Here's a little something from Brian if you are not on his blog.



Hey Whatsup?

So its the first day that I'm allowed to actually write letters, though you should have gotten the one they let us write the first day. We've done a heck of stuff since then. If I was to tell ya'all how much stuff we've done this would be a really long letter. Though I'll give you an idea of what our schedule is like.



Monday is our P-day, so we get up at 5:30am to go to the temple, then we have time to write and do laundry, play basketball and stuff. This morning we were at the temple for over three hours. It was good. But, anyway, on a normal day we get up at 6:15am and have breakfast at 7:00am. We get a half an hour for each meal as we have lunch at 11:30am and dinner at 4:30pm. Every meal always feels way too early, but the food isn't too bad. Though it already feels like Montezuma's revenge is working on me. Anyway, after breakfast we have class time in which we spend an hour of personal study and an hour of companion study for gospel stuff. Then we have an hour of language study. After that we have class with one of our teachers for and hour before lunch. At noon we go back and have class for 3 or four hours. During the afternoon we are either in class or in the RC or TRC. After dinner we have another 4 1/2 hours of class time with planning time at 9:00pm and we go to sleep at 10:30pm. During the day we are in class around 11 hours (and this is always in the same small classroom, though during our personal study we are allowed to study on couches on our floor). We are almost never in our residence halls except when we are sleeping.

Overall it's not bad. They assign a lot of things you don't have time for and they expect a lot, but we have fun. The Spanish is coming along alright. We don't really get into it for three more weeks (because we study lessons in English first, sorta)., but we already pray, sing and share testimonies in Spanish. So it will be really cool when we really start focusing on Spanish. Although, if you can't tell by all the words I've crossed out, it gets hard sometimes to use English words and to spell them. I'm guessing this will get worse. We're supposed to use [Spanish] for everything so it gets mixed.



I am in a trio. Both of my companions are from, like two minutes from here. They are good guys. Everything takes so long with a trio.



It snowed pretty hard the last day or so. Our first temple walk yesterday was pretty blizzardy. It's nice to finally be on our second week. Our schedule will finally be the same, more or less, for the rest of the time we are here. We learn a whole lot and though getting to Mexico sounds really good we aren't ready yet, but it will come. In a couple of days we won't be the newbies anymore, which is really nice because people know and your like at the bottom of the totem pole. Elders that have been here for longer than us seem so much older and more advanced, that's how much they change and learn in the MTC.







I have two Spanish teachers, Hna. Scaife and Hno. Shulca. They are really good and fun. They make those long classes go by a little faster and I usually just want to keep studying Spanish. They teach us partially by not speaking English and they tell us not to translate what they say so that we associate things. This is kinda hard, but it works I guess, that's how we had it in sign language. They always tell us not to worry about Spanish, I guess we'll see. Oh, and you can tell Ari that my teacher Hno. Shulca is from Ecuador. He's from a city called Ambata I think, or something like that. He's really cool, he played pro soccer midfielder down there before he went on his mission. Fun stuff.

Anyway, I'll probably send you guys an email today, so you'll get this later and they might have a lot of the same stuff, but it's all good. So, I'll write next week.

Adios, Brian