Elder Tyler Maxwell Jones Week 3

Sounds like you guys are having a lot of fun over there. Allison is going to have a great time at trek. She looks like a real pioneer.

This week was terrific. Pretty much everyone's sickness has subsided by now which is good. We got a new shipment of missionaries yesterday. There were a ton of them. We just saw a bunch of missionaries walking through the streets pulling luggage. We were helping some of them bring their luggage to their home and I was asking all of them where they were going. I have yet to find anyone here that is also going to San Jose. Everyone in my district is either going to Fort Lauderdale or New York. However If my approximations are correct in deciding how many Spanish speaking missions go to this MTC and how many missionaries are currently here and assuming that missionaries to missions are evenly distributed I should have to ask about 85 randomly selected people to find one going to San Jose. However those are some fairly hefty assumptions.... so I don´t know, Im going to keep looking. 

We aren´t going to the temple today. So we have a full preperation day today. Elder Creager wants to take a nap today so I think I´m gonna try to finish Jesus The Christ today. I´m about 400 pages in and there's a little over 300 pages left. It´s a really good book. I love the perspective and insight that he has on the life of the savior. 

We also switched Classrooms this week. We moved to the Brigham Young building which is just across the street. I really like the new building because in the hallway to our classroom there´s a bunch of beautiful paintings of Christ placed in chronological order. There´s also construction right outside the window of our classroom which one might think as a bad thing but there´s a construction worker that often works right outside our window that loves to sing songs in Spanish while he is working. I don´t think he knows we can hear him but that´s fun.

The CCM is starting to get packed. The auditorium can´t fit all of the missionaries so they´re starting to set up chairs right outside of the auditorium so people can listen to the devotionals. So we´ve been trying to get to devotionals 20 or so minutes early now. On Sunday they showed us a video called ´´the testaments¨ (side note, I don´t know how to use quotation marks or apostrophes on Spanish keyboards so I´ve just been using the accent key without a letter) But I really enjoyed the video. It was basically telling the story of the first 10 or so chapters of third Nephi while simultaneously telling the story of the life of Christ.

The Lessons are getting better. Spanish is becoming a bit more fluid and lessons can generally go alright. We did TRC this week which is where they have people that only speak Spanish volunteer to come in and we give them a lesson. We had 2 lessons. One was with a slightly older man and when he started talking I had absolutely no idea what he was saying. So i said ´´si´´ a lot. But we had another lessons with someone who seemed like they were in their mid twentys  and we could understand them pretty well.

District volleyball hasn´t been happening as much anymore but while Elder Creager plays basketball there´s another elder that plays ping pong with me right next to the basketball court. He´s really good at it but I think I´m slowly getting better. I also played Foosball with 3 other elders that only spoke Spanish and it was super fun because they were getting super excited over it, shouting whenever the ball went in the goal.

I can see why Hal thought taking Latin was helpful with learning Spanish. At the beginning it was slightly difficult because I was mixing up Spanish and Latin vocabulary but I think Latin grammar is way more intense than Spanish grammar so you really need to understand how grammar works and what it does. So when we learn it in Spanish it seems relatively simple. The only challenging part is that in Latin you could have like 10 mins to translate a line whereas with Spanish you´ve got to do it quick enough to speak it. 

I´ve found 3 elder Jones´s so far, so we´re good friends. There´s also an elder in my house that looks almost exactly like Mr. Bean. He ended up finding someone who´s last name actually was bean and borrowed his name tag for a minute so he could have a picture with the name tag of Elder Bean.

I´m running low on time but i´m glad you guys are having a good time in Indiana, hope all is well. Love you guys.

 Here´s a photo of my district at the temple. The Elder next to me is Elder Creager, On the left side, the elder on the far left and the one with a book in his hand are our room mates.