Stuck in the Elevator

I think culture shock is finally starting to sink in. The major differences from home that were fun to experience in the beginning are now started to feel more like annoyances; things like having to hang out our clothes and ride the scary little elevator up to our apartment floor. Now the stiff clothes, and getting stuck between floors every other day are not quite as amusing. More than anything though, we are all getting so sick of people staring at us everywhere we go. When we first got here, we kind of liked the attention that we drew everywhere we went. Now we’d just give anything to be lost in the crowd. We can’t go anywhere without people whispering and pointing.

Everyone in our apartment woke up a little irritable this morning and remained that way throughout the morning. However, coming back from the Piata later, things lightened up a little and we were all able to laugh. We somehow managed to squeeze all four of us, and our bags of groceries into the elevator, as near impossible as it was. A man at the bottom with us couldn’t fit and decided to wait till the elevator came back down. The elevator arrived at our floor just as it always does, but then suddenly started going down again before we even had time to open the doors and climb out. We arrived back at the bottom and quickly pushed the button to go up again before the guy could open the doors and find us still in there. I think he knew we were anyway. We arrived at our floor a second time, relieved that the elevator had actually stopped. But the relief quickly faded as we tried to push open the doors and realized that we were stuck inside. So…crammed and crowded with bags of groceries and bodies in our smelly little elevator, we decided to make the most of the situation and take a picture. The memory was priceless. Afterwards, we starting getting claustrophobic and frantically starting pushing buttons to get the elevator moving somewhere again…and down we went…yet again. This time we opened the doors at the bottom and the man just rolled his eyes and somehow managed to cram his body into the elevator with us. How this was ever accomplished will remain a mystery. We were so far beyond our limits of comfort at this point. He asked us what floor and we tried to explain that the elevator was broken, but we only had it in our vocabulary to say, “No Work!” He pressed the number to our floor and when we arrived, the elevator of course functioned flawlessly. Embarrassed and relieved, we quickly scrambled out.

This afternoon, we went over to the Villa to meet with President Popovich and received our callings in the ward. It was weird being in a bishop’s interview with a third person. One of the missionaries sat in and translated. I was asked to be the young adults sunday school teacher. I was hoping to get to teach for one of the classes, so I am so thrilled.