General Conference Sunday

Today was a very long and very wonderful day. We went to the Institute to watch the recorded Priesthood session at 11am, followed by all kinds of food starting about 1pm: french toast by Trevor (a GANS from Utah who served a mission in Milano), my wife's famous fruit salad, a ton of great baked pasta by Ugo, an apple pie by Trevor, and some awesome pastries by Sheyla (a GANS from South America). Here are a couple of photos:

Sorella Whiting's fruit salad

Trevor's apple pie

Later in the afternoon we watched the recorded Saturday afternoon session, followed by the live Sunday morning session at 6pm. There were about 16 GANS present, so the place was hopping. We are making some good connections with these kids, and it's a lot of fun.

We watched all the sessions in Italian to hang with the kids who don't speak English, while about half of them watched in English in another room. Many of these kids have served English-speaking missions or have learned English well enough in some other way. As a result, we didn't get quite as much out of the talks as we usually would; Americans talk fast, and Italian has roughly twice the number of syllables for most words, so the translators have to talk doubly fast. We got the gist of the talks and most of the stories, but it's certainly not our native language! But the spirit was strong and there were a lot of good points to ponder. We'll enjoy reading the talks in English once they are available.