But it's not all work. We do get to do a fair bit of sight-seeing, too.

The preceding pictures are from a medieval festival at Rabenstein castle, billed as the smallest castle in Saxony. The funny thing was that with all these weirdly dressed people, guess who was being stared at? Yes, the missionary couple dressed in suit and tie, and Sunday clothes.
Last year, right before we came home for Clinton's wedding, we got to tour Berlin a little.

Next are some pictures from a trip to Meissen.

Our Mission motto is "We find, we teach, we baptize, we keep" Most of that is done of course by the young Elders and Sisters, but we do get involved a little bit in it (although for us the main activity is "we feed")

Here is where we go to church and where we work.

That red car used to be ours. The church gets rid of all vehicles after they reach a certain mileage [kilometerage?]. We kind of hated to lose ours. For one thing, it was the only one in the mission that was NOT blue. Ironically, the Elder from the office couple who is taking care of all the mission vehicles envied our car, because he is a U of Utah alumnus.

The main reason I liked the old red one was because it had dings and scratches and even a broken bumper when we first took it over. In November we got a brand new Opel. When the guy from the dealership delivered it to us it had 444km on the odometer. Now I'm nervous because any little scratch will be our fault.

The next few pics are of the inside of the church.

 While Nancy is baking cookies and cooking dinner, Helmut gets the place set up for the evening's activities

Downstairs is where we have the Zentrumsraum, library and office for the Center for Young Adults.

Here are some pics of German, or at least Sachsen holiday traditions. First there is Chritmas.

The previous four pics are of the Chemnitz Weihnachtsmarkt. The next-to-lst one is of a pyramid, a very Sachsisch Christmas symbol. These Pyramids come in all sizes, from tabletop to something that stands in the town square.

Another local Christmas tradition is the Schwibbogen. This is an arch made of wood or even cast iron, with candles on top and underneath either Christmas symbols or symbols of the local industries: Mining, woodworking, etc.

In the smaller towns, almost every window will have one of these, but even just looking out of our window here in Chemnitz we saw the lighted arches in most windows.

What would Christmas be without the obligatory Christmas play?

Yours truly is the wise man with the Arab-looking headdress.

OK, enough about Christmas. At Easter there are decorations of painted eggs on centerpieces, but also on bushes and trees.