WEEK TWO IS THROUGH

Hola Everyone...

This week went by wayyy faster than last week! We decided that the days are like years long, but the weeks are like seconds long.  We´re officially intermedios (intermediates) now, so we´re expected to know a lot more Spanish, which we don´t ... so that's fun. Our teachers are really cracking down on only speaking Spanish during the day, which is very difficult considering I don´t know how to speak Spanish.  But it's good. It is frustrating because they don´t really teach us Spanish, they just teach us how to be a missionary, but in Spanish.  We´re getting there, don´t worry.

We´ve also discovered that, to quote Elder Meier, "They all told me a mission would be the hardest thing you ever did, but the happiest.  They never told me it would be the funniest thing ever" .... which is so true, because literally 98% of the time, we have no idea what is going on.  We have a schedule but on random days they´ll change it without telling us.  Once we know it changed, they don´t even give us a new schedule so we actually know what's going on. haha Even our district leader is always confused.. he´s like "all they did was give me this binder full of info and said good luck... and the binder is in Spanish" so we´re all super confused.

All this confusion leads to lots of funny stories... like the other day two of our elders fell asleep during personal study, so we all quietly packed up our stuff and walked out of the room to go to physical activity and just left them in there asleep.  They apparently woke up a few minutes later and panicked because they didn't know where anyone was. It was hilarious.  We seem to be forgetting some things in English too.  The other day Elder Meier and I had a five minute long conversation about how to pronounce the word "while" and we´re still not sure.

Oh, yesterday we got to go immigrations.   We thought was going to be super fun cause we could actually leave the MTC and see the real Peru world, but it was awful.  First we get there and they ask us for our passports and we´re like, "you guys collected them from us before we even got on the bus to come here??"  Thankfully, the guy showed up with our passports and it was all good. Then we go inside and have to wait in line, so me and some other Hermanas went to the bathroom, and oh look, they don´t have toilet paper. We were warned this might happen all over Peru, but we thought a government building in the capitol city would be all right. Nope, we were wrong.  Afterwards we had to go take pictures for when we go to Interpol on Thursday.  So we go to this tiny little photo shop in the middle of Lima, and there's like 20 of us American missionaries lining the streets to get these pictures.  People walking past would just stare...one lady lives right next to the photo place and she stuck her head out the window and started talking to us.  She asked if we were cold.  It was sweet of her ... but then she and her husband just stared out the window at us for another 20 minutes... HAHA ... One person walked past Hermana Dickman (who is like 6 feet) and they went "oh my gosh!" in this Peruvian accent, but they were speaking English, which was super weird, but it was hilarious... poor Hermana Dickman was so embarrassed. We waited outside for our pictures for like two hours which was a pain, and then we were so excited to finally leave, but nope, the trip just couldn´t get better. We were driving home in Peru, during rush hour traffic.  Not only did it take over an hour to get home, but our driver would slam on the gas, then slam on the brake... over and over again.  Literally everyone in the car was about to throw up. Hermana Gillingham and I ran to the bathroom when we got back to the ccm because we legit thought we were going to puke. Luckily, we didn´t, but it was rough.  We have discovered that since there are no rules when driving in Peru, they put in speed bumps everywhere to make everyone slow down.  Except it doesn´t make anyone slow down until like half a second before they go over the bump, when they slam on the brakes.  

On our way to immigrations...we really get packed in!

The view of Lima from one of the windows in the CCM.  All the houses have these gates big gates around them.

Oh, also if you wanna know what we do here, we basically only fijar metas (make goals) and plan. Literally plan all day everyday.  We don´t ever have anything going on, but we just plan anyways. 

We also have a few phrases we say all the time, because we need something to lighten up our long class days... so we taught all the Latinos to say "que en el mundo?!" which just means what in the world ...  but it doesn´t make sense in Spanish.  Everyone says it and it's hilarious.  Also the only line from any Spanish song we know is "listos, siempre listos", from Called to Serve, which just means "ready, always ready" and so sometimes our teachers will ask us to do something and then they´ll be like "listos?" and were all like "SIEMPRE LISTOS!" Our teachers got so annoyed they taught us a Peruvian phrase to say "ready freddy", which is "listos calixtos" so now we say that all the time too.

So yeah, there's not much more to talk about because I literally just finished breakfast, so p day hasn´t even happened yet, but there is one announcement.....

ELDER BEDNAR IS COMING TO SPEAK TO US TODAY!!!! It's good and bad haha..  it's good because ...it's Elder Bednar, but bad because now we don´t get to go shopping this p day... but that's okay! They won´t let us take cameras so I probably won´t have any pictures with him.  Just know tonight I´ll probably be in the same room as Elder Bednar!!

Love,

Hermana Gurney