Week 2

Collin feels his Spanish is starting to get a little better.  He's meeting/contacting interesting people and dogs!
There are a few pictures included.
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Hello everyone...

Dad, you wanted the address of my apartment (pensión). Im not sure what it is exactly.  The bishop lives 2 blocks north of us. Yes, he has been bishop for 10 years. I was quite surprised to hear that myself. I didn´t know that there were no branches. At Church, we probably had 100ish people there, and apparently there are usually a lot more.

Mode of transportation... we walk and take the bus. Personally I think we take the bus too much, we spend a lot just going back and forth. The mission mom said that one zone or area uses bikes, but they are in the country. Nobody else uses them. I have probably taken the bus 30 times already.

We have been teaching lessons, but I´m not sure if it is considered a lot or not. We have a lot of people who tell us to come back at a certain time, and then they are either ´´working´´ or ´´busy´´ or something of the sort, so we dont have too many return appointments after the first. Yesterday, while we were walking to a members house for dinner, we needed another short lesson for the day, so we decided to talk to these 3 drunks on the side of the road. One of them was missing a leg, and he wouldn´t stop talking. The other 2 were trying to be somewhat nice and listen to us, and when the guy without a leg wouldn´t stop talking, they started fake hitting him and things, and he got up and started swinging his crutch around acting like he was going to hit them. He was quite mobile for only having one leg to stand on while swinging his crutch around. It was quite a show.

On friday i went on my first splits or divisions. i went with our zone leader, a native speaker, who doesn´t speak any english. it was pretty fun. they dont live in their own area, they have to take a bus to and from their area to their apartment everyday, which gets expensive. other than that though, their area was more poor than the area i am in right now. within the first 5 minutes of getting off the bus in their area, i saw a dead dog in the middle of a dirt road. nice. we also see a lot of other dog things... one of them (back in my area), we saw a dog walking down the road, and as soon as it crossed into one block, like 10 dogs appeared out of nowhere, and started chasing the dog and biting it and things. this continued on for about 5 minutes. when one of the dogs walked back, it has a bunch of fur in its mouth from the dog they were chasing. pretty neat. good thing they dont attack humans, everybody was just walking past them.

I have given 3 or so annointings in spanish, my comp still has to tell me what to say, i dont have it memorized yet. I also gave one blessing to a member who really likes me. Im not sure she understood what i was saying, but thats not the point of a blessing is it? hah.

The buses here only accept coins for payment, not bills. and coins are not very common in argentina. so we end up asking if people have monedas (coins) in exchange for bills a lot. well, the bishop ended up giving us a bag of 100 1-peso coins. the bag was pretty big. and yet my companion doesn´t know how to keep enough coins during the day, so we still end up asking for change at the end of the day. oh well, he´s the one that does the asking. maybe he will learn to take more eventually.

have i explained the procession i saw yet? we were walking down a street and heard a bunch of music, and found out a procession was going on, so we decided to watch it. we sat on a nice little tree stump. i took a video of it, but it is way too huge to send through email. maybe when i fill up this card, i will send it.

speaking of sending, that reminds me. i want more pictures of family. preferable send through the mail, so i wont have to print them off (the printer is reaaaallly slow here). lots of members want to see my family, and i only have like 6 pictures to show them. Also, if you can stuff my blue backpack ( the one i used during high school) small enough, I think i would like to have that also. we checked out backpacks today, the cheapest were like 45 pesos (13 or 14 bucks) and it was a piece of junk. the price that it started getting good, was 280 pesos, which is like 80 or 90 dollars. i am not paying that down here, hah.

We met an old lady the other day, who said she had never gotten married or had kids, and that all her nieces and nephews and stuff were just waiting for her to die so they could have her house. that was pretty sad. maybe she will come to church next week?

we had an investigator come to church yesterday. his name is jorge. he has parkinsons or something (im not sure if the spanish translation works out or not) and he reminds me a lot of a bobble head. he speaks slower, so i like him because i can actually understand what he says. when we were at the bishops for lunch today, i was talking to the bishop, and he said i am talking a lot more than what i was 2 weeks ago. i guess that is a sign of my improvement.

last night while we were having dinner, at the Salinas´ (whos mom realllly likes me) she brought out the food, and it was really hot. i unwittingly put a bunch in my mouth, and their daughter saw me breathing out trying to cool it down and started laughing. well, the mom saw her daughter laughing, and asked what happened. i guess by this time my face was really red from the food, so she ended up spitting the drink she had in her mouth all over the floor because she was laughing. she laughed so much, i had to control myself. I dont know if it was the hot food, or the pressure from trying to not laugh, but my nose started bleeding. it bled for like 5 seconds and stopped. that was kind of weird. that just added more to the hilarity.

oh by the way, i dont know if i added this picture in the last email, but there are a lot of walls like this. if you look closely, there are broken glass bottle shards stuck into the top of the wall. ouch. i wouldn´t want to get stuck on one of those.

here is a picture of this guy mario and his wife. it was marios birthday. he is not a member, but she is. she is on suspension of membership because she is not married to him, and they have 1 kid with another on the way. he is trying to become a member, but it is apparently difficult to get official marriage papers, and until then he can´t get baptized. the cake was reallly good. it was called torta cake.

I made my first real purchase in argentina today. i bought some mouth wash, some more floss, deodorant for when i run out, and i decided to buy some toilet paper, since the bidet´s here.... annoy me. it was like 45 pesos, which is about 11 dollars or so. not too bad if i do say so. by the way, the conversion is 3.8 pesos for every dollar. also, i got the refund for the 131 dollars in the airport. they put it into my mission account... and i have no idea how to get it back onto my card, so i guess i am just holding onto it for now. and my hour is about up.

Until next week, I suppose...