April 7, 2014

April 7 2014
Well this week was good. This area really is huge though haha, I guess they weren't kidding. It's like the biggest in the mission. We use busses a ton to get around. In fact that's where most of our money goes for the month so say hello to hunger haha. Nah, just kidding just kidding it's really not that bad and the members feed us well ;) We also do a lot of walking too so consequently I will probably lose the 5 pounds I gained in my last area pretty quickly. It's really funny because everyone keeps telling me that I filled out a little bit and it's only 5 pounds. So our area is kind of in the mountains...but not really. Most of our ward is though, and sometimes all 6 of us eat together so we get to visit other parts of the ward. Some of the views are amazing. We're pretty high up, I think like 7500 feet elevation. We escape a little bit of the smog in the city so that's nice. The area actually has some really cool parts too. There's one part of our area that it built into both sides of a valley. To cross this area we have to go down 200 stairs and 300 some odd to get to the top of the other side. It's a good test of endurance. I'm going to have legs of steel but the end of this transfer if we keep climbing them like twice a day so there are advantages haha. The ward is a little bit dead. We don't have many investigators. We are trying to find more. The difficult thing here is to get them to come to church due to the fact that the church is far away.

My new companion's pretty awesome. He's from Brigham City, Utah. Fun fact. He's in the movie the R.M. He's the kid sitting by the swimming pool when Kirby falls in that's says mom the missionaries are here etc. I got a good laugh out of it when one of the members showed us. He still looks really similar today. We get along really well. He's really chill but also really obedient. He's about to turn 19 the day before Maddie's birthday. I think that this transfer will be really good.

General conference was really amazing. It's really hard to pick a favorite talk. I have to agree with dad though that the priesthood session was amazing. I also really like the first session too, but we had to listen to that one in Spanish and it didn't have quite the same effect as it would have in English. I understood most all of it but it wasn't quite the same. I'm glad that we got to watch the rest in English. I also really liked all of the talks that you mentioned mom. The talk by President Uchdorf was amazing. I really want to improve in this area no matter how tired I am in the morning or at night. It really is super important. It was a great experience. It's just easy to feel inadequate in all of the areas that we can improve. I'm trying to avoid these feelings and stay super positive. Thanks for sending the package mom. I'm sure it will get here just fine if it has the stickers on it. Well that's about it. Love you all.

Elder Schow