Tuesday June 24, 2008

Hey family from your letters it sounds like you are all doing great. I am glad Ian and alyssa had a good time at swim camp worked hard and made some friends, that would be cool if they got to meet up with them next year and do it again. I got pictures of Ian Alyssa Kamille Nick and Jake bowling thats fun that they were all able to meet up and go bowling together, haha sounds like ian was close to having a perfect game.

In the new district in our zone there is a friend of mine from home Jacob Brimhall which is cool, he was in mine and nicks efy group our last year and he also swam butterfly for gilbert it was nice to be able to talk to him. An old room mate of mine from summer semester is in the MTC right now Mike Collard he is headed off to north carolina it was fun to talk for a little bit about last summer.

So Brother Ruda who is the head instructer of like our floor of language classes is from the Czech republic and he was telling us all about the Christmas Traditions the Czechs have, Christmas is 3 days over there and it is non stop eating and hanging out with family and lots of traditions, he says everybody goes to Christmas Eve mass, Catholics mormons protestants just because its tradition he says he took the missionaries with him a couple of times, the christmas season starts off december 8th which is like angels and devils day and there are people dressed up as either angels or devils running around, it was really cool to learn more about where we were going and got us pretty excited to get over there.

Grandma J was asking a little bit about how they teach us, we are in the class room for probably about 12 hours a day learning as part of that we have an hour of personal study, an hour of companionship study and then an hour of language study where we can do whatever we want with the language. The rest of the time we usually have teachers who are teaching us different language principles and stuff from PMG (Preach My Gospel) which is cool. Our first week was 50% language 50% gospel and every week we increase the language i think for our last 2 weeks it is like 80% language and 20% gospel.

So i played some soccer this week for the first time which was pretty fun it has definitely been awhile since i have played but i figure since im going to europe i should catch up on it. The Czechs are crazy about Futbol and Hockey and I guess for the size of their country they actually have a pretty good soccer team.

Thank you all for the many packages and letters and i did recieve the camera chip back you are awesome I am very lucky to have such good family and friends. I was in the RC yesterday and the sweetest little girl called up, Tashia was her name and she was from the south. She is 10 years old and called in for a free bible, I asked her why she was calling and she said she wanted her and her dad to have a bible so they could learn more about Jesus together and she had the cutest little southern accent it was a really good experience. The mission presidents are all here we actually did a teaching demonstration for one set yesterday.

It sounds like Jenni and Mason are having a good time down in southern Texas assisting the 4th years and hanging out at the beach as well thanks for the current events you two. It sounds like it has been very hot down in Arizona that will be nice for Grandma and Alyssa to go up to the Cabin and get out of the heat. Something they told us in Gym was that 4 square is one of the most injury prone activities at the MTC which i thought was pretty funny they get pretty intense out there.

I was reading in Jesus the Christ this week and found something that I thought was pretty good and would recommend people to read, it is on page 247 and is entitled Pleasure Vs Happiness and it does a really good job of differentiating between the two. Your talk was really good dad i enjoyed it I'm sure the Youth all liked it as well it was a really good analogy about our life plan.

This last week in the TRC we were able to talk to people about how school and work were going and what they liked to do for fun and hobbies slowly but surely we keep on learning more. We have a great district and all get along great and help each other out. Something that is funny is how things translate over into czech and its good we have teachers here to help us out the other day i said ja jsem horko which the direct translation means i am hot but in czech it means i am gay haha good thing i found that one out, what you are supposed to say is i have myself hot, another funny one is that the song Jesus Savior Pilot Me, In Czech it is Jesus Steer My Boat. I am almost out of time i will be sending letters out to you and I'm going to send a camera chip and try and tell you who is in what picture, i hope you all have a great week and i love you all very much, remember the Church is True and always do what is right.
Love
Jordan