Tour of the Palace of Parliament or "The People's Palace"

Q: How goes learning the ropes of being the mission financial secretary?
A: I actually haven't started learning the financial secretary yet, they just had the mission audit for the year, so Elder B. had to get that finished first. I should start learning tomorrow though.

Q: Did you get to watch any of conference yet?
A: We watched the two Saturday sessions and the Priesthood sessions, and some of the Sunday morning session. The time difference makes it a little harder. I liked Elder Uchdorf's talk in the priesthood session when he told the story of him touring Air Force One with President Monson. He's always got some story about planes or flying. It was one of the easier for me to pay attention conferences. haha.

We kind of took some of our p-day on Saturday. We took a tour of Casa Poporului (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_the_Parliament). It was pretty cool. It is just giant. So many huge rooms that are decorated beyond belief. The tour only showed us five percent of the whole building. But what we did see was kind of gut wrenching. You'll have to look up the whole story of how it came to be. Lots of people got displaced, and they built it at a time where people couldn't even get bread and oil, but still used pink marble, mahogany, and all sorts of really expensive things. But the moral of the story is, is that it really is as big as they say it is. I'll throw a picture at the bottom of us there.

Me next to one of the giant staircases in the main entryway of the palace.  There is an identical one just straight across from it, one for Nicolae Ceaucescu and one for his wife, Elena.  Apparently they had it all built, then Ceaucescu came and decided the railings were too tall (he was a shorter guy), and said to rip it all out and start over.  And they did. 

Here's the view of the main drag through downtown from the terrace.  (all those tents are the same place where Roger Waters (from Pink Floyd) played The Wall when I was in Bucharest last summer.) 

As for today, we played some sports in the park, and took a car to get looked at at the dealership, and drove in big city traffic. Now we are writing our families and finishing up the work in the office.

Aerial View of the Palace of Parliament (from Google)

The People's Palace (from Google)