Missionary Monday - A Tear to Your Eye...

Half way! Crazy. Can't tell if time is moving fast or slow. I know 3 weeks really isn't that much time but 22 days here is a looooong time. Anyways, I've had a lot of new experiences here. Doing a session at the Mexico city temple, super weird cause you understand about 1 in 50 words,  and the old temple workers speak really fast slurred Spanish, that doesn't help haha. I taught a lesson one on one, it was weird not having a companion. It rains almost every day here at about 8 p.m. and on Saturday night we finished dinner early and had about half an hour before study time so the other elders wanted to go to the auditorium and play the piano, so we all went and played for a little bit, but while we were in there it had started POURING, I've been trying to hold out on buying an umbrella at the "tienda" (store) cause I want to save my pesos. That backfired. Anyways we had to run from the auditorium to our classroom which is pretty far. We got soaked. 

It's been a pretty long week for everyone in my district, there was more personal study time than usual on Sunday and it was the perfect storm for Sunday afternoon naps. I studied like a good missionary though don't worry. There was also a giant moth in our skylight that was HUGE, we thought it was a bird at first. The picture of the missionary in the sunglasses is Elder Taylor, me and him do a companion switch for gym time each morning and go lift in the gym while the rest of the district plays soccer. He played football at Dixie for a year before his mission and loves lifting, I'm pretty sure he used to take hormone enhancing pills our something, that's the word on the street at least, so he can lift a ton, he benched 280 the other day. I'm sore 24/7, but I feel a lot healthier, I'll take it. Elder Taylor can also play any song on the piano by ear, and insanely well too, you'd never guess, he's exactly how you would imagine based off of the picture. 

I've learned quite a bit of Spanish, not nearly enough though, but what can you expect out of a few weeks. They say it takes about six months in the field to get fluent, I can't wait for that. I like what a missionary said in our language class when asked what our goals were for the end of our mission. He raised his had and said "I want to go home....... and not know how to speak English because I'm so good at Spanish." The pause was at least 5 seconds and almost the whole room gasped. I wouldn't mind being able to speak only Spanish and no English right now. 

The food here is pretty hit and miss. I've learned that when they have fish for dinner, not to eat the eggs for breakfast the next day, and the same with the rice for lunch. No one eats the fish for dinner so they freeze it and put it in the eggs and rice the next day. I'm onto them. My favorite stuff so far is probably chicken bakes, carne asada, cantaloupe, and jello. All the meat is pretty grodey (including the carne asada, it's just the least gross) but I usually cut a roll in half and put the meat in there with barbecue sauce and make it a sandwich. It makes it 10x's better.  

Josh got here last week, we are in different zones so I hardly ever see him. I'm glad I only have 3 weeks left instead of 5 like him. My friend Tavita left the Provo mtc for Hungary on Sunday. He's been in the mtc since June 28th, I can't even imagine haha. 

Monday we got a new teacher for the afternoons (hermano Villalobos) and he is awesome, we all learned more in the first 2 hours with him than we did in 3 weeks with hermana Sanchez. He taught us how to teach by asking questions and how to ask questions when extending a commitment that will get the investigator to follow through more often than just asking like you normally would, its hard to explain but I can already tell it's 10x's better than the way we taught before. 

Yesterday we taught him as our "investigator" and used his method for teaching with questions and didn't even have a lesson planned cause we didn't know what he needed yet, and it was awesome, I know it's fake and all but I felt a lot better about this lesson with him than I did with any of the other "investigators" 

Also yesterday, we got to the devotional and there were hardly any seats left and when we saw four seats in the middle, me, Elder west and two other elders in our district went for it. Everything was fine until it was time for the choir's musical number, everyone around us stood up, we decided to stand up with them and sing even though we didn't have papers, we sang "I know that my savior loves me" but a fancy choir version where different people sing at different times, and it was in Spanish so... I killed it, if I was in the choir in general conference and the camera zoomed in on me, it would have brought a tear to your eye. I did a beautiful job. We are going to the temple again today at 9 so we'll see if round 2 of that is any better haha.  -Elder Beck