Jack - October 18

Chile is beautiful!!! It is so much better out of Santiago, which was still nice but you couldn´t see much because it was such a big city. It was a pretty nice city though, there were trees everywhere along the roads and there are plenty of parks that people actually go to, it was cool. But the Viña del Mar area is way way way better, there´s houses up and down the mountains and cities near the ocean it is so beautiful everywhere. My first area is in Valparaíso Placilla area or something. Luckily it´s not super far from the mission home like Coquimbo or something, so I didn´t have to ride a bus for four hours. Our house/pension thing is way better than I imagined because when we went proselyting in the CCM (MTC) I saw the pensions of the santiago oeste (west) mission and they were tiny appartments, I´ve got a cool cabin thing with some pretty rich members next door and a tennis court too! How weird, we haven´t used it yet though. My first day was pretty long, I´m hoping it´s kinda like when I arrived at the MTC and it starts to speed up because it was so long. My companion/trainer is Elder G and he seems great, he´s really excited for this transfer because apparently his last companion was doing a mini mission or something and didn´t want to work very hard. He´s very happy I´m his companion because of my excitement. There´s so much I want to do and help with but it´s hard when I only understand a little spanish and speak even less. Which is partially why the day felt so long. I had my first meal with a member yesterday... It was basically beans in bean juice with potatoes and some meat that I couldn´t cut because of all of the bean juice, so then after eating everything else the meat tasted like beans too. That and it was all very very filling. Then the member brought out a huge strawberry cake/pie thing, which wasn´t bad but so so filling. I ate everything though, it was hard but I did haha. We´ve got a lot of work to do in this area because of the last transfer there´s basically no investigators, I´ve heard my ward here is one of the biggest with a good 200 people or so, which should be good. I´m not exactly looking forward to looking for new investigators because I stink at contacting, I prefer teaching lessons. My first day after dropping stuff off we went to a Family Home Evening with a recent convert family and it was fun, that I could understand and I even contributed to the discussion so that was fun, they´re a nice family. I´m glad to be out of the MTC but now it´s all just kinda overwhelming all over again, I hope I get used to it and learn quickly. I hope everyone back home had a good week!

Elder Blaylock