Week 2

Looking for Smurfette. . .There's got to be a story to that, 

but we didn't get it.  We only got the picture.

Hello world,

Pday has come again. I'm now about 2% of the way through my mission. This week was pretty interesting. I'm not sure if I've had a really normal day at the MTC so far. The first week, the most traumatic thing was one of my companions going home. Every night we would have to go see the counselor because he was homesick. This week my other companion was sick the whole time. A couple of the days he pretty much just stayed in bed the whole day and I was either with him or I had to go on a split with one of the guys in the other district and his companion would stay with mine. Fortunately, we have some guys in our district whose mothers are ER nurses or who are in medical school themselves, so there was no shortage of drugs for him to take. He probably took five or six different things to help him feel better. One of the drugs was my companion's own advil, which he put in his altoids container so that he wouldn't have to carry two different things all the time. It really added new meaning to the altoid slogan "curiously strong mints". Our whole district thought that was pretty funny. He's doing better today, and he even went to the optional workout time with me. 

The sisters in my district got pretty sick this week too. One of them had Influenza A and was supposed to be quarantined for like three days. They let her out early though because she got better so fast. The other sister was pretty sick for a while too. As you may recall from my last email, there are only four people in my district, so that left everyone sick except me. We had to cancel class one of the days because I was the only one that could have gone. Now I'm locally famous for staying healthy when my whole district was dying. It occurred to me that I could be a doctor or something, if I'm this resistant to illness. That's the sort of thing that you can't learn in school. Too bad I'm not really interested in working in the medical field.

The Japanese is coming okay. I feel not I'm not learning very fast, but our teachers say that our district is learning it pretty quickly, so I guess that's good. I've also seen a few people that I know at the MTC. I've seen my cousin, Levi, from Georgia, a friend from my stake in Washington, and a sister that was in my mission prep class at BYU.

It's been pretty nice to be right next to the temple too. We've gotten to go both Wednesdays that I've been here. It's a really nice break from all of the language studying. I hope you're all doing well.

Love,

Elder Mitchell