8/20/09

Well, things are going well for me here. I will try and hurry and write this. More people wrote me this week, so I have a little less time to write, but that´s okay. To answer a few questions really quick, I believe I get 1 hour to email on Monday before leaving. So I can email the fam one more time before you leaving. You can write me too, but don´t make it incredibly long or anything. But yeah, it´ll be your last chance to write me... So good news, I got 3 letters this past week! Before this week I´d only recieved one letter my whole time here. They were from Jen and Kelly. So that was fun. Oh, I must´ve gotten 4 letters, because I just remember I also got one from Iris Brown. So yeah. Anyways, I leave next Tuesday, so this is my last P-day here. It´s weird. I went to the temple today for my last time. It was really good. I did the session in Spanish (with the headset) today. It was really cool. I understood everything. Also, today was the first time I didn´t need help at all the whole time. So that was cool. I love the Madrid temple here. I hope that I´ll be able to come by here sometime in the future. Maybe if we come back to barcelona we can swing by the Madrid temple since we´d have to fly through Madrid. We´ll see. That´s still a long ways off. Anyways, let´s see, what else is new. The fish is okay, but I don´t think I ever said I liked it. So mom and dad, I noticed you made comments about me liking it, but that might be stretching it just a little bit. The park last week was good. I was with Elder Dunn. We got 16 contacts and gave out one Book of Mormon. It wasn´t the most successful week, but it was still good. I´m surprised how many people there are who absolutely just don´t believe in anything. Not even a higher power. It´s crazy. But there´s a lot who believe in God and Christ as well, so that´s good. Oh, so this past week I gave my first blessing. I was way nervous. Hermana Brown, the hermana in my district, asked Elder Bodily and I if we´d give here a blessing. We asked who she wanted to annoint and who to give the blessing. She said she didn´t care but eventually said to have Elder Bodily annoint and have me give the blessing. So we did that. It was really nice to finally see for myself that words will come into my head. I had no idea what I was going to say before, but words popped into my head and I said them. So it was a good experience. She´s been sick, so that´s why she asked. She´s still sick, but getting better I think. There was a teacher that was here for a week and half just subbing, but went home to Switzerland a bit ago and was diagnosed with Swine Flu. So they´ve taken a few precautions here with that, but I don´t think anyone else has Swine, just bad coughs etc. So yeah, hopefully everyone gets felling better soon. I have a bit of a cough again, but as I´ve told people here, I have the immune system of a fox. Then when they ask what that means I say, "Have you ever heard of a fox dying of sickness...?" It´s kind of funny. Because I´m sure they do, but you don´t ever hear about foxes dying of sickness. Ha ha. So that´s funny. Let´s see, what else is new. I´m excited to go to Barcelona. I feel like I´m doing a lot better with the language, but still not fluent. I can communicate very well though. So that´s good. And Kevin, I understood everything you said in your email, so yeah. Anyways, we´ve continued practicing teaching etc. This week we´re teaching the 3rd lesson, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the commandments (The Word of Wisdom, Tithing, Sabbath Day Holy, Law of Chastity). So that´s what I´m doing over here. All is going well with that. President Hill is gone for 3 or 4 days, so we´re kind of on our own here for a while. But the teachers are all still here and all. And he gave me emergency contact info too if there´s any problems. So that´s good. There´s some mission president´s seminar in Preston, England, so that´s where he is. Oh, also, Hermana Hill, his wife,, helped us sew stuff. My pants below the pockets were ripping. She fixed them though. So that´s good. Well, I´m out of time now. So I´m going to send this. Have a fantastic week. ¡Chao! -Elder Sommerfeldt