Just another week in Berlin

We have settled into a routine.  We have FHE on Monday evenings.  We have between 5-8 young adults come.  We enjoy a lesson, play a game and eat.  It is a fun time for all.  Tuesday is usually our shopping day and personal day. We ride bikes to the store, gather supplies for home and institute night. When the weather gets better, we will use this day for sight seeing more.  Wednesdays we finish up what didn't get done on Tuesday and we get ready for English class.  We have a beginning class with  4 students attending.  Our advanced class has 5 students that attend.  It is a fun night teaching English and learning German from them.  Dan always has a silly song to sing and an idiom to expound on.  The German ladies in the class have started teaching us German idioms.  Thursday is Institute night.  This is the day we fix dinner for 45-50 people,  We set up, do prep work during the day and then start cooking around 1600.  some of the young people come early and will come into the kitchen to talk with us while we get ready.  We send them off to class and finish dinner so we can eat when class is over at 2015.  Many of the young people stay and help clean up.  Last week after clean up was done, we  sat around and talked and laughed while others played indoor soccer.  We didn't get home until after 2300.  Fridays and Saturdays are for activities with the young adults, and our Tiergarten ward.  Sunday is church and a new week begins.  We also have been straightening out the Institute Library, adding books in and putting them in order so people can find them. 
Every 6 weeks we have Zone conference with the Mission President, Pres Pimentel, his wife, and the others from our zone.  We enjoy lessons, eat good food, and visit with people we don't see very often.  Today was Zone Conference.  We learned how to communicate better with our companion.  We also learned about the Baptismal doctrine and why it is important to be baptized,  and how to be better missionaries.  It was interesting and informative.  We all enjoyed the day.
 Dan and I help joint teach missionary discussions when they are in English,(our German isn't good enough to teach in German yet).  We enjoy this very much.  One man we've been help teach, Joes, is returning to India next week.  We are sorry to see him go.  He has a testimony of the truthfulness of the Gospel but hasn't been baptized yet.  Hopefully he will seek out the missionaries in India and continue learning and be baptized.  Another young man, Igor is being baptized on Saturday.  He has had to over come a smoking addiction to commit to baptism.  He is trying very hard.  As you know, smoking is a hard addiction to over come.  Pray for him.  He is excited to be baptized.

I've included some pictures of the young adults and from zone conference.  I should have taken more pictures but you know me and cameras, I take it with me but forget to use it.  I hope to get better.