Örebro Part V - Busy days, All Saint's Day, sunrises and sunsets

Days can sometimes be extremely busy and full of travel!  (The amount of weekly travel definitely peaked when I was a Sister Training Leader, but the following is the summary of day in the life of Örebro).  This is taken from my journal entry about the 25th of oktober.

1. We started the day down in Kumla (about a 15 minute train ride which would first require a 10/15 minute bus ride) to visit a referral from another area in the mission.  The referral was a sweet lady from Brazil.  She was definitely interested in discussing religion, but more for the purpose of converting us to her religion instead.  She was impressed that we were able to give a Portuguese Book of Mormon though!
2. We then took the train back to Örebro to then take an hour bus ride up to Lindesberg to meet Collins, who at the time was preparing to be baptized (Collins is an awesome guy; he had to move suddenly, so we don't really know what came of him, but it was pleasure teaching him).
3. We then took the bus back to Örebro to meet a recent convert in the library for a lesson.
4. Then we hopped on another bus to Karlskoga (about 45 minutes) to have a dinner and lesson with a fantastic ward family.
5. And then we were finally able to take the bus back to Örebro and then take another bus back to our apartment.  So a good five hours of traveling and four lessons that day!  Busy, but good.

All Saint's Day!

Halloween is not really a "thing" for Sweden, but All Saint's Day Swedes take the time to visit graveyards and place candles on graves.  It may sound a bit morbid, but my mission in Sweden developed my love of Swedish graveyards.  Very peaceful and most often just beautiful.  These candles though, absolutely gorgeous!

Syster Hauglid and I had really wanted to go see this in action (action being a relative term) and had made plans to go to one of the bigger graveyards in the area, but that plan fell through for two reasons: 1) we forgot that it was a holiday bus schedule so bus times were off, but we didn't realize this until we were waiting at the bus stop and 2) we were invited to a family's home for dinner.  We had been teaching this cutest couple  (she was from Turkey and he was from Azerbaijan) and the wife is seriously one of the best cook's I've ever met.  (I've posted some pictures of her food before)  They had invited us over for dinner but then surprised us by having it actually be their daughter's birthday party!  It had AMAZING food.

And afterwards... we barely felt like we could walk because we ate so much.  So we waddle to the bus stop and realize the bus wasn't actually coming for an indeterminate amount of time (it has missed the regularly time and it didn't come at the holiday time).  With absolutely no one in sight, we decided to wait on what was beginning to be a very foggy night.  So to pass the time, Syster Hauglid did laps around the bus stop and I made creepy handprints on the glass...  anyway a bus finally came and we made it to the town center.  We quickly realized that there was no way we would be able to make it to the graveyard we wanted but we walked to one in the city and were really glad we did. Just look at the picture below!  I loved it!

It wasn't long before the Christmas lights were up in the city =) And as winter was drawing nearer it was getting darker earlier.  Which can make for some beautiful photo ops!

The following were taken on December 13th Santa Lucia day, where we were able to actually catch the sunrise (at like 8 am...) but I love this little castle!