2016.07.25 Week 8 - I am a blonde, white, blue eyed giant

It´s been a fantastic week for me! Definitely some hard parts but compared to last week it has been very very very VERY good. Shockingly I still am not fluent in Spanish, but despite this I am surviving. I notice everyday that I can understand more than I could the day before. Every word here is slurred together and this is called a sentence, but still everyone tells me my Spanish is very good. I´m assuming its like when I tell people their English is good. I say it because I can understand them and I get the point of what they are saying, not because it is perfect or even correct at all. I guess this is fine. Bowling last week was fun, but it turns out I am horrible. I LOVE THE FOOD AQUÏ! When the members make us lunch it is always super super good. The food that I make on the other hand is just the worst. Oh well. Everyday I eat oatmeal. OATMEAL. I hated oatmeal at home. But here I cover it in black sugar (yes black not brown), canela and slice up an apple in it. I just can't believe that I am eating oatmeal. Unreal. 

Schedule:

Get Up

Excercise

Breakfast (OATMEAL)

Study for 4 hours (4 HOURS)

Teach A Lesson (Drink Mate)

Almuerzo con un miembro (lunch with a member)

Teach about 4 more lessons/walk around for 6 hours while people tell us they didn´t actually want to have an appointment with us and can we come back another day. (Drink 50 more mates because rather than eat, people drink mate)

Plan for the next day

Dinner (Some form of a quesadilla)

Sleep

We walk a lot, a lot a lot. And it´s not walking, it's hiking. My calves are growing in like bricks. We live on a mountain and it seems like no matter where we are going we have to walk uphill, it's defying some law of science. I love the members of the ward, they are super nice and really want to help the missionaries. They also make really good food as previously mentioned. Sunday I got a blessing from the Bishop because our mission president asked all of us to get a blessing in order to strengthen our relationship with the Bishop. It was a super good blessing and helped me a lot.

Funny Stories of the Week:

We have an open house in the chapel every week for 1 hour on Fridays. This guy stops purely because he can tell that I speak English.  (I am a blonde, white, blue eyed giant here, there is nowhere for me to hide, kids are actually scared of me) I talk to him for a while and ask him where he's from. He says he is from the United States but was kicked out for practicing his religion. I ask what religion. He says, "I guess you would call it Christian" Hmm. Ok. Whatever. We talk more about religion and it turns out him and his family have been kicked out of a bunch of countries for practicing their religion. He was actually LOCO. We asked him what he believed about God and he went into some commentary about how the church is the spouse of Jesus, and how evil the government is. Then we found out that his family are the only people practicing whatever religion. I can't be sure but I am pretty sure their religion is some form of terrorism. PSYCHO, but really funny.

I go to turn off the sink in the kitchen after washing some dishes. The knob just falls off of the sink. Water is just shooting in this giant stream into the kitchen. AHHHHHHH. I start yelling AYUDAME (help me!) My companion comes over and then we spend forever trying to fix it. It was seriously sooooo funny, but so annoying. The whole kitchen was a lake. We tried to turn off the water in our house but that switch apparently doesn't work. So we were trying to fix the knob while the water kept shooting. Eventually we got it fixed and it was very very funny! We are both soaking wet and the kitchen is a lake. WELCOME TO NOT AMERICA.

Spiritual Thought of the Week:

The gospel truly blesses lives. It is so much more obvious here than in America because most people in America are just richer in general, but here the people who are members just have so much more. You can see the gospel in their homes, their food, their faces, their cars, their clothes. Everything. The gospel isn't just this fun nice thing. It actually makes a huge difference in our lives. And when we live it we are SO blessed. I want more people to receive these blessing and this is just another reason to serve a mission!