Semana 14-Salta

¡Hola de Argentina!
Bowling was fine. They didn't care what shoes we wore and the whole thing was using a different piece of technology--the pins were attached to long, thin chains and the display screens were a little old-looking, but it worked so I'll take it.We're able to sing the hymns just fine. English and Spanish hymns don't literally translate between each other. Spanish kinda rewords and uses slightly different phrasing to give the same feeling to the text as you would feel if you sang it in English. The new missionaries are the only ones that really have the LDS bible right now. It's not the cheapest and easiest book to come around after all. It's nice, but the real meat is the Spanish Book of Mormon because the topical guide and bible dictionary in the English bible are taken out of the Spanish bible and combined into one 'Guia para Estudiar las Escrituras' in the back of the Spanish Book of Mormon.Things are going great with the trainer. He does most of the 'getting to know you' talking, and then hands me the teaching torch. I'm getting more and more involved as the days go by though. The toughest is just understanding the people--I can talk just fine. I either lack vocab or the people really don't speak well at all--one of the two causes me problems, but I'm working on it.
Mom's Email:Ouch, Drew drove to Tacoma?! At least I only have to walk 30 minutes to play my instrument!I loved the pictures! No snow though? That's too bad. Speaking of weather, you know how I said that it was blazing hot here? Yeah...the past week has taken a turn and mimicked common Seattle weather--cloudy, chilly (by Argentine standards of course ;) ), drizzly, and occasionally raining. It's kinda funky, but I'll go with it. The mini wheats pic was crazy! I think that was actually 9 on there, not 6. I took a picture of a mini-wheat chain of 4 before--it's hidden somewhere in my misc. pictures on the laptop. I liked the Creche pic too--good job with that! Good luck getting people there.That was a good idea to donate for Christmas! I was given a little quote this past week related to giving a gift to Jesus--I'll remember to bring it next week. The boxes were actually waiting for me when I got here. Nobody told me to pay anything though...so they were free for me at least.....it didn't look like anyone opened them up though.I'll definitely keep the piano going (I HATE playing the Christmas hymns...they had to be the most difficult out of all the hymns to play...) I don't think a choir would be quite feasible--95% of the members can't really sing :P
Well as for my past week, the big highlight was my first 2 baptismal dates! I hope our plans for the 2nd of January and the 16th of January follow through! We had zone conference this past week so I got to see President Northcutt and Hna. Northcutt again. I could only understand about 50% of the various talks given, but it was still nice. We had a wonderful lunch, a scripture chase competition between my zone and the other that was there with us, and we even acted out the nativity scene! Of course, I was on piano duty, playing EVERY SINGLE ONE of the Christmas songs......I think I may need to go write my own arrangements of the Christmas hymns so that I can stop trying to sight read all of them. This past Sunday, during the first few testimonies (which I had a tough time understanding anyways), I worked on writing out the chords to Angels We Have Heard on High in the hymn book so that I could somewhat-fake the closing hymn! We'll see...P-day was great today! We made peach pancakes for breakfast and then our zone went hiking with the other Salta zone and we got lots of great pictures. It was drizzling/raining the whole time, but we loved it!1 transfer down this next week, 14-or-so to go!Mucho Amor,-Elder Powell-