Jay Family Missionaries

Hey everybody,

 

I wrote down a bunch of things to address in this email but then I left the paper in my room and my companions aren't willing to go back for it, so I'll just try to remember what I wanted to say.

 

I got the pi-day box and I shared it with my district on pi-day, I remembered that I never told you.  Also, have you checked to see if the SD card is locked or not?  It was perfectly fine when I sent it so it must have gotten ruined in the mail.  I can get pictures from my companions though, and just take new ones.

 

So, we got new roommates yesterday and they are in the next Romania district so they will be learning Romanian.  So, we decided to tell them that Sister Humphries is from Romania and they are convinced.  They ask us how to say stuff and how to pronounce stuff and we can always help them because we have asked our teachers the same things but they think that Sister Humphries is actually Romanian.  The teachers are in on it too, even the one that is from Romania.  She said that she would stop by our classroom occasionally with her district to talk really fast to Sister Humphries and pretend like she knows her.  It helps us to practice speaking all the time because we have to talk to Sister Humphries in only Romanian and then translate into English for her.  It's fun.

 

Well, sometimes life here at the MTC is pretty dramatic.  Sometimes I hate my companions, and my teachers, and the rest of my district; but most of the time we are friends and things are good.  I thought it was interesting how Mom said that she is really good friends with all of her companions.  My companions are nice and we get along well, but their not the kind of people I would hang out with or be best friends with.  I think that after living with them for this long they still don't really know me very well, just like a lot of the roommates that I had.  Maybe it will be different when I am with my companions in Romania and we are out teaching instead of studying all day.

 

Sister Petrisor told us that in Romania hardly anyone can play the piano so we practiced a little this week.  We have also been planning a musical number for the Sunday before we leave so I checked out a violin and played it.  After I finished and put the violin away I walked out the door and there was a guy sitting there on the floor outside the door.  He had a suit on but I didn't see a nametag so I think it was a teacher, but apparently he was listening to me play which was wierd.

 

We have made friends with a lot of missionaries from other districts, especially the foreign language districts because they have been here a lot longer.  It seems like it takes about four weeks for a missionary to learn to be a missionary and to be friendly and outgoing; so I don't know how the English speaking missionaries manage after being here for only two or three weeks.

 

We made friends with the Italian district and they left on Tuesday.  We made friends with them because we could understand their italian so we would go say hi to them.  Now their gone and only the brand new italian districts are left so they can't talk to us very well.  We made friends with some missionaries learning Tagalog now though, and we say hi to their district when we walk past their door on the way to devotionals.

 

A lot of missionaries say that they know somebody who is, or who taught, or who knows somebody who is Romanian.  In pretty much every European country you will find Romanians because Romania is what our teachers call "the Mexico of Europe."  They have traditions like slaughtering pigs and then cooking them with a flamethrower.  Fratele Middleton told us to go to those types of celebrations if we ever get the chance.

 

It was awesome on those days when it was bright and sunny but there was snow falling.  There were a lot of missionaries just standing outside looking up at the sky with confused or delighted expressions on their faces.  I forget how many of them aren't from around here.  One time during class two sisters went running past the door shrieking; we recognized them from the new ASL district.  Later on we realized that it was snowing outside and one of the sisters was from Hawaii and had never seen snow before so their teacher told them that they could go outside to see the snow.

 

Rodney and Pete you guys should write me more often.  Whenever we get really good letters we share them with our companions and your letters are rare but they are good ones.

I don't live off of letters but every time I get one it's like a special treat.

 

Thanks for the pictures Joni, the one with Emmett standing on the first place thing is the best.

 

-Sora Jay

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