Brutalness

Hola familia and other people.

Today is my second P day! And yes I only get to do e-mails on P day both reading them and writing them, and for only 30 minutes. So where to start. I'm working on letters for all of you, as I won't get to everything in 30 minutes. So they'll come eventually, don't count on them anytime soon. Thanks for all the stuff, especially for the hangers and the clippers. I had some pretty gnarley claws and I was considering buying some from the book store. And now that I have hangars I don't have to put my pants in those nasty drawers.

Speaking of the MTC book store it's really neat. It's basically the same as the BYU book store except everything is like 40% off! We have a blue card and every week $6 gets put on it. We're to use this for laundry, buying stuff from the book store, vending machines, etc. It's cumulative too, so by the time I leave I'll have quite a bit to spend on random junk. I haven’t but much from there, just a name tag clip, washing detergent, a small spanish verb book that has like the 300 most used verbs that it highly recommended by everyone.

Spanish has been going a lot better! For the first week it was tough, but then it finally clicked for me one day when I finally figured out that using personal pronouns is entirely optional in spanish, that it's rarely used. Before then I was staring at these sentences and wondering where in the world the "Yo" was when I clearly saw that the verb was in the Yo form. What a lazy language... Anyway, we're progressing really fast, and I'm keeping up somehow. We've already finished with present, imperfect, preterite, and present progressive tenses. Quite a bit but they have these neat computer programs that help a lot, I drill my self on conjugations for at least a half hour each day.

Oh and in my last e-mail I mentioned my companion Elder Wood and that he went to Carmel Creek when I did. Anyway, it turns out that we might have actually knew each other, we were in the same class, same ward, and my friends were his friends. That and he's still in contact with them! They're like his best friends now. Remember Antonio? I forgot his last name even though Elder Wood just told me five minutes ago. But Antonio among others, are on Elder Wood's mission e-mail list, so he's gonna tell them about me. He says he remembers me but I don't remember him. He remembers me as the little blond kid that was always in trouble all of the time at school and didn't like being at church. That sounds pretty accurate, but I don't remember him, though he claims that YOU, mother, arranged to have him come over to our house one day so that I could "make a new friend" or something ridiculous like that. I told him no way. There's no way my mother would do something stupid and incredibly lame like that!

What else? Oh and I figured out the secret behind the uncleanliness of the MTC, you're exactly right dad, they have the missionaries do the cleaning. No wonder... Saturdays at 6:30 AM is when our zone does our time cleaning stuff. Last saturday we cleaned bathrooms, it sucked. Not even that but the manner of cleaning the various bathroom fixtures is to splash chemicals all over them, wipe it around, and then pour water on it to rinse, and then towel dry. Obviously that doesn't get things very clean, but I'm grateful cause it takes like 10 seconds to clean a toilet and there's no scrubbing involved. Now there is a MTC custodial staff, but they just direct us around, we do the real work.

Hmmm... What else? Oh, the other day we had lesson from a sub teacher that we called the 'J-Dub 101' Lesson. Our teacher, Hermana Barker, served her mission in Brooklyn, the supposed center of J-Dubdom. Anyway we had to get to know her as an "investigator" and then teach her. It was tough, we failed miserably, halfway through our 10 minutes that Elder Wood and I were "teaching her" we found out in a very unpleasant manner that they don't even use the same bible we do! Thus we were totally defeated halfway into it, and she stopped us right there and started to tell us how we ought to teach. It was kinda fun, the J-Dubs have some weird beliefs, most of my district thought that they are freaking crazy and they must be stupid to believe such things but I for one, think that their beliefs are just as bizarre as ours.

8 minutes.... Moving fast. Gym time is fun, before I got here I thought Gym time would be miserable because all I'd ever hear of people playing was basket ball. But there's a field too! And I can play soccer! My companion hates soccer and loves basketball, so we alternate everyday. I've gotten pretty beat up from soccer, supposedly there's not supposed to be any heads or slide tackles allowed, nor are we supposed to keep score but it never turns out like that. Anyway I was pretty sore after the first few days and I have a slight and temporary limp in my left leg. It's incredibly fun and brutal! And we don't have any hispanics that share our gym time so we're all equally bad, save for a few souls. When we go to the gym I'll just play volleyball, a lot of people play it there. The last couple times I've been playing with a district that's going german speaking and thus I was able to converse with them and to apologize most sincerely to this one girl who's nose I almost broke when the ball hit her straight on the face when we both went for it.

Umm... 4 minutes. Not much else to say. The food is still terrible, probably always will be. But I'm almost use to it now. Not much else I have to say, or at least that I could say in 3 minutes. I saw Bro. Manwaring in the temple today. And don't try and "run into" me there, that's not supposed to happen. So I love you all. Oh! and also Mom and Aunt Becky, please write in a language that uses the Latin alphabet, I cannot read Arabic all that well.

And no Austin you cannot have the speakers nor the ipod dock.

-Elder Rice