December 13

December 13,

 Are you getting in the Christmas spirit yet? Apparently we are going to have TWO apostles or something like that come and talk to us on Christmas. I'm super excited.

So, I actually have spent the money they've been giving me weekly, like I wanted to post signs in my room about Bulgarian verb conjugation and stuff. But yeah, other than that and laundry detergent, everything is completely free. We do have to slide our ID cards when we eat, but it doesn't charge us, it's for "statistical purposes only." And in class we're never given tests or anything like that. How communist.

My linguistics major is helping SO MUCH with Bulgarian. Everything is pretty straightforward, just like learning any other language. A lot of the grammatical concepts aren't new either because they're the same in Spanish and German. I thought I would be having a much harder time. Maybe I'm speaking too soon, but so far I just think it's really fun. We are in the classroom 3-6 hours a day learning Bulgarian, not counting our study time on our own, so it does get pretty tiring. 

There are missionaries from all over at this MTC. I think which MTC you go to has more to do with where you're going and how much space they have at other MTCs than it has to do with where you're from. The other day me and Sister Lefler were walking somewhere and there were these pacific-island-looking people standing in the snow taking pictures of it, sticking their hands in it and laughing. I heard one of them say, "I love it!" When new missionaries come they get a green dot on their nametag if they don't know English very well, but all the Europeans I eat with and stuff (the Slavic language-learning missionaries) speak perfect English.

My favorite companionship of elders in my class is Elder Slinker from Kentucky and Elder Calderon from Finland. Elder Slinker mentioned how he had milked cows twice a day every day for the past fifteen years of his life, and I asked, "Are you from a small town?" and he was like, "Yeah. Well, we don't live in the town, we live near a small town. We live in a farming community." I had to put my head down on my desk I was laughing so hard.

Elder Calderon was talking to us all about Finnish grammar one day and he wrote something on the board which I referred to as a "really long sentence". He was like, "That's not a sentence that's two words." Then he tried to teach us all some saying and we asked him what it meant. "Is it an uplifting message?" someone asked. "It's not uplifting, it's Finnish," he said. He also expresses that he thinks the English way of describing things is nonsensical, for example, he said in Finland you would never say someone came through the door, you would say someone came through the air inside the space of the doorframe, or something like that. One day I accidentally said "si" instead of "da" (meaning yes) when we were practicing Bulgarian and so now whenever I talk to him he says "Como?" to me instead of "What?" To be honest, I at first didn't even notice and just answered the question, but he started laughing at me so I got it. The other day he hurt his foot playing volleyball and I guess he got sick of explaining it to people so when he left to ice it during class and the teacher asked how it happened, he was just like, "I fell down stairs," and then as he left he said, "I did not." They crack me up. For some reason or another Elder Slinker got a horse mask in the mail and he showed me a bunch of pictures of himself wearing it like, in the bathroom stall and stuff. Last night when we were in the classroom he looked at something written on the board in Bulgarian and was like, "What are all these stupid triangles!!!" in frustration.

I feel like the whole Bulgarian: head shake for yes, head nod for no, is just allegorical of how learning the alphabet is. The D sound can either be written as a "stupid triangle" or a g. Not to be confused with a triangle with only two sides, which makes the L sound. The G sound can be written as something that looks like r, or a z. The P sound is written as a "box with no bottom" and the R sound is written as a P. There's one character that can be written like three different ways, but I forget right now.

We practiced teaching lessons to an "investigator" in Bulgarian for a few days last week. We would leave class and go knock on some other classroom door and talk to him. They had already told us all the investigators are paid actors who are actually members, but this guy was pretty good. Apparently he's going to be one of our Bulgarian teachers now.

I'm out of time.

Love you bye!