Letter from 10/25/11

Oi familia! e mai!

So first off, we're only supposed to email once a week so I can't email Mark specifically, so Feliz Anniversado Mark!

I'm going to try and answer all your questions real quick in this email but I'll probably be writing a letter too later today.

My daily schedule changes every day but pretty much always consists of these things: 3 hours of personal study time, 2 hours of language study time, an hour of gym time, 6 hours of class time, and 30 minutes of planning time. There's other stuff too but that's all I can think of right now that happens every day.

My all day of Portuguese was in a word, FRUSTRATING. It was a pretty quiet day. My companions and I even got a little angry at eachother because we just couldn't figure out what we were trying to say to eachother. Pray for me though because we're doing 2 full days this week...

We try to go to bed at 10:30 every night. But my companions are frequently writing in their journals til a little later than I'd like, haha. I sometimes have trouble getting to sleep because my head is just buzzing with verbs, present subjunctive tense conjugations, what we're teaching our investigators, what I could do better as senior companion, and most of all, wondering what kind of food they're going to make us tomorrow. And almost every night I wake up at 3 am. I wake up, I check my clock, then I roll over. Don't know why but hey, at least it's consistent.

We do our own laundry in a huge laundry room with tons of washers and dryers so it's pretty easy to keep all our stuff seperate. But Elder Doyel did find one of my shirts in his clothes. We're still trying to figure that one out...

We get 50 minutes a day of gym time. We either play district kickball or I play bball. Our district is kind of known for kickball now because we're the only ones in the MTC that do it and we are SERIOUS about it. We used our daily planning session a couple days ago just to get our lineup and positions in place. We sometimes play by ourselves but we like to challenge other districts too. Bball is soooooo fun. It's all 3v3 games and they are so much fun! I'm loving it while it lasts!

My teachers are amazing! They are both new but they are both really good teachers. They are both very spiritual and very helpful with Portuguese. Did I mention that every single lesson is in Portuguese? It's definitely, learn the language or learn nothing here I guess!

We don't have a mission president other than the MTC president but we do have a Branch Presidency. He's like the bishop of our ward/branch of missionaries. I've had an interview with him and one of his counselors since I've been here. Also I've had interviews with my District Leader in which I've had to report on my companion, which is him! It's been fun.

We have church in one of the many Chapels/Classrooms. The speakers are called up at random from the pulpit so that means we have to prepare a talk EVERY WEEK! And did I mention that the talk too are only in our mission languages? (Which in our branch includes Portuguese e Italian.) The sacrament preparers, passers, and blessers are asked tghe week previous to do it.

We have all 3 hours but it's scattered throughout the day and our sunday school is just a kind of district discussion.

We get to go to the temple every P-Day.

The food is interesting. I'm getting pretty sick of it. They do NOT know Mexican food here and it's killing me.

There are always missionaries everywhere in the MTC. We see missionaries from every mission all the time.

Everyone eats meals at different times. Our meal time is the last one of the day and we often run our of the good stuff!
I like it here because of my district, my teachers, and I'm just used to it.

Half my district goes to Masao Brazil and half to Recife.

GOTTA GO! I LOVE YOU!!!!