August 26, 2014

Thank you everyone for all the emails! Please forgive me for the terrible grammar and spelling I am about to have but when they only give us an hour to write it is not nearly enough time to say everything I want to say! After we wrote last week we got to go to the santiago temple which was realllly cool! It is a very small temple but we fit at least 50 missionaries in one session. Since most of us spoke english it was in english and the spanish speakers wore headsets. We get to go to the temple every other week so maybe next weeek I will try listening to it in spanish!

Everything is absolutely incredible here, in fact I don't even dislike the CCM, or the MTC in english, its hard but I enjoy it and the people around me! It is crazy to think that tomorrow new kids will be showing up. That was me two weeks ago. Those two weeks went by incredibly fast, these next four will only go faster!

A couple kids have gotten sick in our district but nothing terrible, I had a sore throat and a runny nose for two or three days but that was all. Elder Wortley got pink eye and lost his voice but that was the worst anybody was. Other than that I am in perfect condition!

One of my favorite parts of the day is running in the morning, its soo fun!! We can run in any direction and as far as we want, we have to be back within 40 minutes but usually we dont run for that long. My comp Elder Nelson and I go really far and so far have gone in every direction! Thats one thing I really like about him is that he likes running and is okay with going somewhere new everyday which is good cause I could not run the same way everytime that we be too boring. We ran to the tallest tower in Santiago which isnt too far but it is one of our farther runs! The tower was HUGE and there is a massive mall right at the base of it that has like 6 stories its crazy.

The food is actually really good! At least I have thought so. The bread is super yummy, i don't know how they make it but they don't cook it until it is hard so it is still really soft. Our meals consist of rice, or pasta, or patatoes, then some sort of variety of meat or meat and sauce or meat and vegetables or all of those at the same time. They really take care of us and I have eaten sooo much! The thing about the food here is that it doesn't have a burst of flavor everything is just kinda toned down. The desserts aren't all that good. They are usually some sort of weird pudding. My favorite thing though is Manjar, go get some of that stuff from maceys in the mexican section, its like a dulce de leche spread kind of thing! At least in Argentina they call it dulce de leche but here its called Manjar and they sell it in the states. One other thing is that the Chileans like to eat cereal with yogurt whether it is fruity or vanilla and its actuallly pretty good cause yogurt is basically liquid here.

It snowed in the mountians this week and it made them look absolutely beautiful. I can't wait to get out of the city to see them! I took some pictures from the roof of the CCM and I will send them. And don't worry there is an elevator to the roof with a room up there and a couch so it wasn't illegal or anything for us all to be up there! Haha

We have some awesome teachers that have helped so much the last couple of weeks. We have Hermana Ceballos, Hermano Leiva, and Hermano Cifuentes. Hermana means sister and Hermano means brother. How you would pronounce Ceballos is like this: Say-bye-os. Cause its a spanish name!

We got to experience our first earth quake this week which was crazy weird but very cool to feel. It started off by sounding like there were tons of people running on the floor above us then there was this rumble and then we all started moving up and down then sideways and up again then we slowly started to stop moving! It was weird and nothing happened but now I can say i was in an earthquake!

Until next week love,

Elder Gunnell

August 19, 2014

 Almost all the missionaries at the Atlanta airport.

  my view from the plane when we were almost to chile, you can see the mountains and the ocean

  One of what my desk looks like alllllll day long, so many books/dictionary/lesson manuals/etc.and notes that are always in use

 Elder Nelsen and I in front of the Santiago Temple.

 Me and my companion, Elder Nelsen in front of the place we are staying at called the

The Santiago Temple where we get to go tomorrow.

Wow it feels like forever since I said bye to all of you. That day at the airport definitely did not happen last week. Chile is crazy. The flight was even crazier. Mom and dad I really don´t think you are going to want to fly down here and stay a week to pick me up then do that flight a week later. If I was ever to think about coming home I wouldn´t do it just because the flight was sooo long!! But don´t worry I´m not coming home for two more years! So the blog thing isn´t gonna work cause we can only be on ldsmail for now but maybe i could do it out in the field! Thank you all for the emails and letting me know how things are! I was surprised about how many I got, thank you!!

