Elder Rice, reporting in.
This week was rather noteworthy, a rarity as of late. So the new transfer began and Elder Ordaz is my new companion. He's cool, from Mexico, has no papers, and has bad english. Kind of lucky on my part getting the only native spanish speaker in the mission as my companion, well there are other hispanics in the mission but the others are all "Chicanos" (born in the states or spent most of their lives in the states and speak english better than spanish). I had high hopes when I got him for learning better spanish but that kind of evaporated quickly, despite having bad english he prefers to speak it (with me and the other missionaries) rather than spanish. That kind of stinks, but oh well, at least while we're teaching I can see how an hispanic teaches the gospel. He's kind of a quiet guy too. Rather weird, it often falls on me to teach most of the lesson or do the small talk, which is hard since I have nothing in common with the people we teach, he does though. And on the rare occasion he feels like talking with the people about stuff it goes over well (he can actually connect with these people, I can't). But just like Dad said when you have an hispanic companion you become invisible to the people you are teaching. They won't pay much attention to me and are indeed almost startled if I suddenly speak up. Though as of yet I haven't anyone turn to Elder Ordaz and ask him what I just said, my spanish hasn't been that bad.
Say... that reminds of an amusing anecdote. This happened a couple weeks ago and I should have written about it then. Elder Woodruff and I were going around town and making the rounds, I had to use the bathroom so we stopped at this little corner store/taqueria thing (basically a gas station without gas). It was called El Supermercado Chiquita or something along those lines. So I walk in and all these hispanics are everywhere not a single Anglo-Saxon, I turned to the guy behind the cash register and ask him if there was a bathroom here. "Hay un banjo aqui?" The guy just stared at me blankly for a second and repeated "Banjo?" I got rather impatient and said: "Si, un banjo. Hay un banjo, aqui, en este edeficio?" He stared at me doefully some more and said "restroom?" At this point everyone was watching and I said in english: "YES.... a restroom." He pointed to the corner and went to it. I was in there thinking to myself, is my spanish really that bad? I can't even ask where the freaking bathroom is! Then I had a sneaking suspicion. On the way out I checked to confrim. Sure enough the guy I just talked to was talking to this little brown woman (presumeably his wife or something) and yep, he sure wasn't speaking spanish and yep the woman had a red dot on her forehead. I should have known! Every flipping gas station in Conroe are worked by Indians! I should have known, but what threw me off was that there was a taqueria in there, I didn't expect any Indians in there.
So that was rather funny. Now the pictures attached to this email depict what I called "Shelob's Cave". The place in Lord of the Rings where the giant spider lives. One night Elder Ordaz and I were biking back home, it had been a long hard day and we had been biking up and down the same street in down town all day and I didn't want to ride it again so we went a new way. It was about 7:30 pm and we were biking next to the freeway and the feeder through all the grass and consturction. We come to this bayou that runs under the freeway (a "bayou" in Texas what we would call a big gutter or culvert". Basically a 40 foot concrete half pipe just not as steep. There was no stream running through it like there usually is and we were going along it when we pass by these seven or so tunnels in the side of it that ran under the freeway. Ordaz dared me go in one of them as a sort of joke. I was like "YEah let's go!" I picked one where we could see an opening at the other end on the other side of the freeway and went in. Ordaz was flipping out, he didn't expect that we would actually go in them. They were probably about 150 yards long and big enough that we could ride side by side in them. We didn't ride through it, we just sat on our bikes and pushed along with our feet off the wall, there was a little water running through it but not enough to come up past the soles of our shoes. Oradz was afraid that some hobo or something was living in it and would jump out and kill us. I told him that nobody had been in here for a while because of all the spider webs everywhere we were going through. We came to about the middle of it where the was a crack in the ceiling, the other half of the tunnel was lower than our half (imagine a dislocated pipe). I stopped because my front tire went down into this sort of pothole where a chunk of concrete was missing. It was like half a foot deep and half of my front wheel was submerged in it, I nearly lost my balance. I regained it, looked up and right there in front of my face was this huge nasty spider, just chilling right there on its web. It was huge! It's leg span was about the circumference of a tennis ball. I backed up rather startled, Ordaz was tripping out. I snapped a few pictures and counted more of them. I counted 11 of these huge spiders sitting in this vast nextwork of web that had been strung through this crack. Pretty cool, I wonder what kind of spiders they are.
So we called that place, Shelob's cave and went home. Yup, that's some of the adventures I had this week, now I'm tired of typing so I hope you all have a good day.
-- Elder Rice
