Elder Noah Johnson

Oct 26, 2017
NICKNAMES...

Hola guys, it's been a week here in Spain and I am still not fluent in Spanish, which sucks but maybe I will be next week. This week has been insane and full of meetings, lessons, orientations, devotionals, and Spanish. The jet lag was pretty bad for like 3 days but now I feel decent and get like 4 hours of sleep every night! So not too bad. On Thursday we went to the temple and I wore a short sleeve dress shirt to do endowments.... I will never make that mistake again. I got yelled at by some 4 foot tall, 80 year old Spanish dude for like 5 minutes. I love Spain.

One of our Spanish teachers name is hermana ganaza and the first couple days she taught us, I'm pretty sure all of us thought she was speaking Russian because her English is not good haha. And she always loses track of time so we are always late to stuff. I was made district leader of my district which has 2 elders and 4 sisters. They want me to prepare lessons every week or something, and it kinda feels like I'm inadequate since they all speak better Spanish than me. Oh well.

On Saturday we went to a park in Madrid to go proselyte in spanish... it was so hard. But on the metro, my companion for the day (elder stearns) and I gave out 1 book of Mormon and got 1 referral which was crazy!! And then we sat next to this guy in the park and right when we sat down, he told us he wanted to hear our message and he wanted to know about the book of Mormon! I don't speak very good Spanish, but I bore my testimony to him and then my companion pretty much did the rest. We also gave Miguel (that's the guys name) a book of Mormon and got a refferal for him. Overall, we handed out 4 book of Mormon and got 3 referrals!

And then, last night my companion elder kohlstrom and I were giving a lesson to our fake investigator, bea, and we were just kind of reading a script that we wrote, but then she asked us a question about it and we just started having a full on conversation with her in Spanish which was crazy because I definitely don't speak Spanish that well. The gift of tongues is real!!!

Weird thing I did this week:

Oh yeah, on Sunday we sang hymns out on the temple steps and after, we were all just talking and hanging out in a courtyard on the side of it and I ate a piece of bark.. it tastes just as bad as you think it would..

And we gave all the guys in our room nicknames too

Elder Sorenson: Señor tazon de fuente de Corte which means Lord bowl cut

Elder palazzo: Señor memes... I think you should know what that means

Elder Kohlstrom: Elder Stockholm because he's from Sweden

Elder McMillan: Mcnasty because I thought it was funny

Dylan: Chico esqueleto which means skeleton boy

Me: Señor Bagel because I had a moldy bagel in my bag from the flight to Spain.

If any of you guys wanna email me, I can read them during the week but can't respond until Thursday!

Oh yeah, and we play futbol pretty much every day which is super fun. I'm still really bad...

Love you guys,

Elder Johnson

Ps were not supposed to take pictures on any day except Thursday so I may be sent home for this...