Friday, November 27, 2015

Bogota Life in the Dream House Week 3

Heyo homies! Happy Thanksgiving! Hope you all have a good day with your fams! I write stuff down to mention in my letters, so sorry if this is all over the place. Last week I forgot to mention that we got to leave the MTC to go talk to people for an hour! That sounds like a long time, but I wish we had more, tomorrow we get to go for 3 hours! It was good though, talked to lots of people. People talk super fast which is obnoxious. I shook this guys hand and it was like touching the ground in AZ, so dusty. In our classes, which we have like all day, we have 3 different red books, a small, medium, and large one. So naturally the teachers here call them Charmander, Charmeleon, and Charizard. I think its like the funniest thing ever. We moved classrooms this week, luckily this room doesnt leak when it rains. The gym roof leaks when it rains which is cool, so we have to put out like 10 buckets to catch falling water, kinda sketch. Within 4 days of being in our new room, me and Elder Ralphs got moved away from eachother again... On Twitter before I left I said that I needed to learn how to say Rest In Peace and Skeleton in Spanish and Im proud to say that I accomplished that. 

OH YA I SAW A CAT TOO! IT WAS 11-19-15 at 4:45 PM during excercise time and I was running, ya surprise, and I saw a CUTE CAT EATING A DEAD BIRD. Never5get. Theres like a dog park right outside our fence so all we see all day is dogs which is obnoxious. Dogs are cool, but cats are so cute, oh my. The birds here are still super cute.
My district, including me, are going to sing Battle Hymn of the Republic, in Spanish, in sacrament meeting this week which should be cool! Latinos are very bad at singing lol. They also dont know what floss is or how to use it. Since I floss every day, they are very confused and will sometimes ask to try, but they will usually yell in pain once it goes inbetween their teeth. Its fun to mess with Latinos and try to get them to say words like Earl or zit, which they cant even begin to fathom how to correctly say. 

My new roommates are pretty cool, Elder Munoz is very serious and yells at people if they make noise in their room during bedtime. Some people have started jokingly started to call him Caesar, like from Planet of The Apes. Elder Hernandez is pretty cool, not much to say or complain about. 

Spanish is going well! I'm learning a lot, but it's hard to understand people that arent my teachers since most missionaries here think its so easy to understand their weirdo accents. Elder Hatch is progressing too! He likes to talk a lot, which is good, because I dont like to talk a lot. Elder Hatch is convinced this sister missionary is in love with him and is stalking him, but I think he needs to take a chill pill. 

Me and Elder Hatch have been struggling to not get in touble too. This week our district got in trouble for praying in a circle which was interesting, Ill let you all know if we're allowed to pray in a nonagon asap. We also wrote nice letters for people in our district and would give them to them with flowers, but the president was very angry, because he thought we were involved in 'secret combinations'.

Thats all from Bogota, love all you homies!


Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Bogota Life in the Dream House Week 2

Back again homies! My P Days alternate between Tuesday and Thursday just in case you care, so sometimes I go 5 days between emails and 10 days between others. So ya this week has been pretty great but also pretty sad. On the up side I wasnt 'randomly' selected to give a talk this week which was a blessing! The president of the MTC 'randomly' selects missionaries to give talks each Sunday after everybody prepares for one, so we dont know until we get to sacrament meeting. I got in trouble a few times this week by him, once for whistling which is not allowed, and once for being in someones room past bedtime, a rule which makes sense but I didnt know of. Sorry for not adding apostrophes, this keyboard is literally in Spanish. But ya, not talk in sacrament which is HOLLA. Spanish has been going really well for me! I'm kind of a perfectionist when I speak so I don't say very much, but I'm able to help my district bros which is very cool. 


So here at this MTC we get a shipment of homies every 2 weeks, since white people are here for 6 weeks there are 3 groups of us, one on weeks 1/2, one in week 3/4 and one in 5/6. There is only one group of Latinos at a time since they only stay for 2 weeks. So yesterday was the last day for lotsss of people here. I had to say goodbye to all the Latinos, and the group of white Nortes who were very silly. Tomorrow we will have 5 more Nortes and like 40 more Latinos. I had to say goodbye to my roomies Elder Campos and Elder Baranzueta which was sad. They were such genuine nice guys, I loved em. 

