Sunday, November 29, 2009

Ciao, Ciao, Ciao!

Okay,

So I'll work on getting more interesting with my titles, but we really just say Ciao all the time.

Like always, I've been keeping very busy. This last we we got the 36 new portuguese Elders+Sisters, along with one Italian Elder, and one Italian Sister. That was pretty crazy. Whereas before our sacrament was empty except a few rows (we had maybe ..20 Italians), now the whole congregation is filled (We now have the extra 60-70 Portuguese).

One thing we do each week is write a talk in our mission language. So this week we actually had talks given in portuguese. hahaha. It's about the funniest language on the planet. Per esempio, instead of saying "molto bene", they say "muito Beam" Or something like that. It sounds hilarious. Instead of "Ottimo" they say "Oigimo" And instead of "Calcio" they say "Foogie Ball" hahaha. So it's all just pretty hilarious.

It was very hard to focus while they were giving their talks.

I'm starting to get extremely comfortable with everything we do here. Whether it be teaching lessons, practicing street contacting, or just whatever. I know it will be different in the field, but the fact that I've gotten comfortable with it all here makes me feel good about everything, and I know I'll get comfortable in Italy quickly.

One funny thing that happened this week: Me and my companion were going to teach the second lesson in ENGLISH because we were going to teach my teacher's friend, but then, about 15 minutes before the lesson we found out that the friend didn't make it, and then we had to teach in Italian!! We hadn't prepared a lesson at all. We hadn't studied for it this week. haha. So we prayed, and then we had a sweet lesson. The investigators we taught were really funny. He asked if I was Indian, then when I told him I was Chinese he was like, you know noodles actually came from the Chinese and stuff. haha.

My Italian is coming along great. From now on we do SYL everyday. So..we don't really speak in English. Not everyone in our district is the best about following it, but I think we do alright. I'm getting better at expressing myself in Italian, and the other day I talked to an RM from Catania that's only been home for 1 1/2 weeks and I could understand everything he said way clearly! And that's the mission I'm going to so....questo รจ otttimo.

Apparently we'll be receiving our flight plans in three days. So that's pretty awesome.

So a few more things about this week. I don't have a thesaurus, so I can't look up the antonym of "highlight," but whatever it is...the opposite of highlight this last week is that Sorella Prina went home. She'll be back, but she went home to recover because she can't eat anything. It stinks cause she was supposed to go to Italy two weeks ago!

One thing that was a highlight was that we learned some Italian sign language. So that's pretty cool. I actually really hope I meet a deaf person in Italy, cause I'll totally ask them how they're doing...and that's about all I can do. I can also say hello to about anyone I meet. So far me and Anziano Rowland are up to 24 languages. Including quite a few I had never heard of, like Kurdish and some Filipino one besides Tagalog. I've also started reading Siate Fedeli, or True to the Faith in Italian. It's awesome. I can understand most of it.


Sorry if my e-mails seem cut off sometimes but we run out of time and I have to just send it.
Okay, I really must go.

Con Affetto,

Anziano Banks

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