First P-day

Ciao everybody!

So real quick, really cool thing... I can check email EVERYDAY! That being said, I can only reply on Fridays.  BUT because I have a tablet, my emailing time is pretty much limitless.  So that is really nice.  We do however have other things to do though.  So the work load will determine how much time we have to email.  

These last two days have been absolutely crazy!  Marshall and I found about 35 other missionaries that were also on our flight from Atlanta to Salt Lake City.  About 30 of them were returning home from Spanish speaking missions.  One Sister was returning from Africa!  Super cool!  Most of the missionaries were super struggling to speak English.  Especially the one that was sitting in front of us on the plane.  At one point he flipped around and spoke entirely in Spanish.  It was a little bit in that he realized that he wasn't speaking English.  Another Elder spent a really long time freaking out over the fact that he had just gotten a free refill.  It was so funny!

Michael and Courtney picked us up from the airport.  It was so much fun to see y'all again! Thanks so much for coming!  We took like 700 million photos. It was amazing! 

I have seen so many people I know! No sign of Joseph yet, but I'm keeping my eye out.  I saw Anna Gillespie and Sister Adams (She is from school and is going on a mission to Macon, Georgia.  I think she thinks my name is Holly, but that's fine because I don't have a clue what her name is.  So when a missionary comes up to y'all talking about how she saw Holly in the MTC, just go with it.  Honestly I'm not even sure that her last name is Adams?) 

Oh, and I saw Senghung (sp?) One of my old FHE brothers!! Its actually really funny because I saw him, and was like wow, that is a spitting image of him.  And then I did my stalker like magic to find out his first name.  It involved peering over shoulders of one of the ladies that was hunting us down and reading a list that just so happened to have his name on it.... Because I knew he was from Korea, so I had a feeling she would be hunting him down too. It said his name, and then I was really confused, because I was like 90 percent sure that he had already served a mission in California.  But I apparently made up an entire history for him, because none of that was true.  He is going to Washington! (He told me that, I wasn't that creepy, lol) He remembers me! 

My companion is Sorella Pacheco.  (Sorella is Italian for sister, the title we have as missionaries in the church)  She is super awesome, and actually super reminds me of Lena.  She like makes the same faces that she does, and kinda has the same mannerisms.  Sorella Pacheco is from Columbia, so Spanish is her first language, but she speaks very good English.  She is kinda quiet though.  Which means that I talk a lot.  Because it is super awkward to walk literally everywhere together in silence.  So I will talk, and pause, and then she will say a little bit, and then silence.  So then I start talking again.... She has opened up more over the last day. (It feels like we've been here longer, lol).  She either thinks I'm annoying, or like kinda cool.  

Our district (group of missionaries) is super fun!  There are 10 of us.  8 Anziani (Elders, the male version of a sister missionary), and 2 Sorelle.  So Sorella Pacheco and I are the only Sorelle in our district.  The first day I think the Anziani were afraid of how to act around sisters, they like wouldnt talk to us directly, it was really funny.  Now we are all super close.  We eat meals together. And we sit next to each other at meetings and stuff.  It is really fun when you run into each other around campus, because then it is like "Ciao Sorelle!" and then we go "Ciao Anziani!" and we feel super cool because we are being good missionaries speaking our language.  There are 3 of us that aren't from Utah.  

Our zone (a group of groups of missionaries) has 32 missionaries.  All of us are going to Italy except for one.  He is a Solo missionary, and is going to Romania.  He gets to sit in a classroom with just his teacher, for 9 hours a day.  I can't say I envy him.  

So for most missionaries the first little while at the MTC (missionary training center) are crazy, but when you have a foreign companion it is like absolutely insane! We have had people hunting us down in the hallways, calling our name on the intercom, and pulling us out of class.  We have been all over the MTC, and off campus to the hospital.  Basically everything that missionaries from the United States do before their mission, some foreign missionaries do on their first day at the MTC.  I guess they usually assign foreign missionaries to a host missionary (someone who has been there for a bit).  So it was really weird to everyone that we both were new.  And because we are both new we are both super lost.  All the time.  One time to get to a class we went in three buildings and did like a million stairs till we found this one room.  I am still as good with directions as ever!

The one problem with getting pulled out and pulled aside is that no one tells your teacher, or the people leading the meetings.  So it looks really bad when you are late for a meeting, or an hour and a half late for class.  Sorella Clark was really nice about it though, and she helped us get caught up with the Anziani.  

