Fri., 10/21/2016

The spanish is coming; We have been working so hard! Every day we spend around 13 or 14 hours in the classroom going over endless words and grammar in spanish. Its hard but a lot of fun. We also learn a lot of spanish walking up to random latino elders and trying to talk in spanish. Its really funny because we dont know hardly any spanish and they dont know much english. I have made some friends with some of them though, so thats good. I got a picture with a district of them that are leaving monday. starting next week we arent allowed to talk in english, so it is going to be difficult but thats whats so important about it. I know about as much spanish now as probably 1 or 2 spanish classes in high school would have given me. Last week I think i forgot to email about my teachers. In the mornings we have hermano tapia. Hes really cool and knows a lot of english. He served his mission in mexico. He likes having us go outside to have part of class because the weather here is really nice. I dont have any pictures with him, but ill try to get one fopr next week. In the afternoon and evening we have hermano santiago. He is a really good teacher, and served his mission in honduras. He is 23 and is applying to go to byui, but has to take an english proficiency test. He is one of the nicest people I know; he has the energy and happiness of a little kid but he is really smart. He also teaches english to 5th graders. Most days are the basically the same, study then breakfast then more study then lunch and gym then study then dinner then study. Every morning and afternoon we teach a lesson about the gospel in spanish, whuch is hard due to our level of spanish and the fact that religious words are often long and hard to memorize and say. There are a lot of little moments that help relieve the stress, like every time fireworks go off. there is not a half hour that goes by without at least 1 firework being shot off. That includes the night. Sometimes they are really funny because its endless, but sometimes we are trying to sleep and its very noisy. apparently rthe fireworks are for catholic holidays and saints days and whatever, but thats every day hahaha. Sunday for church i didnt have to give a talk, but i m ight one of these upcoming weeks. Every sunday there is a movie night where we watch a church movie; this weeks was the video about parley p pratt and then about the guy from Italy that was a preacher then moved to the US and found a book of mormon in an alley then joined the church. Tuesday was a good day. For gym time we played soccer(We always play soccer). It was our district vs another district. They were all good at soccer.One of them played for BYU last year and a couple others had played in high school. We have one elder who played in high school. They were really cocky and had terrible attitudes; they wanted to keep score and such, and kept getting mad during the game. We put a stop to it and routed them, around 8 goals to one(we arent allowed to keep score). They didnt play as a team, and had bad attitudes, but wee played as a team and were nice to them. Soccer is a lot of fun, especially playing with latinos since thats all they play too(except its different because they are really good). Bonnie Oscarson, the young womens general president, came and visited and gave the devotional on tuesday. It was really good; she talked about missionary work and the process of how missionaries are called. It was pretty interesting. During/after the devotional an elder named elder ortega who was sitting a row back and a couple seats over offered me some candy during the devotional then after he wanted to talk for a minute. apparently i had talked to hi at lunch or something and he remembered me and Im his friend. I like all the mexican and other latino elders because they are all really nice and love making friends with the gringo elders like me. Wednesday morning in one of our practice lessons, elder brower accidentaly read deuteronomy 3:7 instead of 6:7 like he meant to. We didnt notice it til after but when we noticed it was really funny because it isnt close. later that day we had another good experience, i gave hermano santiago a blessing of comfort because he is stressed with teaching us and 5th graders and applying to byui all at the same time. His english exam is really soon so thats been weighing on him. Also that day we got to take a trip to the dentista; mexican dentistry isnt that bad, and we got to leave the ccm campus for a little while, which is always fun. Mexico city is a really busy place. I like how many of the big roads have medians that are so wide they make parkis and gardens and sidewalks and stuff on them. Its really cool. We are in the middle of a very busy crowded area of town. Today we got to go to the temple again, which is an hour of driving away. The roads here are scary with everyone cutting off everyone, but the drivers are all so much better than in the us that there are rarely accidents; probablly a lot less that in the us. In class we play a game called find the latino to help our spanish. Basically one person is the latino and can use absolutely NO english, only español. The teacher has to guess who is the latino, so the rest of us speak all spanish too. If the teacher guesses wrong, we get to watch a mormon message, which is basically a 2-5 minute video put out by the church. We watched a really good one thursday called abide by me about a newswoman whos intern is acting really lazy one day even though theres been a tragedy thats a good news story, and she gets mad at him, but... you need to go watch it to see what happenes. Its probably the best mormon message ive seen so far.

best food this week: carne asada. Its my favorite food and we had it yesterday at lunch!

wierdest food this week: well a lot of foods are wierd to me here but one of them was carrot enchiladas. Yes, they were enchiladas that were filled with only mashed carrots. not too bad, but really wierd.

I hope yall have a good week!