This is what we ended up saying to Herbal Life in the end of things. That stuff's just too expensive. I planned on continuing to eat healthy, but Elder Downing has begun to bing unhealthy food in an effort to make up for lost time, so that hasn't worked out as well as I'd have liked it to. I came into the kitchen one morning to find him hard at work melting sugar to make candies for breakfast.
On Wednesday we discovered a very interesting thing. Elder Downing always wants to speak Russian with me, but I can't stand his accent when he speaks Russian, and he doesn't like mine. I could never figure out what it was, because I thought he should have a pretty good accent. After all, he served the first few months of his mission in Russia and says that he focused on mimicking their accent. I couldn't figure it out, because it didn't sound anything like Russian accents that I've heard, so it was frustrating that he was so insistant on his accent. I didn't make him change it, and I figured he must be correct, but that I had too little time left on my mission to really make a difference as far as my accent goes.
This state continued until Wednesday at English Practice when I was talking about accents with the beginner class. I asked about different kinds of Russian accents, because I'm always interested in that sort of thing. I got the usual answer of "In Russian we don't have different accents" (A comment that is outright false), and then one guy in the class (Who's an awesome punk rock bassist with a huge beard) says, "Нет, конечно же есть разные акценты! Если, допустим, ты был в Сибири, там окают много: хорошо, погода...". For those not versed in Russian, Google translate is not your friend here. It'll get the whole sentence except for the word "окают". Russian lesson!
"окают" is a form of a verb which means to pronounce the Russian letter "o" as an "o" in situations where, according to Moscow Russian rules, it should be pronounced as an "a". This is one of the things that makes Russian difficult. A word like "хорошо" looks like it should say "Khorosho", but intsead says "Kharasho" or "Khurusho".
Turns out, in Eastern Russia they do this with a lot of words, their accent is pretty far from technically correct Russian. Elder Downing and I figured out that it only happens on words that are the same word in Russian and Ukrainian. Ukrainian "o" always gets pronounced as "o". Guess where the USSR sent a ton of Ukrainians that they didn't like... Siberia! In the exact region that Elder Downing learned Russian. So, I can't stand Elder Downing's accent because the Soviet Union sent a lot of Ukrainians to Siberia and it corrupted their language a bit. The more you know!
Anyway, I'm going to try and help him learn Moscow Russian, because that's what I speak. This will be benificial.
So that was fun.
On Saturday there was a branch activity. Retro-night. You know, it sounds better than what it turned out being. In order to do retro here, you have to go back to the Soviet Union. Not everybody's that big of a fan of the Soviet Union, so the lady who organized the activity got heckled a bit some of the people we invited. That wasn't cool. You know what is cool? Elder Downing, Elder Mayberry, and I got to play "Hit the Road Jack" for the American part of Retro-night. That was pretty cool. Aside from the light heckling, it was fun, everybody had a good time.
Elder Downing and I taught Lyuba, the lady who Elder Anderson and I had been teaching, on Sunday, and she agreed to be baptized at the end of July or the beginning of August. We set everything up so that she can learn what she needs to in that time period, and it's going to be awesome.
Well, that's all for now.
Peace!
Elder Robison
