Birthday in Kazan...

Hello! Happy Birthday! I celebrated my birthday today… lets face it… birthday on fast Sunday as a missionary. Not a good birthday. Birthday on p-day. A little better. I celebrated by taking my new companion out to one of the nice restraunts in my new city… McDonalds! No really… ‘MakDak’ is where all the business meet for lunch here. Kazan is beautiful! And today is WARM. Plus 8 celcius. Not sure what that translates to… except a lot of muddy puddles. But thanks to red wing I don’t have to tread lightly. Yeah gor-tex! My new companion is a 25 year old from St. Petersburg. He’s as obedient as a Russian missionary gets, and he’s a hard worker. We have a ton of work in the area. My whole last cycle we had 7 member present meetings. We’ve already had 7 in this area in the 4 days I’ve been here. I’m excited about actually doing missionary work. The Russian is coming along. Slowly. I met up with an elder who is 6 weeks behind me… and well he already speaks better than me. Dang. But I’m only speaking Russian now… so that should help. I’ve been kinda quiet lately. That’s weird for me. I did get the socks from jasmine. I haven’t gotten mom’s package yet because I live 9 hours away from the office… so mail doesn’t make it up here too often. I want to know some of the history you found out about this place! All I know is that there are a lot of muslims. We have a mosque right next to our apartment and we get to here their prayers 5 times a day? Although, we’re never actually home. We don’t even eat dinner here… too busy. It’s nice. I’m very happy to be in kazan. It was a good transfer. God loves me on my birthday. Well.. we spent too much time at MakDak today… so I gotta end this one. I'll try to make next week a good e-mail. If not we'll just chat when i get home. I love you all! Thanks for the birthday wishes! Love, Elder Ellis