The weather here in Bogota is amazing, it's constantly between 70 and 80 degrees night or day. The sun comes up at 6 and goes down at 6 every day. There are these cute little birds with cute orange beaks that are eeeeeeek! The food is getting slightly better. I can actually tolerate eggs now SURPRISE WHOEVER DOUBTED ME! Beans are on my to do list but idk, they look like garbage. I swear for meals they just throw random stuff together. Like for lunch we'll, for example, have rice, chicken, bacon, and potato chips, in a bowl. It's not like Mexican food at all. 
Today we got to go to the temple again, woo! And they we did something called 'going on tour' where we basically spent most of the day going around the city and seeing cool things! So we started by going to Monsarat which is a super cool mountain that overlooks the whole city of Bogota! This place is friggin huge! The elevation up there was about 3,200 meters which is pretty spooky, basically cloud city. Before going up we found a llama and took pictures with it, his name was Lucas. We took a sketchy tram go get to the top and up there my companion was swarmed with girls to take pictures with him, he's okay looking I guess. I had to protect him obviously. Then after that we went back down the sketchy tram on the roller coaster tracks and went to the city to buy some stuff. Basically downtown Bogota is insane. The drivers, like I have explained are nuts. There are no rules. Walking down the street is like smoking a pack of cigarettes, its pretty smoky. We all bought Jerseys for the Colombian national team for about $10 each. Today there was actually a game going on while we were in the city so every place with a TV was packed and a cop was outside each of the buildings to be sure everyone behaved. Colombia was losing to Argentina so people were angry. People here wear their jerseys like garments.

Class is going well, me and Elder Hatch are pretty good buddies, we try to stay out of trouble! It's such a spiritual place here I love it! Peace out, love you all.



To Mom: Elder Ralphs is from Idaho, and he really sucks at volleyball hahahaha, we always trash talk each other its amazing. The temple is pretty small. we went again today. We dont take any trips to the store but today we got to go downtown to buy some random souveneirs, i got a colombia jersey. There was a colombia game today and it was literally insane in the city, every store with a tv was filled and had cops outside it. I dont think I need anything really. I have lots of stuff compared to everyone else, lots of candy left. ya we have a pillow. They gave us like 5 hangers, but I was able to steal some from cabinets not being used since only 4 out of 6 beds are being used. Ya we got water bottles with filters. We cant do anything musical so no. Havent found anything we forgot to pack yet. Love you! time is so short! Learning so much!



