Received Mon Oct 13 2008

I'm finally in Galveston!!! We are staying in that condo with the senior missionaries...it is reeally nice. Me and Elder Nielson get the master suite because we have to put our desks in there to study. It is a really big condo and its new too. I took some picture of it. I think I'm just going to go to a walgreens or something to print out a lot of my pictures and send them home. Our schedule has been pretty much the same this last week. We work in the mornings until like 2 or 3 then come back to our apartments to proselyte for the second half of the day. A lot of people still arent back on Galveston yet so we dont have a ton of people to visit, so the half days have been working well. On Saturday we did have a full normal missionary day though. It was pretty good, but not a single person was home that we visited until like 5pm. We OYMed a lot of people at a washateria. (OYM = Open Your Mouth. Thats were you walk up to random people in the streets and talk to them. Tracting is when you go from house to house knocking on doors). So we did find a few potential investigators. We are also teaching one hispanic guy named Germán. Hes actually really smart and he is picking up on everything we teach him. Elder Nielson has been teaching him for a few months. His only problem is that he is living with his girlfriend, which is stupid because he tells us she always goes out and cheats on him. Thats even more awkward because he tells us when his girlfriend is sitting right there beside him. I guess thats not too weird in their culture. Another of our investigators is named Janaki. She is from India and she is Hindu. Shes definitely a very interesting person. Elder Nielson has been teaching her for a couple months too. She wanted to take our picture before we started our lesson because she is going to go back to India to visit her family in November and she wants to show all of her friends the missionaries that always visit her. She also invited us to come with her to India and she promised us she could provide us protection because the US Embassy is near where she lives. We told her we couldnt leave our area and she was disappointed. She also asked for like 5-6 Books of Mormon in her native language so she could give them to her friends. Shes a pretty good investigator...shes already spreading the gospel to people in other countries. The weirdest thing is that she believes everything we teach her, but she also believes her Hindu religion. We asked her if she believed the story of Adam and Eve and she was like, well yes of course! She understands how God blesses you for following the commandments and everything too. She goes to her Hindu church every Friday still though. She says that she believes everything we teach her and that she goes to her Hindu church to preserve her culture because that is something she never wants to lose. She's a pretty funny person. She says the word "evidentally" in just about every other sentence. She gave us some Indian bread too before we left, that was pretty good. She also told us she wants us to visit her for the rest of her life. I guess thats why we have home teachers!Oh yeah, I remebered I totally forgot to tell you last week that we had a Temple Zone Conference. For zone conference we got to go the temple in Houston! It was awesome. We go to a session in the morning, then have a 2 hour conference afterwards. It was really nice to be able to go back to the temple again.I also finally got that box with the trenchcoat and helmet delivered to me. Its a really nice trenchcoat...it will be good for when it gets really cold. That lighter raincoat that you sent me a picture of will be really good to have too. It has only rained one time since I have been here too, which is really unusual apparently. The weather has been pretty much perfect every day. Because of the lack of rain, the humidity hasnt been very bad at all either.I've been able to start biking more now because we proselyte at night time and I love it. We ride down along the sea wall so there is a cool ocean breeze that blows against you and you ride right along the ocean. Have I explained the sea wall to you before? The whole side of the island has been lifted up like 17 feet, so in order to get down to the beach you take these stairs to get down to the water. They did this to prevent flooding. So the sea wall is a big wide pathway that goes along hte ocean. There is a street that goes along the sea wall too...it is called Sea Wall blvd. So its nice to ride, and like how I explained last time it is really easy.One neat experience that I got to have was during service some guy in charge needed some Spanish speakers to help translate so he could communicate with a hispanic guy who neededed help with his house. Me and Elder Nielson got to go do it because Elder Nielson is one of the Elders to speaks Spanish the best. I actually did some of the translating too...it was really really cool. Another good experience was when we were doing service at another Spanish members home, so of course we were speaking Spanish to each other the whole time. Then when I was taking something outside, I was talking Spanish with one of the people there and one of the neighbors walked up to me and was like "Do any of you here speak English?" That made me pretty happy.I'm not going to be able to write a hand-written letter today so I'm going to give you my little informational tidbit about the island here. I think I'm going to keep doing this as I learn more about this place. I find all these things interesting, and I think it helps paint a picture in your mind about where I'm serving. So Galveston is mostly made up of two main groups. One group are young people who are going to the UTMB hospital for their doctoral residence or whatever its called. (I dont know if I told you, but the UTMB, University of Texas Medical Branch, hospital place is on the island) These people make up a lot of the Galveston ward. There are UTMB students and workers all over the island. The other group are the business owners. There are a lot of tourists here so people set up stores all over the place. The island definitely is not very wealthy. I doubt theres a single house here that was made after 1950. The only large houses are these big huge houses that were made in the late 1800's so they are really old. I took a picture of one of them...a recent convert lives in one of them. All the other houses are small and old. A lot of them are more like shacks. But they have recently closed down all the projects. That is most likely because a lot of the people who live there are the ones that do the looting. So they exported all of those people out of the island. They also have set a curfew is one portion of the city, which happens to be the poorest/ghetto part of the island. Nobody is allowed to be outside in that area past 10pm.I STILL havent had a normal meeting here in Galveston. Yesterday we had stake conference. It was really good. The Houston temple presidents live in this stake and they spoke for a few minutes. The main theme was service. They encouraged everyone to help each other out. One speaker made an analogy to bees. He said we all need to be more like bees. Not only are they always busy and doing something, but they always work together. A bee cannot exist alone, it always depends on its colony. I also found out that I think every choir has at least one overzealous singer, like the lady with the big red wig in our ward. The one in this choir was hilarious. She belted out those high notes...I still have problems holding the laughs down when I hear people like that sing.Ooo...I also learned one more thing this week. Remember how I told you how people always say Im fixin to do something? Well I just heard the ebonics form of that. Its, I'm fi'in to. It sounds more like "Im fin da eat some food" or something like that. It took me a second to catch on. I'm gonna be trilingual by the time I come back home...I'll know Spanish, English, and Ebonics.Hmm...well in other news we found out that we are going to do full time normal missionary work this whole week! President Allred is going to continue rotating through the mission and sending districts to come help with service each day, but our district is going to put a hold on service for now and start workin our areas. I'm way excited. This week is going to be awesome. It will definitely be hard though, because I know not a lot of people are home right now and their houses are unlivable.I remember one more thing I think I forgot to tell you. Remember how we walked into Sister Boone's (MTC pres's wife) and asked her if we could sing Army of Helaman? Well that happened our last week in the MTC when President Uchtdorf came to speak. They even got permission to change the words "And we will be the Lord's missionaries" to "And we are now the Lord's missionaries." It was awesome...I think every person there was singing. It was cool to know that we got to do that because of us asking. I guess learned that from Mom...you'll never know if you can get something until you ask for it.Today for P-day we went to Moody Gardens. Its this place that has a big aquarium, some rainforest place, a hotel, and a bunch of other stuff. We went to the aquarium...it was pretty cool. I couldnt take many good pictures though...camera's dont shoot through glass very well, especially when its dark. I'm also going to go get a well-needed haircut.Well, I'm going to fill out this registration ballot. Ohhhh yeah, Mom the address you have is wrong. That is the old apartment which is now ruined. I think the new address is 500 Ferry, #322. You should call in and get the new address. It should be something very similar to that. Ok I think that's just about it! I love you all and I'll talk to you later!!Love, Chase