So ya know how it normally takes about longer than a day to be able to hold a conversation in Italian?  Well, apparently here it doesn't... Sorella Pacheco and I have an investigator, TONIGHT, and guess what? He doesn't speak English.  So that will be a blast!  We already know how to pray, and we can bear like a limited testimony.  But it is going to be exciting.  We will be teaching him tonight, tomorrow, monday, and wednesday.  AHHHHHH!

Our whole zone went to the temple really early this morning, like 6.... Well, that is when we woke up.  Sorella Pacheco and I did Inititories while everybody else did endowments, because we needed to go get Sorella Pacheco a TB test.  We finished about half an hour before the temple cafeteria opened, so we went into the laundry to help out.  That was fun, we folded socks lol.  

So our district basically lives in one classroom, and we have one teacher (Sorella Clark).  She is awesome.  She has been speaking Italian from the first moment I met her and hasn't stopped since.  Also it isn't like we have a gospel class, and then an Italian class.  It is like you are leaning Italian while learning the gospel and practicing all of it at the same time!  The super cool thing is that we are able to leave all of our stuff in the classroom.  We will have chirch in that classroom, and we can go in there whenever we want to because it is our classroom.  We are there all the time, but I am never bored.  Sometimes the teacher isn't even there, we lead our own lessons.  

On the first day Sorella Clark assigned Anziano Bono to be il capitano ( the captain)  He knows Italian very well.  His family is from there and he lived there for a bit.  He understands it better than he speaks it though.  On the second day Anziano Bona was leading us in this lesson, and then it said to pull out our packet.  As it turns out we were all supposed to pick up this giant bag of super heavy books, but nobody told us.  So we trudged through the lesson packet-less and it was fine.  After class we had dinner.  We all ate together and then we were going to all go together to pick up our super heavy books, and head back for class.  However that was one of the times Sorella Pacheco and I got kidnapped by nice elderly ladies with our faces on some kind of wanted poster.  So then Sorella Pacheco and I had to trudge back to our classroom, by ourselves, with our books (did I mention they were really heavy?).  We usually always take the stairs, there are no rules against taking the elevator, we just always take the stairs.  We've never discussed it.  We must have something to prove, lol.  Even when we were in our third building still looking for that one classroom, we sicked it up and took our 700th flight of stairs.  Sorrella Pacheco commented on how strong I was, because I didn't need to take breaks as often as she did.  I explained that I owed that all to one 8 year old cousin of mine for beating me in an arm wrestle.  So, thank you Matthew for allowing me to realize that I am pathetically weak, so that I could go lift weights at the gym. 

Anziano Rummins came to the MTC later than the rest of us, so he was busy doing all of the intro stuff while we were having a mini Italian lesson, so he is a little behind.  He was not aware that we already had learned some phrases though.  At one point in the lesson Sorella Clark asked us a certain question (in Italian of course) and we all answered except for Anziano Rummins.  He was like "How do you all know that!?" I died, it was so funny.  Then I explained to him that we had learned that phrase while he was next door doing things on the computer.  He sits next to me, so I help him when he doesn't understand something.  

Our room is on the 4th floor (yay, more stairs!) There are 6 Sorelle in our room, and we are all going to Italy.  We are taking turns each night praying in Italian.  The other 4 Sorelle are in a different district than us, but still in the same zone.  There is another Sorella Nelson, so that is exciting.  Sorella Nelson's companion slept walked last night.  Out the door, and all the way to the other side of the building.  She came back and knocked on the door at 12:40 in the morning.  I thought that maybe it was some of the sisters from the zone coming to get us for the temple and that we had slept in.  I checked the clock, and realized that it was the middle of the night.  I was sure that we were all about to be murdered on our second day of the mission, but I opened it anyway.  The poor Sorella was so freaked out, she knew that she slept walked, but she had never left her room before.  I'm glad I answered the door.  It is freezing in out room.  Like sooooooo cold.  But it is burning up in the Anziani's rooms, so I guess we win?  It wouldn't be so bad, except the blankets are too short.  I'm short. If a blanket is too short for me, that's crazy short on normal people.  

The showers here are pretty cool, they are big enough that you can get changed in your stall without getting your clothes wet, and they have enough shelving that you can keep your clothes off the floor.  there is one rogue shower curtain that likes to fall down randomly though.  Future sister missionaries, you have been warned!  It hasn't happened to me, but this one sister was telling the story about when it happened to her, it was so funny!

I should go now, 

A dopo!

Sorella Nelson