Nick's First P-Day

This first week has been great. My Spanish is coming along quite well. We have started teaching a man named Carlos, who is actually one of our teachers but we treat him like an investigator. The first lesson with him was bad, I couldn't say anything that I wanted to say and it was very difficult to get our point across. Yesterday was our 3rd lesson with Carlos. I can already see the great amount of Spanish that I know compared to Friday (1st lesson). I will say that it gets hard sometimes because my companion, Elder Ward, is not up to where I am at yet in Spanish. Therefore, I do most of the talking.

The food in the MTC is well... pretty nasty. In order to keep any kind of nutrition, I have begun eating at least 1 salad a day. Hopefully I'll get used to the incredibly mass-made food.
Our district is 11 missionaries strong. We had 12, but one of them went home. It got very real that day. Anyways, the district is like so: 5 missionaries going to Peru, 5 going to Houston, and one going to Missouri. Yep, I am the only one going to Missouri in my district. Totes Crazy right?
Side note, I met Elder Eldridge here in the MTC, he is the cousin or something of Sister Nichols, and is very funny.

Our daily schedule goes something like so:
Wake up at 630, eat, go and sit in our classroom and either study our brains out or sit through instruction, then we have gym time or lunch or something, then we study some more, and then we eat dinner, and then we teach or do more studying, lastly we go back to our residency and go to sleep at 1030.
It is a very long day, and very tiring. This P-day has been great to just relax and such.
We also found our Narnia Hole today. Inside we found packaged cookies and candy and some small footballs. Those footballs have kept me sane.

The first thing anyone tells you when you get here is to last until Sunday and then it picks up. I can attest to this. Those first few days were so tough, and very discouraging. As you get used to everything the time starts to fly, Monday seems like a blink when I think about it now. The saying in the "Cage" is, "Days feel like weeks, and weeks feel like days". No truer words can be said about the work being done here. It is crazy to think how different everything is here. I'm constantly with someone and we are constantly teaching ourselves a language, and, I'm constantly wearing church clothes.

Tonight we have a devotional, as we do every Sunday and Tuesday night. I have heard that they are amping up security for tonight's speaker, so maybe we'll hear from an apostle or something high up.

It is tiring work, but worth it. I'm super excited to get into the field. Only 8 more treacherous weeks.

I saw Spencer a few times already. It has been awesome to be in the MTC the same time as one of my best friends. He says Portugese is very difficult. I believe it.

There are a ton of Lone Peak-ers here. A lot of them are from the 2010 class, but it's cool to see some familiar faces.

Boy do I miss lacrosse right now. It would be so nice to be able to go shoot during our exercise time. Maybe I'll get a mini stick in mizzou to lax with.

One of my roommates plays baseball at the University of Oregon. It's pretty cool to talk to him about being a student-athlete. One day, I'll be one too, eh?

Alright my time is running out.

I hope you all have a great week and I hope that the beginning of college football brings much joy to everyone.

Deuces,
Elder Nick LaMay