Week 2

Hey guys!

This week hasnt been as eventful, but it has definately been just as crazy. We are spending around 12 hours a day in the classroom. My Spanish is getting so much better. I'm to the point now where I can have a basic conversation. I can understand just about anything our teachers say, but im still struggling to talk back to them. Ill figure it out quick though. They only teach in Spanish now, and we are supposed to use everything we know. Everyone here probably looks pretty dumb speaking spanglish all the time, but it really helps. Our teachers dress up as fake investigators everyday and we teach them. Tomorrow will be our last day with this investigator, but she has committed to be baptized already. Starting next week we will meet with 2 investigators everyday. It's really cool that we are able to teach the lessons right from the beginning.

The park was awesome on Saturday. My companion was the other Elder Johnson. It turns out I played against him a few years ago. He played for the d1 strikers team. We talked to some polish guys for a while. They didn't really want anything to do with the church, but I wasn't going to turn down a chance to practice Spanish. They were trying to hitchhike their way from Casablanca to Barcelona. We mostly just talked about Madrid since we were both new to the city. Right before we went back to meet up with the group we found this kid named Ruben, and we ended up talking to him for 35 minutes. We were late but it was worth it. He was 18 and spoke English. That was really exciting until he said it was entertaining to listen to us struggle in Spanish. He wanted to know why we were in Spain and how long we would be here. After we explained a little he was pretty interested and we were able to explain the restoration. I memorized the first vision in Spanish so I used that. In the end we got his phone number and he took a book of mormon. That conversation was definitely the highlight of my week. At the end of the day we gave out 4 books of Mormon and got 2 referrals. We sang again. And this week we had tons of people listening. Our group of 60 missionaries gave out 47 books in 3 hours. I've decided that if you go to retiro park on a Saturday morning, youre either a member or you will be baptized later that month.

So today we went to a mall for our activity. Its funny how I thought I was so prepared, but there are still so many little things that I needed. I bought some shoes for soccer, a water bottle, and some soccer shorts. The shorts I brought didnt work because they are see through with gaments and we arent aloud to wear anything else to workout. The shorts I Bought were some cheap $3 things. Theyre great. I dont have very many pictures because we were just in a mall all day.

I haven't been able to open any of the files you've been sending. They're all blocked. I can open any Google files or pdfs though. We're all pretty bored with the CCM already. It's hard being stuck on the 5th floor of an apartment building all the time. We switch between basketball and soccer everyday, and the basketball days are killing me. Basketball itself is fine, but it's inside. So we'll go 48 hours without ever leaving the building. Soccer has been so fun though. Playing with Los terribles was the best mission prep ever. I've been killing it here. And don't worry about me getting hurt. We still do real workouts everyday and I take it easy with soccer.

Can you email me some pics of my long hair? No one believes me about that. And the teachers are already making me cut my hair. Keep the soccer updates coming. People here take that seriously so its been nice to know whats going on.

I attached some pictures of my district with the president and some pictures of the stuff I bought. Here are 3 more from last week, too.

Erin,

That's awesome that you're going to see the Provo MTC. We watch a lot of their devotionals. That MTC is a lot bigger though, we only have 3 floors. The first one has around 8 classrooms, the second one is our bedrooms (they call them habitats), and the top one is the cafeteria. There are probably 15 teachers and we have 60 missionaries. Next week 10 Portuguese missionaries are leaving and were getting 20 Russian/Ukrainian missionaries. We usually do 4 hours of Spanish grammar/vocab in the morning. And then at night we plan our lessons for our investigators and study the book of mormon in Spanish. It doesn't really feel like church all the time. I mean, we're talking about the gospel, but it's different. I've realized that over time the food is getting worse. It started out good but now they're trying to make it American. We have had fried chicken twice this week and it's only Thursday. Yesterday was pretty good though, we had a Spanish tortilla thing for breakfast and grilled shrimp and rice with mystery meat for lunch. Dinner is really small here. Like last night we just had zucchini and bread.

Talk to you guys next week,

Josh