This past weekend the OM team here in Hungary headed off for our once yearly team retreat. no complaints when it means spending the weekend with friends and staying in a castle! Vajta is a small town here in Hungary and in it is a Bible school which has completely renovated a old palace/castle. the story of the castle was that it was built in the early 1900's by the 5th richest family in hungary, they fled during the 2nd world war and the camp fell into the hands of the communist party and was used as a vacation home for leaders and their families, it was then converted into a camp for handicap children. but after the fall of the iron curtain the government could no longer afford to keep it up and it was abandoned. in 2000 the palace was bought and converted into a bible school complete with everything from a pool, to two i must say pretty cool coffee bars. we spent the weekend playing games, we had a guest speaker, and a trip to the pool which included what is needed for true team building... a giant pool wrestling match. we had a great weekend of catching up with team mates, getting beaten in a variety of card games and sipping good coffee. here's a shot of how we've been getting around hungary now a days, it's slow going what can i say. these are all the rage for kids here, there super funny to watch all the kids roaring around on them, i just had to give a try. apparently i'm a little to big though. but really north america should wake up and get their hands on these, we are actually thinking of starting a export buisness to introduce these to the american market! i think it will go. but in reality we do actually have wheels here right now, we are borrowing our english team mate's (jill) car, believe it or not we have had a car since october. first jill's then when she came back and our south african team mates (pranesh and heather) lent us their car and now that they got back jill once again lent us her car as she doesn't need it. and now we found out our brazilian team mates (carlos and rita) will go home for the summer and told us we can us their car......! what can we say but the Lord provides and we have great team mates! this last picture is of our team leader rodney and his wife kitty and their two boys mark and patrick. they are leaving the team to go back to the states. we have enjoyed getting to know them so much and will miss them greatly, we will especially miss their boys who refer to us as kyle basci and lynnette neni which is the formal way to great people but they are the only ones who do this for us and plus their really fun and funny guys to have around. rodney and kitty you will both be missed but we know the Lord had amazing plans in store for you in the states. this coming weekend will be filled with helping our team mates move out and in of various places and also on sunday we have baseball games, our boys team won both matches last weekend, even beating a un defeated team, which we had earlier lost 23-3, and we just found out that we have qualified for the hungarian finals which will be happening in two weeks time, so "hira" pirates! GO Pirates!