Of Strings & Green Things

~Highlight of the Week: Making friends with other Hermanas - harder than you think in the CCM, since all time is scheduled. . . :)

Week three done, going on four. And that means I´m more than halfway through my time here at the good ol´ CCM. It´s a little bitter sweet, or would be if I didn´t still have three more weeks of cafeteria food to look forward to :) My companion and I still can´t accurately guess when the many suspiciously similar looking jello-like desserts are worth it or not.

Ok. Here it goes.

The cupboards in our room really do smell wonderful. And I know I´ve already said this, but I get to smell them every day, so it´s still new news :) It makes getting out my study materials one of my favorite things to do.

All of the recorded devotionals include a musical number, which are all accompanied by a Sister Omatangelo (I think that´s how you spell it, but I could be terribly wrong. . . Sorry Sister Omatangelo :) Coolest. Last. Name. Ever.

Alacrán is Scorpion in Español, according to my best friend, the Spanish/English Dictionary.

The mosquitoes are playing mental games with me. They are everywhere, but for the first whole week I didn´t get bit. We eventually learned to treat them more like flies. But then the other day I found a bite on the most visible spot on my arm. . .like a warning, like they´re offended that we´re not scared of them or something. And then a few nights later I woke up to one flying past my ear. Not ok! Easily my least favorite way to wake up :) It tormented me for hours, and when I finally got up I wasn´t quite sure if it had really been a mosquito, or just my imagination getting the best of me. . . these Mexican mosquitoes are tricky little bugs. . .

An elder in my district treated us to the entire ´morning routine´ song from Tangled. We kept expecting him to run out of lyrics, but he knew every word :)

The crows here are kind of scary looking. Like they´ve been mauled by a cat and are still upset about it. But the parrots are fun (and a little noisy), and occasionally you can spot a brilliant red bird, like a golden finch, but red.

And what else. . . Ah. The adventures of finding your progressive investigator. . . :) So to help all these brand new missionaries learn how to teach, the MTC teachers pretend to be investigators ( and probably endure all sorts of the most horribly pronounced Spanish ever uttered on the face of the earth because of it). It´s extremely helpful, though nerve racking and frustrating ( but only when you´re investigator falls asleep) and so hard to adequately prepare for. Our teacher, Hermano Lloyd, happens to be very good at it, and always keeps us on our toes. He´ll pop into class, announce he´s headed to the building across the way, and then take off into the evening´s thunderstorm (pretty much a daily occurrence this week). We then quickly cram a few more faith-promoting spanish phrases into our heads, don our raincoats, and pray for the best before braving the 50 feet of brick pavers fraught with large puddles and small rivers to get to the building across the way. Once safely across we then have to look into every classroom till we find our ´investigator´. We say another quick prayer, come to terms with the fact that we´ve already forgotten the spanish phrases we´d just practiced, and knock on the door like there are souls to be saved :) It´s quite exciting.

And I can rest in peace because the flower I was trying to remember is Lobelia - my mom´s looking out for me :)

And I thought I´d be free of the ´cups´song (made famous by Pitch Perfect) for a while, but as it turns out the Hermanas I live with kind of like the missionary version my roommates and I wrote a few months back. . . So if we´re not singing a hymn we´re singing ´I´ve got a ticket for a long plane ride. . .´