Last minute shopping and packing

Friday was a wonderful final day. We both woke up earlier than we would have liked, unable to get back to sleep. Dee got almost eight hours, but I was still tired. Since we were already up, we decided to go to the 8am endowment session. I ran into Alberto while eating breakfast. When he heard what we were doing, he went back and woke up his wife so they could join us. The session was again in Italian, and it gets easier each time. After that session, which ended about 10am, we went to the start of a sealing session, where Alberto's father was sealed to his parents. His dad died last year at age 98; we had met him once a few years ago while visiting there, and he was still sharp and seemed quite the gentleman. His mom is still alive at age 91, so her work obviously cannot yet be done. Dee and I have a long history of being present at big Perego family events and ordinances, so we didn't want to miss this chance given that we were so close.

After that one sealing, we left to go back to our room for a nap: first me, then Dee. Alberto was stunned when we had told him earlier that we were tired and were going to take a nap. He responded, "at 11 in the morning!?!" Doesn't seem odd to us, but apparently that is strange in his world.

Brother Certa, who is French but with Sicilian ancestry, and his wife are now very friendly with us, even though we can't communicate well. My wife has Certas from Sicily in her line as well, so she is looking at how to help them with their family history. Apparently they are not from Dee's ancestral town, Chiusa Sclafani, but from other towns in the region. The Swiss temple is small enough that we keep running into them.

At 2pm we had a ward endowment session in Italian, with Bishop Magnanti and his wife officiating. It was nice to see so many ward members together in the temple. Rhenald and Dexter were not there, which surprised us. Later we learned that they were running a bit late and didn't have any family names (which many of us would have happily shared if we had known). Since they are new, they didn't know that the temple had names it could share with them, so they just skipped it. Bummer. We think that we explain things well, but it is so easy to overlook an assumption. 

After that session, we were done with temple work for the week. Dee and I walked over to the distribution center to buy some temple clothing. The woman at the store speaks four languages well, plus a few more to some degree. She said that she was the temple president's secretary for a few years back when there were only a few temples in Europe, and they regularly had visitors from all over the place, including Finland and Scandinavia. I bought myself a new white tie and slippers, as mine were both quite worn out. We also bought white ties as gift mementos for Rhenald and Dexter, which we will give them on Sunday at church. They had a bunch of church materials available in Italian, including CDs of the Primary hymnbook. Dee has been wanting MP3 files of all the Primary songs, but online she has to download them one at time. For 4.5 francs ($4.50), we bought the six-CD set, which I will rip for her when we get home. She bought a white dress, which we just learned that she needs for a brief presentation we will make at the GANS conference next weekend in Assisi. We didn't bring our temple clothes with us on our mission, assuming that we would not have any opportunity to use them. Dee asked around about borrowing a dress, but didn't find anything that would definitely fit, and it was easy to do this while there in Switzerland. She really liked the dress, and she took it to the temple where they have sewing tools to fix things up a bit for herself.

Once back at the hostel, we had an early dinner and packed (me first, then Dee), then cleaned out our kitchen area. It is always easier and quicker to pack for going home than for leaving home. Jahir, one of the ward members, made some nice pasta to share with the whole ward, of which I enjoyed tasting a little bit.

 

 

By about 8pm we took our luggage down and enjoyed sitting in the very fresh outside weather, after vacuuming our room. We returned our keys and the Swiss 3-prong plug adapters which they loaned us, plus gave them the Swiss outlet strip we had bought for others to use, as we will not need it again. Two-prong devices tend to plug in fine, but the Swiss have the middle ground plug offset instead of in a straight line, so a couple of our devices needed help.

Dee vacuuming out our spacious room

The hallway to our door, last on the right

The bus departed at 9:50pm, a few minutes early. I was able to secure the seat in the middle on the back row, with full leg extension available for me. However, I was surrounded by teenagers who weren't quite sure what to make of this old guy in their midst, and I was concerned about how rowdy they might be. But, as I told our bishop, "è meglio non dormire per rumore che per dolore" (it is better to not sleep because of noise than because of pain).

The view from my seat in the back of the bus

Sandra eating an apple while helping her kids settle into their seats on the bus.
I told her that I could blackmail her with this photo

We were all excited to be heading home, although the kids were sad that this would likely be their last time at the Swiss temple, with the Rome temple opening next year. We felt very privileged to be able to participate in this last trip of its kind.