Hola,
so I leave for the mission on Monday. My flight leaves at 7 pm and it´s 8 hours long, then when we arrive we wait 4 hours and have another 1 and a half hour flight to get us down to our mission. So we´ll arrive early in the morning on Tuesday. Hopefully we can sleep, but I don´t know if that will happen, because my sweet companion doesn´t sleep well on planes and I don´t want to leave her awake and lonesome.
Because Hermana Scholl is going to the same mission as me we get to be companions on the plane, and we have a couple of sweet gringo elders to accompany us. I´m a little stressed about it, because I´m the travel leader, so I have to make sure that everybody´s bags are within the weight limits and that they´re all ready to get there on time and stuff. Hopefully all goes well, we´re debating about trying to drop useless stuff from our bags, because they told us to bring everything and we aren´t sure if we need it or not, or even if we can buy it in Chile. It´s supposed to be a more advanced country, but at the same time, we´ve never been and we aren´t sure what to expect. So I talked to Hermana Bennet the MTC Presidents wife and the president of the relief society, about my experience and how I wish there were more opportunities that would push the gringos to speak the language, and she told me that they´re actually going to start a new pilot program today where they mix an american district with a latino district for part of their activities. So each person will have an american companion for part of the day and a latino companion for part of the day. I´m really excited about it, because I think it´ll make the MTC experience so much better for a lot of people. It´s too bad I won´t get to experience it myself, but it´s all good, because I got my first half with the latinas and that made my experience so much better.
Tomorrow for trc instead of teaching the usual mexican members who volunteer, me and Hermana Scholl get to teach some chilean members, because our teacher has friends there and she´s going to set us up on skype so we can try to understand the rapid speaking of the crazy-daisy chileans. Hopefully that goes well. Aside from that we don´t have anymore fake investigators to teach. Our schedule from now on is mostly workshops to prepare us for the field. I´ve been sucked into the gringo-mentality and I don´t speak spanish nearly enough, so even though my grammar is improving I´m speaking and understanding even slower. Oh well though, there´s only about 5 more days to survive before I can start adjusting to the faster chilean spanish. Also we get to go to the temple today, which I´m excited for. I hear the Mexico temple is beautiful and big and it has escalators on the inside, so it´ll be fun to see what that´s like.
Funny story time:
Last night Hermana´s Sutton and Sumsion were drying their laundry and we were all sitting in our room when we hear this alarm go off. We were all thinking it was a fire alarm so we threw our shoes on and ran out the door with all of the Latina sisters. We (The gringa sisters) decided to run to the reception to get some help, and by the time we got their one of the latinas had already called so we walked back feeling kind of embarrased like we were the stupid americans. We then waited by the door for a guy to come and tell us that it was the gas alarm that sometimes goes off when we´re drying clothes, and that if it happened again we should call and let them know but probably not worry about it. But we all felt pretty stupid, because we kind of freaked out a little bit and the latinas were relatively chill about the whole experience, but they´re nice so they didn´t say anything.
I don´t have any pictures to share at the moment, but probably next week I´ll send some more.
P.S. I somehow survived the mosquitos for 2 weeks and then got 3 nasty bites within a day. I think it´s cuz I ate more sugar and they thought I smelt tastier or something.