"Vale"

"Vale" is the new magical word of the mission. It´s pronounced ¨BAH-ley¨. It basically means OK. Not in the Ï´m ok¨ sense but other stuff. We use it a lot here. Must be a Spanish word. I´ve found out that most of the words I learned in Spanish class are only South American words and they don´t like them here. Also they drop their S´s sometimes and shorten "hasta luego" to "staluego." and Guapo is uapo.

The foreigners had strength competitions in the lobby but now they all left. They were really funny. I got a few pictures but I can´t send them until later. Time is weird here. It feels pretty long, but also short at the same time. I just don´t think about the past or the future and that makes things weird too. We heard a great talk from Elder Holland in the Provo MTC from January. Find it and listen if you can. The bathroom stalls are like safes. They are entirely steel and the locks are big and chunky. If there is a bombing or shooting, I´m going to the bathroom.

Hymn 158 is ridiculously hard to sing in Spanish. I don´t know what it is in English. They seem to need to shove as many syllables as they can in the hymns here. They invented this evil sideways parenthesis that makes you shove even more syllables into one note. And some words that are long and sort of one or two syllables are always shoved into one. Like Dios. Always.

I love soccer. We play it in this small concrete stadium in the ground. It´s called The Oven for obvious reasons. It´s madness because they expect us to teach 2 fake investigators almost every day and still learn Spanish and learn the gospel. They want way too much of us. One elder fell off his bunkbed in the middle of the night. Another started the phrase, ¨Tengo poop¨ for I need to poop. I love singing. I heard there is a new temple video now. We haven´t gotten it yet, though. Go check it out. This keyboard is freaking me out. Everything is mixed around. I keep on thinking I can go do things but I realize I´m in Spain and on a mission. I found out from my teacher that the word "Spaniard" came from English people calling them Spanish (rude word that rhymes with Spaniard a bit.) On P-day we went to the center of Madrid. Every single building is gorgeous. We saw the exact center, we went to the Plaza del Sol and Plaza Mayor. We also saw the royal palace and the museum nearby. Oh my heck. Gypsies. Everywhere. And they seemed to like our group. They want money but really they´re making bank. We found a black guy from Idaho and we talked to him and he said he´d check out our church. It was a group of like 20 that talked to him. Today we´re going to some famous stadium.

This message was loads shorter. At least it wasn´t the panicked rush of last week. It´s very busy here. Still was a panicked rush sorta. I have to print off emails from everyone to read them because there´s no time. Love you all loads! I miss you guys!

-Elder Morgan