May 8, 2013

This week was super busy but super fun as well! Basically every day we're either studying the gospel, learning about the gospel, teaching the gospel, or sleeping (with some time for exercise and eating:).  For exercise we've gone outside and run or played futbol.  If you call it soccer over here some people get offended.  No joke. The weather has actually been quite nice.  It was sunny 2 days in a row which was awesome!

Sorry if my email is kind of random but there's so many things I want to say and only so much time!

My companion is Sister Huntsman and she's super cute. She's from Salt Lake City.  There are 4 sisters and 6 elders in my district.  There's Elder Wu, Elder Sage, Elder McCray, Elder Lewis, Elder Bolingbroke, Elder Frost, Sister Hunstman, Sister Roscher, Sister Gilbert, and me.  Elder Lewis is from England and he's hilarious! He's completely bald and a trick he's shown us is he can stick cards on his head, especially his name badge haha.  I think his record is 6. Elder Frost is from Denmark and he's super funny.  He reminds me so much of the monkey king--King Julius--from Madagascar.  They have the same accent basically.  We all get along well and we're already really good friends.  One of our teachers, Brother Day, is from England and he reminds me so much of Mr. Bean! They look the same, act the same, and talk the same! But he's great and I've already learned so much from him.

There are mostly Americans here at the MTC but we have a couple elders from Denmark, England, and Russia.  We also have some sisters from Sweden, England, and Ireland. The MTC is tiny--only 50ish missionaries I think so everyone pretty much knows each other.

Learning how to teach the discussions was kind of hard at first.  It looks so easy to see others do it but then actually trying to do it yourself was kind of difficult/awkward for me.  But I know I'll get even better and more comfortable with it as time goes on! 

Really quick about the food--we have meat, vegetables, potatoes, bread and gravy a lot.  They pour gravy over everything!  Their breads are SO good but they cook the vegetables a lot so they're pretty mushy and tasteless.  Also, they can't do spicy food here.  We had mexican and indian food one day and it looked like it would be spicy but it didn't have much of a taste at all:)  They served us croissants one day filled with Nutella and it was AMAZING!

I just went with a group of missionaries to ASDA which is like an English Walmart.  I exchanged my money for pounds for the first time today and was able to buy a blow dryer and stuff.  It was pretty exciting actually haha!

I LOVE the accents here! I think Scottish has been my favorite so far.  I've practiced my English accent and I'm getting better at it! I've actually started to think in an English accent. 

Some words/phrases I've learned here:

ice cream bars=ice lollies

band aid=plaster

soda=fizzy water

cool/great=pucker

terrible/garbage=rubbish

Some things that have made me happy this week:

hearing an English sister sneeze in an English accent:)

the fire alarms sound like the noise that pac-man makes when he's eating the dots except a lot louder

the cooks wear pajama pants for their uniforms and sing really loud and operatic-like to music while they cook

the ambulances are bright yellow and green and honestly look like ice cream trucks to me.

I get to play my viola for a devotional tonight where 2 members of the 70 are coming!

the grass is bright green here!

Sorry for the super long email! I love you all so much!! Thanks for your emails!

Love,

Sister Jackson