Week 4 MTC!

Hey so It's week 4 here! Generally speaking the days and weeks get harder and more difficult generally, and these computers are still terrible and they freeze up all the time so you get your time cut by sitting and waiting for them to work, and that seems like it gets worse as time goes on anyway. But despite the difficulties here the Lord will make up the difference. So as far as a package goes, can you send some Arnold Palmer's??? That would be awesome! Also, I'll need more stamps and laundry detergent (my companions and I share it, they pay for my laundry to get cleaned and I let them use my detergent). I'll tell you 2 funny things that happened this last week, actually the second one happened 2 weeks ago.

So you know how we have firesides on Sunday right, and devotionals on Tuesday, well we usually get awesome seats every time, we always take the reserved row up front on the side and nobody says anything haha. So on this last Sunday, we happened to take the very front row in the center seats, best in the house, it was pretty cool. Anyway, so generally every fireside has a special musical number before the speaker, these usually consist of somebody playing the piano or singing, there was even an organ solo once, which was good but I thought kind of bizarre but anyways this time there was a piano solo, and in the gym where the devotionals are held and there are literally thousands of missionaries seated, there are a bunch of TV's and two massive projector screens that are all showing the same shot in HD so people can see and everyone looks at them, and there are like 4 or 5 cameras that they switch between periodically. So when these cameras are filming during musical numbers there are always like 1 or 2 people in the shot in the background with their face kind of dimmed due to the lighting around the stage or piano or whatever else is the musical number. I told my companions when we saw this to be the case that I wish that I was in the background so I could troll the camera by making some creeper face, and Elder Sandoval was right next to me and called my bluff and wouldn't believe me, and I told him he should have seen what trolling I did outside the MTC, then he would believe me, this all took place during the very beginning on the piano musical solo. So when they take these shots they are zoomed in like to the max so there are only 1 or 2 faces or people in view but they're very detailed and everyone can see them pretty clearly, so this one shot comes up soon after us talking and Elder Sandoval points out that I am on camera, and I was lit up very well, it was me and like 1 or 2 other people, it was the back of our heads, and this time we were in the foreground and took up like 1/3 of the screen, and my head was the most in focus so it took up like 1/4 of the whole screen! So I moved my head a little to confirm it was me and then after the shot switched I told my district to watch for the next shot because it was gonna be awesome. So soon the shot of my head comes up again and knowing where the camera was that was shooting it, I made the creepiest creeper smile and stuck my head up and twisted it slowly slowly to the camera and stared at it while making the creeper smile and the entire MTC was laughing!!! Even the MTC presidency!!!! It was perhaps one of my greatest pranks ever, haha a bunch of people came up to me afterwards and talked to me about it. It has gained me some sort of status here as a troll, some people just call me "classic kid" or "classic troll" haha. It was a great time!!! After the fireside the kid playing the piano wanted to know why everyone was laughing when he was talking to some people haha.  

The other story isn't quite as epic haha but this one happened like 2 weeks ago. Russian in many ways is largely a tonal language, meaning that if you don't emphasize the right vowel on a word then it can change the meaning of the word, similar to Mandarin Chinese, and almost every Russian verb has 2 different words depending on the content of the sentence, and 12 different conjugations in 6 different cases that change the words spelling and pronunciation from predicate to predicate throughout the sentence, haha it's intense. Anyways so the Russian verb for writing is almost identical to the Russian verb for urinating, of course I didn't know this so when I was with one of the teachers role playing an investigator, the entire time I was telling him to write down some stuff I was actually telling him to urinate because I wasn't stressing the right vowel in the word haha, he told me afterwards but it was funny anyways and now I know the difference, good thing that didn't happen in Russia!

Well I have to go, be safe. Talk to you next week!!!

 Elder Travis Skene