Hey Family,

The first lesson went pretty good.  I was able to say a lot of what I wanted to say, probably not as fast as I'd like to say it, but I was able to say it.  This week we teach the second lesson in Albanian along with the word of wisdom.  So not only do we have to learn how to teach it in Albanian, but we have to know how to incorporate the word of wisdom into it also.

I just recently found out that today was our last day to go to the temple and not last week.  So that was a nice surprise.  I'm going to miss going on a weekly basis.

Make sure Caleb knows I wish him a happy birthday.  That's great that you all got to go caroling.  I heard that in Albania, since most of the population is Muslim, they just skip Christmas, but incorporate all the traditions of Christmas into new years.  Our teacher said that they even have wreathes that say "Merry Christmas" on them, and they say they are New Years decorations.  They have New Years trees, too.

I just found out recently that I don't get to call home from the MTC on Christmas.  I heard that we get time to write letters home though.  I heard that our branch president said that we can call home in the airport or something, but I don't really know too much about that.

I just got a letter back from Elder Langston today, so that means that the letter I sent was able to reach him.  That's good, because that probably means my other letters got to my other friends in South America.  I also wrote a letter to former roommate Elder Logan Walker last week, and I got a response yesterday that was dated for Monday.  So I assume that writing somebody in the MTC only takes a day to get to the person if I am also in the MTC.  But since we both only have 1 preparation day per week, it doesn't do us too much good.

I'm not sure if there's much else that happened this past week that hasn't happened every other week.  I'm getting along with my companions pretty good, and Albanian is going pretty well.  Anyways, if anybody back at home wants to learn some specific sentence or something, go ahead and have them throw that into the email and I'll try translating it.

I thought I had finished translating "If You Could Hie to Kolob" into Albanian, but when I had my teacher look at it, he said that it was a start and that I had quite a few errors.  So I redid the first verse and had him look it over again, and he told me how I could fix it, and so I fixed it again.  I will show him tomorrow, and hopefully it is good.

Oh yeah, I recently found out that in the gym, there are a list of records for like the mile, pushups, and other things, and I decided to shoot for one of them.  This week, I started doing workouts that should help me break the mile record.  I am going to go for it in probably 2 weeks from yesterday.  I was thinking maybe I'd like to go for the pushups record too.  I don't know what the pushups record is, but yesterday I was able to do 45.  I'm going to check tomorrow and see how reasonable that is.

Well, I think that's all I have for now.  I'll write next week.  Keep things going good at home.

Love,
Elder Wallentine