time seems to be just flying.... i don't know how we have already found ourselves almost in the new year but we have, and as we look back over the last year its has just flown by. this time last year we were living in lynnettes parents basement, soon to be moving to my parents place soon to be heading off to hungary. and well the rest has been kinda crazy, but we are so amazed to see God's faithfulness through the whole year, we have definitely learnt how his plans are better than we could imagine even though at the time it has been hard to see. (for example while rolling over the land rover) ,it's crazy to think how fast this next year will go and we will find ourselves back home before we even realize it. this coming year we are very excited to have many different guests coming to visit, including all our parents! and of course some friends and other family maybe?!
on another note it seems like winter has finally arrived in hungary with every day in the negatives and even some snow yesterday, snow is fun for the first couple days but i'm sure it will begin to wear off pretty soon but we will enjoy while we can, ok we will enjoy when we can seeing how we are both kinda sick today, well maybe i'm a little sick and lynnette will most likely spend the day on the couch.

(the top pic was taken hanging out the train window one night on the ride home from budapest of a passing train, and the one right above is the pride of budapest and hungary, the chain bridge which is the first bridge built in budapest)

a couple days in vienna.......

we just got back from a couple days spent in vienna, we enjoyed touring around the city and their many christmas markets and tea houses! fellow OM'ers(dave ad brenda babcock) who work and live just outside vienna invited us up to stay with them. also dave's sister janet who is working in the czech was staying with them, we attened mts training when we first arrived in hungary with her so it was great catching up and laughing together about our past year. we really appreciated our couple days there, it almost felt like going home for the weekend, vienna has many things that are impossible to find in hungary, like breakfast sausage and root beer, i was so excited to buy some root beer i can't even describe it, i have another 3 in the fridge and am resisting temptation on drinking them all right now. thanks so much brenda for hiking all the way through the city for my root beer! vienna has many markets all over the city, the first pic is infront of the main market infront of the city hall, we had walked through during the day and it was pretty cool buts it so amazing how the atmosphere changes once it's dark and the lights are on. the also was another market up in front of the summer palace which is quite the backdrop for a market (pic below), i must confess i quite enjoyed it even though i'm not so into the craft stuff, lynnette found some great little christmas things. vienna is only a 3 hour train ride from home here but it's quite a big differnce from budapest, both are really beautiful cities but the difference in terms of money and cleanliness is quite drastic. we had to laugh getting of the nice, high tech austian train in budapest and onto our train to home in erd, completely graffiti covered and browned from years of use,i don't even dare look into the bathrooms but i kinda enjoy the feeling of our trains here, gives you a real feeling of history. both cities have the danube as a center point but both are very unique to themselves, did you know the danube has 7 capitals of countries on its banks?! i wrote a couple posts back of songs that now make sense to me well i have another one to add, "chestnuts roasting on a open fire" never knew what it meant well now i do, on the steet corners there are always vendors selling roasted chestnuts over these drum fire things, so we thought we better try some, thinking they would be crunchy and probably tastey, we were wrong, not so good and not so crunchy, more like warm soft and tasteless. lynnette chocked down one and i tried my best to aquire a taste for them but gave up after 5 of them and decided they look a whole lot cooler than they taste!.... so anyways we had a great couple days in vienna, thanks so much janet, dave and brenda for allowing us to spend the days with you! we also put more pics on our flickr site if u are interested follow the link on the side for more pics. merry christmas to all and to all a good night!

well i know many of you have been praying for our special christmas service which we had in a gyspsy community close to erd. on sunday we headed out loaded down with gifts for children and families. i actually felt a bit like the grinch who stole christmas as i had the joy of driving our team toyota loaded down with all the gifts, all we were missing was a little dog with an antler tied on its head to pull the van! i guess i would need also to be green and have the desire to steal the stuff, as much as i loved all the barbies and toy cars! the evening included a program put on by our team, we sang some christmas songs, our hungarian teammate sang a solo and also our team mates nephew visiting from brazil sang a song. carlos shared a message of Gods power to change our lives. he shared his life story and how God brought him off the streets of brazil and changed his life completely, he has one of the most powerful testimonies i have heard and he had a deep impact on the people there, more than 15 people came to accept christ, many with tears in their eyes and one even before carlos had asked if anyone would like to come forward. God moved in a powerful way on sunday evening and we could only sit back and rejoice in what he was doing!

as you may have read we had tons of clothes and stuff delivered from sweden, so we packed these into gift boxes for the families and the local christian high school donated a ton of toys which we gave to the kids, although we didnt have enough for all who came (many people came completely unexpected) we were able to get names down and tomorrow we will take another van load of boxes out to deliver to families.

Christmas Advertising Hungarian style, lynnettes favorite past time now is spotting her favorite billboards, go ahead take a guess at what this one is before scrolling down. On another random note some things that have made sense this holiday season, the song "i'll be home for christmas", first time ever this song has made anysense to me! also "i've been working on the railroad" never made sense until ridding the train every day and seeing guys actually work on the railroad, and lastly reading in Psalms 3:7 i've realized that hockey isn't such a godly sport afterall, "you have broken the teeth of the ungodly", anyways back to the billboard by now you probably have scrolled down to see the lovely raw pork billboard, we found this right beside the main christmas market in budapest, we love it's been christmas-azied with mr.snowman. by the way tesco is one of the big box retail places here, kinda like wal-mart but way bigger. for a while right by our house they also had a raw chicken ad which lynnette cringed at each time we drove by and celebrated when it was replaced with a add for eggs. well anyways thought you might like to see some hungarian advertising, and by the way any of you shoppers wondering what the price works out to, it's 4$ a kg.

