Week 1 Recap

Family and anyone else who may be reading this,

I finally made it to P-Day. I thought it would never come, it finally did. Now this is going to be rather short for I have only 30 minutes to write this email and five of it was already spent setting up the e-mail account, so try to ignore all of my typos.
Anyway, I have so much to say and so little time, so for actual detailed accounts of my exploits you will have to rely on my illegible letters. So, where to begin? Day 1. If I had to associate one word with the MTC it would be 'Madness' cause that's exactly what it is. The first day was a day full of: "go here, get this, go there, get that." I was loaded up with books and sent to the room that would be my residence for the next couple months.
So we don't have to pay for the essential package of books we got. We got a Preach My Gospel, which will heretofore be mentioned as the PMG, in spanish. A bible and book of mormon in spanish. The cool thing is that the Bible we have is a Catholic one, it's really cool, it has this baroque, old world look to it and in it. So much more cool than our stale protestant like standard works.
So loaded with all of this I finally got to my room with my luggage. There I met Elder Allbee, not my companion but he was in the same room with us, his companion is Elder Manship. Elder Allbee is cool, he's a fellow metal-head so we get along quite well.

Elder Wood is my companion, he's from San Diego and it turns out that he went to the same elementary school that we did when we lived in San Diego, Carmel Creek Elementary School, so we must of been in that school together. Elder Wood is amazing, he's had 3 years of spanish already and is like 6 tenses ahead of the rest of us and knows his scripture mastery really well, like down the page number. But he and I have nothing in common, that and I cannot really understand him, he can't say his R's so to him my name isn't 'Elder Rice' it's 'Eldwah Wice' it irritates me to no end but I've gotten used to it now and now I only have to ask him to repeat things once. So now you know that his english is bad, now imagine his spanish! Like I said before, he knows it really well but he cannot, for the life of him, pronounce anything. He relies on me for pronunciation, of which I believe I am rather good at. One of our teachers said that I sounded almost like a native, so that's good. Elder Wood will only talk about Spanish, nothing else. He get's really annoyed at this habit of mine. I have a tendency to go out of my way to talk to anyone with Cyrillic or Slavic characters on their name tags or striking up conversations with those going German speaking.

Spanish has been tough though, especially after a couple years of German. Several times now when I give the prayer or anything else that requires me to speak spanish under pressure I end up speaking Spanish, German, and English all in the same sentence. It's kinda funny, and I enjoy letting my district hear the mighty language of German and how much more awesome it is than any wimpy Latin language.... Oh and I think I figured out the secret of going on foreign speaking missions. Most everyone I've talked to has had at least 3 years of the language they're going to. So, Austin and Aidan, take 3 years of whatever it is you want to speak and don't take ANY Spanish at all, or else that will cancel out anything else.

So, the MTC, the room was terrible, I was expecting something dirty but it was just nasty. It smelled terrible, like an old wet sock in that's been left in a corner of Cove Point or something. The only thing that smells worse is Elder Wood's feet, I have to vacate the room when he takes his socks off so I won't gag. The food isn't that bad, but nor as good as others have pretended. Rather less than mediocre actually, at first it was nice being able to eat curly fries at both dinner and lunch and as much as you wanted but after the first 3 days my bowels were being torn up something terrible and now I just mostly eat salads with the occasional something else more meaty. I've got six minutes left so perhaps I shall give a more detailed descriptions of the food later.

Our district consists of 12 people, who's names I don't have time to mention. 6 of us are going to Houston, 4 to Chile, and 2 to Guatemala. We're an odd bunch, lots of weirdos, but weird in the churchy way, as in a tad bit overzealous, in fact we once had a heated discussion about Geology and the age of the earth and other things that I won't go too much into cause I have a couple minutes left.

Okay so I need a few things, clippers, whites socks, about 3 or 4 pairs, two more pairs of garments, dri-lux, round neck, medium sized, and a contact lense for my left eye. I lost down the sink the other night. So please send as soon as you can, the contact will take awhile I know but i have a minute left so I love you all and almost but not quite miss you.

- Elder Rice