Happy Thanksgiving!  Today is some sort of Slovak Thanksgiving and we celebrated with a luncheon and an extra church service.  There were several testimonies and people sharing what they were thankful for and how God has made them appreciative.  During the service Burke and I were especially thankful for our translator.  I can’t remember her name right now, but it was the second time she translated for us and we actually got to talk to her a bit before the service started.  She is a professor at the University here and is one of the tiniest Slovaks we know.  We were all a little shocked today when we found out that we are all the same age.  She thought we were older, and we thought she was.

Something else we are incredibly thankful for this weekend is our health!  We’re not sure that we’re completely over it, but because of our 12 day, high dose antibiotics, we are not sick this weekend!  To celebrate we finally were able to go out for my birthday dinner (only one month late:) ). We went to a restaurant that we had wanted to go to for a while.  It overlooks the square and when its warm you can sit on the terrace.  It’s one of the nicest, oldest restaurants; they even have the Beniczky family coat of arms above the entryway.  The restaurant was very beautiful and rather expensive by Slovak standards (5-7 euro a plate:) ) but we commented on its appeal and thought it only mildly funny when we noticed that the song playing was “Celebrate Good Times.”  It’s pretty common for Europeans to listen to old pop music, so we didn’t dwell on it.  However, it was only right after we got our meal that the next song that began to play was… The Hokey Pokey.  The nicest restaurant in town played the Hokey Pokey during the dinner hour.

The final thoughts I want to leave you with are about my plant, Plant.  He was a gift from our friends the Kilbry’s (one of the YWAM families), specifically Jo and Emma.  The instructions for care were in Slovak, so by the time I figured out what kind of plant it is and looked up what it needed on the internet, I had made some pretty tragic errors in his care.  Despite those errors, though, Plant has prevailed and produced many flowers.  However plant’s health took a turn for the worse about two weeks ago.  He stopped producing flowers and his leaves began to yellow.  I checked his water level and ensured he was getting the proper amount of sun, but it seemed nothing was good enough.  Burke has been ready to pull the plug on plant since I first got him, but even now I won’t allow it.  In the middle of this week plant showed promising signs of life: three stalks sprouted up from the dirt.  Unfortunately, two have since died; but that one stalk is standing proud and until that last stalk falls over, I have faith that Plant will survive:).

Plant