Ever wonder what a truck load of clothes looks like?!

this past sunday i received a call from Carlos (a team mate) asking if i could help unload a truck of aid that had come from sweden, we expected it on monday but it arrived a day early. i asked him how many of us would be there to unload and he replied 10 or so, and i responded "good it will go really quick then", to which he replied "oh kyle you don't understand you'll see when you get here!", now I was picturing a mini-bus packed with some clothes and stuff, when i arrived i was shocked to see a full semi-truck waiting, packed from top to bottom, front to back. 24 tons of everything from shoes, clothes, tables, chairs and everything in between. now don't get me wrong we are so excited to have this all donated but it is just a little overwhelming when you look at it. we unloaded it all into our ministry center, so now you can hardly walk inside there, boxes stacked from floor to ceiling, plus we had to fill a vacant team apartment with couches, tables and chairs. I would put some pictures of what the inside of the center looks like but no picture would do it justice so you'll just have to picture hundreds of banana boxes (apparently the swedes have a addiction to bananas) and a huge pile of garbage bags of clothes. We have had a group of swedish gypsies come down many times to do work with the gypsies here and they are the ones who put this all together. they also have contacts in slovakia so the plan is for a truck to come from slovakia to pick up a good chunk of the goods, otherwise we will be spending the next year distributing all of it! on Sunday we will have a Christmas service in a close by gypsy community and we are putting together some packages and also there we will take down names of families so we can personally bring them clothes and the such!

Above is a picture of our team, children and all. This evening we had our Christmas dinner together and as you can see it was quite a crowd, and we were even missing some.

Christmas tree shopping

a couple days back we shared of how we tried to go find a place to get a tree and everything was shut down. so we thought we would try again, so we pumped some Micheal w. smith tunes..."I'll lead you home" on the tape player and headed out, we now know all the words and are brought back to our child hood times as we sing along........ and here for all of you to see is our grand, huge tree for this year. we were so pumped to have found the right tree and we could hardly fit it into or small car,.... and as you can see we needed a ladder to get the star on top! alright maybe in reality its not quite as big as in our imagination but we are quite proud of our little addition to our place! (we had a laugh thinking about the massive tree we bought last year for Lynnette's parents...remember j&v?...well this year it didn't quite touch the celling as last year!) we call it our kisfa (little tree). we even found some cute wooden decorations for 2$ and a string of lights for even less, well kinda cause the first one fell apart while we tried to put it on the tree and almost gave us a 240 volt surprise. the bare wire was swinging precariously close to lynnette's leg at one point! our landlords caught us as we tried to bring it inside and informed us that according to our contract we weren't allowed trees. but after much begging and promises of letting Bernd watch soccer with me they allowed us, no just kidding they just laughed at our little tree as we dragged (more like carried it our arms) inside!

A little brightness on a otherwise gloomy day...... ya today was one of those i just felt like climbing into a hole and hiding from the world! The morning started out fine with me even thinking it would be a good day at language school, boy was I wrong.... if any of you want a humbling experience try a intensive study class, i felt a bit like a two year old child who accidentally walked into a university lecture, ya it was painful. after class we came home thinking maybe we could get some stuff done, like finding a christmas tree, picking up pictures and the such but of course when we got to the tree place it was closed, not that we had plans of buying a big tree, we are hoping for a small shrub or something like that which of course is even harder to find. then we went to pick up our pictures, also not there, anyways maybe it seems like not so much but some days they just add up to alot....... on a more interesting note yesterday was saint miklocs day here, which is a big deal here and as you can see in the pic below he even pays canadians a visit! the tradition here is that on dec.6th if a child is good he will receive chocolate in his shoes and if he has been bad golden twigs will be found, on our front steps we found chocolate and at class we got chocolate and twigs, so apparently we are good neighbours but only marginal students!

Christmas time in Hungary:

well its hardly december but things are quickly changing to christmas time here, as i'm sure they are at home too! since we are in the city all morning every morning at language school we have had plenty oppurtunity to walk the city, hungarian school is going alright, we can tell it has helped us alot already but at some point most days i'm tempted to just get up and leave or take a swim in the river or something like that, but we are encouraged that we are making progress. anyways back to christmas, this picture here is taken in the outdoor christmas market here in budapest, filled with all sorts of interesting randomness, some really neat stuff i must confess. and thankfully no tacky christmas music! sorry to be a scrouge but i can only take so much of christmas music, by the way thanks mom for the christmas cd, knowing my aversion to it she kindly sent me a cd! my rule is from the 20th on is fair game but more than that is too much, tonight we had kids club again in ofalu, which suprisingly went quite smoothly. The kids are great and if the center was open everyday they would probably be there every day but they are also sometimes very diffucult so today was quite refreshing to have them attentive and just be able to have fun with them! here's a pic of a couple of them.