Weekly email

Oofa, 

      This week has been awesome and brutal all at once. Lots of stuff happened and if I were to go through all of it this email would be a small novella. However I can and I will write about the three maybe four most interesting things that happened during the week I've been here. 

     First off, nobody here really knows how to shake hands. They either give you a dead fish or they feel like they are trying to strangle a living fish to death.

     Secondly, everyone is really nice. Stopping people on the streets is awesome because we get plenty of people to actually stop and then usually 10 to 15 minutes would be our normal amount of time for conversations. 

     Third, the t-shirts here are awesome because almost all of them are in English and almost nodoby knows what they say so that's a really great way to stop people is to ask them what their shirt says. When they say they don't know, we give them a card for the English course my companion Anziano Daniels and myself teach every Tuesday and Thursday night for an hour. Sometimes they do know but they still want to learn more which is awesome! I feel I should mention that I'm in castellammare as well as the fact that my preparation days are now Monday. I have plenty of pictures that I will attach to the end of this email of my apartment, my companion and a few other things that I feel I should show all of you. 

     Fourth, the missionaries here don't get scripture cases made for their scriptures, rather they get them rebound. In some really awesome new covers and such, they look really cool and I'll be doing that after a few months here. I've also lost 8 pounds since getting here but I blame that in the MTC. Lots of potatoes and frozen chicken and then sitting around for 8 hours a day doesn't do anyone a whole lot of good. So getting here where its really humid, I cant drink the tap water here because it has so.msny minerals in it that it will give you kidney stones. No joke, the president said that happens way more than it should because missionaries don't buy bottlesld water which is a lot cheaper here than it is in America.

     And finally there was a sailor named Bob that we taught on Saturday that has been sailing since 1975 and has been around the world 5 and a half times on an actual sailboat before he switched to working for a whale research company. I have pictures of the boat he's on now because we stopped by the boat yesterday with an English Book of Mormon for him. Also stray dogs are a thing but they aren't like America's strays. These dogs get groomed, fed, and make it into the newspaper all the time. They also all have names. I haven't attempted to learn them yet but we'll see.