March 8

hola todos. I LOVE SPAIN. i really do. my journal for the past week i swear all it says is i love spain. sometimes its like unreal to me that I’m here. like i dont beleive I’m here. AND IN A COUPLE HOURS WE GET TO SPEND THE REST OF THE DAY MADRID. like in the city....like in puerta del sol. um does anyone realize what this means?????? by the time you are all reading this i will have broken my year long fast of chocolate nepolatanas from sol. seriously first thing on my to do list. i will eat one in honor of all you. no one here understands my excitement for spain yet. and do you know how hard it is for me to hold excitement in? really hard. i know the field and barcelona will be amazing but I’m un poco sad knowing that i have so little time here in madrid. i love madrid. i love spain. but i most def will be getting fat. we have three meals here plus snack time at night and nutella and bread is put out every single time. i have no self control and without a doubt 3 out of our four meals i end up eating nutella. there is not much going on here though. we sit in class all day expect this past week we all have been struggling with jet lag. the ccm here is way more lax than the ccm in provo which is weird to get used to. i don’t’ have much time so I’ll tell you about my favorite day.

saturday was like my favorite day so here it is: so we got to do a session in the madrid temple. who would have thought last year when i would go to the temple all the time to do baptisms that a year later i would be doing a session in the temple? not me. it was so cool. AND THEN... basically saturday was my favorite day ever. so at the ccm here on saturdays they put you on splits for a couple of hours with a different companion and then send you off to proselyte (apologies for my spelling) in the park. and not just any park RETIRO PARK. i love retiro park. this was my favorite thing i think I’ve done since I’ve been on a mission. they send us off in the metro to the park with books of mormon, reference cards, and pass along cards. i was sitting there on the metro and i think this was my first time ever i actually felt like a legit real missionary. the mtc is all role playing and everyone you are speaking with also knows english and they are already members. so here i am being shoved off into the real world...these are real people who are native spanish speakers, they don’t know english, and they are not members. like this is the real deal. AND IT WAS SO MUCH FUN. seriously I’m living the life. i get to walk around retiro for a couple hours talking to everyone. if i learned anything this day its the gift of tongues is real. no joke. so we go up to this guy who is sitting there rolling up his cig...... HOLA QUE ESTA HACIENDO. his name was william and he was a mumbler. i cant even understand people when they are mumbling in english. and he was talking about the weirdest stuff ever....but i was able to understand him no problem and then tell him what i needed to say. so i basically just spent the whole afternoon street contacting in retiro. nbd. and we ended gathering as a huge group of missionaries in front of that huge lake right in the middle of the park and sang a couple of hymns.

sorry this is so short.... i don’t have much time left. I’m not really sure what’s happening next week like when we are leaving or anything or how we are getting there. so i don’t know when you’ll hear from me next. I’ll write home some letters though and tell you more there. thanks for the emails though! I’ll get on again when i can!!

love your spaniard, miguelita.