Dear Mom and others who will be reading this,

At gym when I run, there is a track on the top floor of the building, so I just run around that.  It's kinda hard because sometimes it's really crowded so I have to weave in and out between people.  It kinda turns into a game.

I've gotten to be real good friends with most people in my district.  I think me and my companion from France get along really well.  If we could speak the same language, it'd be even better.  We draw pictures on the chalk board every now and then, and they usually end up being pretty epic.

Albanian is coming along pretty well.  I've been trying to memorize 20 words a day, and I've been successful almost every day.  We have district goals, but for a while it didn't seem like anybody was real serious about it.  I think that's starting to change though.  Our goals for vocabulary has decreased for this week from learning at least 15 words to learning 10 words from a certain category.  Half the words that we put up to learn as a district are either obvious or I already have learned them at some point, so I often just find my own words.

Yesterday, my team lost a vocab game in class, so we all had to do a door approach.  We only lost the game by 1 point, so it wasn't too bad.  But I felt really good about it afterwards.  I felt like I could say almost everything I wanted to say, so it was great.

Me and this Hungarian Elder from France have this kind of rivalry in 4-square during gym.  It's really fun.  He's merciless when he goes against his companions though.  That is fun to watch as well.

Today we went to the temple again, and we missed the session we are assigned to again.  So we were 15 minutes late for lunch.  This isn't really a big deal to me, but a couple other guys in my district really want this to change.

Pretty much this whole week was more MTC.  Every week has basically been the same.  Learning gospel, learning language, gym, meals, sleep.  And we hear some pretty fun stories from one of our teachers.

We're starting to be able to say some useful phrases in Albanian as well.  Me duhet te shkoj ne banje = I need to go to the bathroom.  All the 'e's except the one in "duhet" in that sentence needs to have 2 dots above them, which makes it mean the sentence I said it means.  Otherwise, it probably doesn't make sense.

I haven't run into any Belgian missionaries yet, but a sister in my district speaks German.  We haven't tried communication with that yet.  Mostly because I think we're busy learning Albanian.  Oh yeah, and I decided today that after my mission, I want to learn Arabic.  That looks cool.  Or Japanese.  That would be cool and probably more helpful.

Anyways, have good times at home, and I'll do MTC-type stuff here.

Love,
Elder "Thunderhorse" Wallentine

Note: Thunderhorse is a self-proclaimed nickname that nobody calls me.