Thursday, November 12, 2015

Heyo, Elder Dawson Week 1

Wassup homies, hope you all are doing well! Im south of the south of the south of the border if that makes sense Colombia is a pretty chill place! The MTC life is pretty rough tbh lol. We gotta be up for 16 hours which is obvi hard for me since I usually take 2 naps in my days where I stay up 12 hours. This MTC in Colombia is very very small. There are 22 white dudes, 30 Latino dudes, and 8 Latino girls. I got to this MTC Tuesday night and sense then its been pretty intense, the night we got here something broke in the kitchen and water started going down the halls, luckily me and my roommates were up to tell the MTC president, which he wasnt too happpy about, now that I think about it maybe that's why he doesn't like me... Anyways, my companion right now is Elder Hatch and he's a pretty cool guy! He is very spiritual, likes following rules, and definitely keeps me in line. He's from Florida and likes, Idk, Church I guess? In my room are 2 other Elders who for the most part speak only Spanish. Elder Campos is from Argentina, has an accent that I can't understand for the life of me, has 3 girlfriends waiting for him when he gets home, loves soccer, and is absolutely hilarious. He speaks only English that he knows from movies, and music, so we gotta tell him to watch his mouth when he gets angry sometimes. One time he told me and Elder Hatch in the morning that he had a present for us so we waited for it all day and were super excited, and then that night we asked him about it, he pulled up his shirt and said, "Honey, I'm pregnant." Elder Barrenzeuta is from Venezuela and is a little business excecutive. He's very professional, and doesn't know any English except "WOW!" He's pretty cool though, no complaints, except when he steals my keys, loses his and mine, blames me for it, and then finds them both in his pocket a few minutes later. Communicating with Latinos in Spanish is hard because they have no tolerance for people who don't know Spanish. I can communicate pretty well though! Out of the 8 Elders in my district, the people I go to class all day with, I feel like I know that most about Spanish which means while they are learning in class I'm usually not paying attention which usually leads to me having to do pushups. Most days have been the same, get up by 6:30, personal study, breakfast class, at around 9 until 12, lunch at 12, class from 1-4, work out from 4-5, dinner at 5, and finally class and planning until 9:30. The food here is edible for me luckily! Nothing to write home about. I'm obviously the pickiest eater on the earth, but luckily the food here isn't straight veggies, eggs, and beans, usually only 2 of those per meal. We eat a lot of rice. 
The Elders in my district are super chill. I'm probably the closest with Elder Ralphs, lets just say that if we were companions, we would get nothing done. We can't sit next to each other in class anymore. He reminds me of the purple guy from Lilo and Stitch who creates stitch and has to go find him on Earth, in the best possible way. This morning for P-Day we got to go to the Bogotat Temple which was an amazing experience! Drivers here are literally insane. I saw a lady standing in the middle on the freeway selling cheese, which was 3 lanes and everyone pretended it was 4 lanes, cus people here just use lane lines as suggestions. I took lots of pics, but I'm running out of time to write , and idk if I'll be able to send them, rip the dream. I know I probably forgot to write a lot of stuff, but we don't have long to email.  Shoutout to all my homies, love and miss you. I'm doing great, love it here, learning a lot. I miss Bob Ross. 




To Dad: Im doing good. Food is fine. Eggs, hot chocolate, and bread for breakfast. Rice, meat, and veggies for lunch, and usually a special thing for dinner. No repeats for food for lunch and dinner so far, they usually rotate between meat types, and then dinner is like lasagna, or hamburgers last night, idk, usuallly meat. The older missinaries have a *rice belly* from eating rice literally every day. I dont like the rice, it tastes like seaweed, but I recently learned I can just dump bbq sauce on it.

To Mom: Hey Im back on. Dont know how to do apostraphes, or how to spell it. Its good! I get an hour starting now! Ya all those pictures loaded, thanks for that! I didnt get checked at customs, and then at whatever the next part is I just walked up to a man in a cubicle, he spoke some spanish to me, I handed him everything I had, and told him I didnt speak Spanish. I did meet up with the guy I met at BYU, he actually speaks Spanish so hes only here for a few more days, frowny face. Hes super cool and so is everyone in my district. Everyone in my district, 9 guys, are going to medellin. Elder velasco, the one I met at BYU is going to baranquilla, but ill prob see him on my plane ride home! Thanks, love you a lot!

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

CCM Photo


First Day

Heyo! I´m doing great and the flights went well! Long day yes, I didn´t get to sleep until 2 though because of a little flooding problem lol. My P-Days will alternate between Thursdays and Tuesdays so tomorrow will be a p-day and then 5 days later on Tuesday, then 9 days later on a Thursday and so on. I don´t think I forgot anything, but I´ll get on again tomorrow, love ya!

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

In Flight


Tuesday 03 November 2015
Delta Air Lines 4755 8:30 AM to 10:16 AM




Delta Air Lines 1333 11:00 AM to 4:30 PM


Delta Air Lines 981 5:47 PM to 10:36 PM






Airport

Practicing with my new camera

(Sad) Family Picture

Fellow Missionary on my my Salt Lake City and Atlanta flights.

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Open House






Kevin, Porphy, Jayden, Tyler, Nate, Bryce

Anna, my friend from my BYU Spanish clas

McKay, Jay & Ray

Ryan and Taylor

Cousins

Uncle Rich's Family


Family Pictures