10/20/14

So long story short. I am here in the peans. Manila is so pretty. There are lots of palm trees and crazy drivers. I thought I was going to die the first time I drove in a car. It was scary. Anyways, the MTC here in Manila is super small. All the church complexes are right next to each other. The MTC and general authority building are on one side of the street and the temple is on the other. I get to go there today. We were really lucky that we got to go.

It is so humid here. UGH, jk. It’s not as bad as you think. It feels like a humid day after a rainstorm, everyday, but it’s not that humid. It isn’t as bad as you would think. It’s not unbearable.

So the plane ride was really long. I slept a total of like 4 hours the whole time. One of the kids was only awake for four hours. So we got to the airport in Japan and we looked around at some of the shops and admired the bathrooms. They were pretty cool. Didn’t know they were exactly like the ones that were in the movie "Cars." I laughed for awhile at them. So we rode on an airbus plane. Those things are huge. Do you know how hard it is to be on a long plane ride and only be able to watch the plane moving on the screen? It’s horrible. Well we got in to Manila at like 12:43 and we didn’t get through customs until like 1. We then had to exchange money and wait for everyone. It took a while and then it was an hour ride to the MTC so we didn’t get there until like 2. We had a brief meeting about a quick overview of everything, so we didn’t get to bed until like 3 and we had to be up by 7 the next morning. It was crazy. Well it was really cool. We got to go on splits with elders from around the area. It was so neat to talk to people and  listen to how fast they talk. We got to teach someone and ride in a trike. It was a tight fit. We came back that night and ate dinner. They eat rice with every meal. Even breakfast. Good thing I like rice. It just has no flavor sometimes. So the food is really good. It is always rice and some sort of meat, and water. We then went to bed at 8, much needed. I adjusted to the time zone pretty quickly so I didn’t have too hard of a time sleeping.

Sunday was really neat. There are only 200 missionaries here so we had sacrament meeting with all of them. Felt like I was at home. We then got to take pictures and then we studied and took a quick nap. I was really happy for that. Monday my companion wanted to wake up early to go to gym, so 5 am he was up ready to go. Crazy polys. So we had gym for 2 hours instead of the normal 1 hour.  We went to get our visa's extended and while we were there we met this lady, her name was Precious. As we were talking  to another man we noticed that she was kind of trying to listen to us but without making it obvious. I noticed it and we went and talked to her. She was really interested in the gospel or at least she seemed like she did. We talked to her about the gospel and she said she wanted to know more so we got her information and the missionaries in this area will be contacting her soon. It was a really neat experience for us to be able to teach her. It reminded me of the movie the best two years where Elder Calhoon was like I talked to him. While he was in the store sharing about the Book of Mormon taking out Kyle’s wine he was buying. That scene. So that leads to today where we went to the temple. It was so cool. I want to do that again.

So I’ll tell you guys a little about here. It’s very humid. It’s beautiful. It is so loving. Everything is super cheap. I have grown to love the people here. They are always laughing even though they don’t have much at all. They love to hear me speak English. Everyone is really sweet. There are lots of byotes here. byotes=gay. So they have parades and play all sorts of games and it’s weird. So anyway, they think that when they are gay that they should be the opposite sex so they dress up and act like gay people. It’s really weird.

I’ll send some pictures, hope you enjoy them.