MTC Week 3

So it seems Elder Siemers' e-mail got cut off for some unknown reason this week. So don't be surprised when it comes to an abrupt end.



Life is good here at the MTC. I have somehow managed not to gain any weight. We finally found a scale and weighed ourselves the other day.

Earlier in the week we were informed that we would be filmed as part of a documentary that will be played between the Sunday sessions of General Conference. We were all nervous, and a little excited. They were going to film one class from each language and they picked us for Portuguese. We cleaned our classroom the night before. I even brought our Brazilian Flag back to our residence hall and ironed it. I told my roommates in the morning that I was going to be called into the travel office over the loudspeaker during the filming. It would be the perfect touch for their documentary. Our room is pretty crowded so I knew the camera was going to have to be in the hall. I sit directly opposite the door so I knew I was going to get some screen time. Our teacher, Irmao Allred was so nervous that wrote out our complete lesson on the whiteboard. It took him about 20 minutes to do this because he was trying to make it as nice as possible. He even drew some pictures which he has never done before. 12:15(filming time) rolled around and a lady stuck her head in and told us we were not going to be filmed. We were all so bummed out. I was looking forward to having everyone see me on conference sunday but not anymore. To make matters worse, the day after I got a letter from dad telling me he had just been filmed and interviewed. Salt in an open wound.

Portuguese is coming along slowly. I haven't taken a language class in years so it's been hard trying to remember language learning techniques. Portuguese is really weird because words are so similar to English or Spanish words. It's like they decided to spell everything completely different, but then developed a way to pronounce letters so that the words sound almost exactly like an English word, or a Spanish one.

Elder Toala and I decided to sing in the Choir this week. We sang "Be Still, My Soul". It's one of my favorites, so it was really nice being in the choir. I don't think Elder Toala wants to go again so that will probably be the last time we sing in choir. Unless I work out splitting with other missionaries in the district.

It was snowing today while we walked to the Temple. It was extremely beautiful. By the time we came out everything was covered in snow. My whole district are a bunch of wimps. Myself and like one other Elder actually enjoyed ourselves. Everyone else was just complaining about being cold and wet. I thought it might be a good test of my waterproof shoes so I walked through as many puddles and as much slush as I could on the way back from the Temple. The shoes work great. My feet were not wet at all when we got back.

The devotionals and firesides have been really nice. Elder Toala and I watched Legacy last Sunday. We have an option to watch one of 4 or 5 movies. He had never seen it so we checked it out.

Two Elders from our district got their visas earlier this week. They were called into the travel office and 14 hours later they were on a plane to Brazil. One of them was Elder Tyler, one of my roommates. He is a really neat guy. We mourned him for 3 days, but we moved in another member of our district into our room today.