Birch Bark Shoes and Finnish Dance Instruction

Another great week in beautiful Finland!

On Monday night, there was a ward FHE. They had a potluck and then some dance instruction.

 It was fun, but we should have practiced some directional words before we went. 

Even though the instruction was all in Finnish, we were able to follow along for the most part.

We were concerned because the QR codes were not working 

on the pass along cards that we had received from the printer, and were delivering to missionaries at zone conference.

At first, it seemed like it was partly because the website was supposed to be accessed later in the week.

As of Saturday, the English and Swedish both work, but the Finnish card QR code is not working. 

If the missionaries have the person just type in the URL information, it will work.
Hopefully they will all be working tomorrow!

Here is a link to the English video.

EASTER is CHRIST

This week was zone conferences. 

It was the assistants turn to go to all of them, so we only attended the Helsinki zone conference.

Zone leader training.

 I helped Sister Lehtinen a little bit with the food. 

I am not sure just how much help I am, but mostly I just enjoy being able to visit with her, 

and this gives me an excuse to do so.

It was sad because this is Sister Airto's and Sister Herttuainen's last zone conference.

Sister Aura took some fun pictures.

 Sister Laitinen wanted to get an office photo.

On Saturday morning, Elder Shurtz went to crack some eggs to make an omelet. 

He dropped an egg, and it looked like it would land on the ground and break. 

Instead, it landed on the drawer handle, which cracked it, but not too much egg leaked out, 

so he was able to still use the egg and there was only a small mess to clean up. 

We started to do some "spring cleaning", even though it was a bit cold outside. We cleaned the deck, washing the trim and the floor.

 Afterwards, it looked much more inviting to sit out there. 

Now, if it would just warm up a few degrees.

I compared our blog from a year ago. It looks like there was more snow that stayed around later last year. 

There is still some snow where there have been big piles, or some places where it never gets any sun.

The walkways are all clear, and some have had the gravel swept up.

We went to WeeGee Exhibition center in Espoo. There are several museums located there.

We visited the Espoo City Museum, the toy museum and Elder Shurtz did a quick look around the clock museum.

I was interested in the example of birchbark shoes,

 and the "rock" cushions to sit on to watch the big screen of the sea.

(At least those are the only things that I actually took pictures of while we were there.)

Then, Elder Shurtz wanted to try to find the Espoo Waterfront Walkway, 

so we drove to where we thought a portion of it was. 

It is 40 km long, so when we couldn't really find a good place to park, we drove on staying close to the waterfront. 

We found some street parking and went walking on the trail for a while. 

 It was beautiful, but COLD! We were glad we had coats and gloves.

 We could see some buds on the trees. 

We hope that it will warm up a little bit and the trees will begin to leaf out soon.

 We saw several swans and ducks.

Google photos made a little movie of our walk.

We continue to enjoy our mission. 

We love when we can be with the young missionaries. 

We love serving with the wonderful people in the mission office. 

We are enjoying seeing more and more signs of spring. 

We are especially enjoying more and more light each day.

We have more than an hour more of daylight here than in Provo, and 38 more minutes than we had last week.

The sunrise this morning in Espoo was at 6:08 and the sunset at 20:36 for 14:28 hours of daylight.

The sunrise in Provo was at 6:50 and the sunset was at 20:04 for 13:14 hours of daylight.