Tomas Update: Week 4 at the MTC

Here’s the latest from Tomas:

Hey everyone! I hope you’ve all been doing well. Things are still all good here, although this week a lot of our friends left since they were learning languages that were less than 7 weeks here. So we no longer have any Norwegian, Swedish, or Spanish speakers on our floor – it’s so quiet. I’m glad I could meet them and wish them all the best out there, but it’s just not the same anymore. I just have 3 ish weeks left here though! I can’t wait to actually be out there in Slovakia. We teach practice lessons with a missionary who has come home from Slovakia, where she pretends to not know anything, and each one is better than the last. This most recent one we gave her a Kniha Mormonova…and then had to ask for it back because we needed it and she definitely already has one. Then again, that lesson I accidentally referred to God as “Bob,” since I confused the words God and Boh (Slovak for God). She thought that was really funny, but managed to keep her composure until we explained what had happened in Slovak. 

We play a lot of sand volleyball. Pretty much every day, since we have an hour a day to exercise (or two on Wednesdays!). No one else has been able to take on the devastating combo of the Czech/Slovak and Finnish elders to the point where other districts of missionaries have heard of us and are afraid to play us. It’s raining today, though, so I think we don’t have much time left outside before it’s too cold or covered in snow. Last week we played in the light rain and it was SO cold, but also very worth it. 

There are a couple of running pranks here, but I think the best one is what happens to new zone leaders (that’s the word for people in charge of essentially the residence floor, kinda like a college RA). Since January of this year, there has been a collection of empty cans passed down from zone leader to zone leader, but the way in which it’s passed down is by dumping them all on the floor of the new zone leaders’ room. When we got here, the current zone leaders had around 250 cans. In like three or four weeks, the floor collectively doubled that to almost 500 – many hands make light work. But we also had to figure out how to get into the room, since they knew it was coming and had secret knocks and everything. We just had our biggest guy bust into the room in a brief window and then all ran in – sometimes simple is best. Then we helped them restack all the cans on top of a closet again, prepared to add another 250 before we leave.

Halloween also happened like a few days ago! I say “happened” because really not much was different. One of the elders in our district got a witch

 warlock hat in the mail, and I wore two ties and two tags because my costume was two elders. Then we did a little bit of trick or treating, but no one really has a lot of candy here or anything. It was fun though.

Okay, I think that’s about it for this week. Crazy to think that I’ve already been here for like a month, and soon I’ll actually be in Slovakia. Still having a great time here, although I miss you all, and I can’t wait to share what I do next week as well.

Love you all,

Tomas

Pictures:

500 cans on the floor

Me, in full costume

“Food”

The last picture of the whole floor

A monkey I drew

Our little trick or treaters

The fabled triple layer drink

Us watching the BYU game out the window 

Master Chief visits the MTC cafeteria

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