I´ll start with the airport and try to tell you as much as I can in this short hour I have to write. Once I got to the terminal in the slc airport there was at least 30 missionaries going to Atlanta all together. There was just like a herd of us so that was cool getting to know all of them and talk  about background stuff! The flight there was really fun because it was only 4 hours and I sat by a missionary going to Brazil and a college student and we were all able to have a good conversation for most the flight and it went by fast! Once we were at the Atlanta airport all the missionaries went to different terminals cause they were going to different places in the world but when we got to the terminal for Chile there was like 20 more missionaries all headed to Chile(there was like 13 of us from slc) and these kids were all from different parts of the country so we all ate and got to know each other! Then the flight wasn´t even fun. Then we got to Chile and wow..... It is absolutely beautiful!! There are soo many mountains every where and Santiago is HUGE there are so many buildings and people! It was a whole new world! Everything was in Spanish haha so that was funny cause none of us could read it! It was a little colder than I thought it would be but it feels pretty nice and this is the coldest part of the year it turns out.

So because there are so many missionaries here in Chile the MTC or the CCM as it is called in Spanish is too full so the church has this house like right outside downtown Chile that use to be a swiss embassy so it´s a massive house and fits like 40 or more of us! All we do there is sleep, eat breakfast, run, and get ready. Then we take two shuttle vans to the CCM which is like 5 minutes away and it is right next to the temple which we get to go do today!

My favorite part of the day is from when we wake up (at 6:45 which is soooo nice!) Until we eat lunch around 1. Everyone morning some of us go running and we can run wherever we want. So the first couple of days we ran with kids who have been here for awhile and kinda got a feel for the city but today my companion and I just ran deeper into the city and around a little bit then back! It is such a cool city with so many neat things to look at and experience. It will be muchas mejor (much better) when I can speak spanish because I am absolutely terrible at it. I know it´s only a couple of days in but it is HARD for me. Most the kids here took like 4 years of spanish and can remember most of it and use it somewhat decent. I can´t remember any of the verbs I once knew or anything. It is really frustrating because when I do know how to say something it takes me like a year to figure out how to say it and by the time I´ve figured it out, we are already way past that conversation. 

We haven´t really had any learning classes either. We focus on learning the vocab for teaching lessons for the investigators (our teachers who pretend to be investigators) that we have. And yes, we are already teaching lessons to them in spanish, to three seperate investigators. And I can´t speak spanish. My companion is some sort of genius though, he knows spanish like the back of his hand almost. So he does most the teaching and then when I attempt to say something he just finishes my sentence for me because he hates how long I take. He got like a 34 on his ACT so my brain capacity doesn´t really match his with anything.  I try to speak spanish as much as I can but whenever I am working through a sentence or something and trying to challenge myself to figure it out he just tells me the rest of it and I´m just like Elder! I wanted to figure that out, punk. And he just kinda looks at me. Don´t get me wrong though cause I really do like him! Haha

The CCM or MTC just consists of sitting in a white room from 10 am to 9:45 pm with no windows. The teachers all speak in spanish and we are supposed to answer in spanish. I hardly ever understand what they are saying or how to answer them! I mean it isn´t just strictly spanish but a lot of it is. It is really hard for me but the Lord has asked me to do it and he will provided a way so some how I will understand this language eventually! I can actually pray and testify ( a little) in spanish which is pretty cool!

Sunday was a really good day because it´s just the gospel and it gets you spiritually pumped for the next week cause you are so tired from the previous days so it was actually one of my favorite days! Then today we had two hours to do whatever we wanted so we wandered around the streets of Santiago and bought some snacks and a muffin from a cafe and just things like that! 

Please keep letting me know how everything is! Don't let Drey forget about me and thank all the kids for the letters they gave me!