AHHHHHHH!

Hotel in Manila 

View from hotel window

View from MTC window

Patrick's room

Local store?? Looks like they have familiar things... The Elder in front is Patrick's companion

Where to begin? I love the MTC! There is SO much to do here! The food is like crazy weird.. I had a  whole fish yesterday and there is so much rice with every meal... like half of my plate. it's insane. The classes are way long. Like 16 hour days and such. We've already had four teaching appointments with a guy named Jayson and they have gone well! He only speaks Tagalog but we got him to commit to baptism! Teaching in Tagalog is really difficult but it is crazy how far we've come in a week. All of our favorite words is Mabuti (Pronounced Mah-boot-ee). See if you can figure out why.. It means "good" so we're always like "Dude this dinner is mabuti." The other missionaries are really cool! We get along really well as a district, which is the Alma district. We don't have TOO much time to bond because they keep us so busy, but that's ok. Keeps my mind off of missing everyone, ya know? I really love the little toys you guys packed for me. They are such a relief when I've had a stressful day and everything and I can just chill with a yo-yo or something. Ok, I'm sorry this is so rushed. There's just a lot I wanna go over! Let me slow down. 

My companion is Elder Lindley and he's a really cool guy. We have quiet moments but we have the relationship where that is totally fine. The rooms are for six people but we only have four, thankfully. Our two roommates are both Filipino which is really nice for all of our questions about the language. 

They keep us really busy, like I said, with language classes, preach my gospel classes, and just teaching practices. They really challenge us with difficult situations and leave us to figure it out on our own. Like the investigator we are starting with today hates God, is recently divorced, and his son died two months ago. It'll be challenging but I have faith (Pananampalataya sa Tagalog) that we will be able to teach him well. 

We get gym time every day but I definitely forgot athletic shoes at home... so I wear my flip flops and play ping pong for an hour every day. I ordered some new ones for like 500 pesos, which is about 12 bucks and I think they may actually be here today! The food, like I said, is funky. The cheese really does all taste like easy cheese and the milk is most definitely powdered. You can't even imagine how much rice I eat. All in all though, the food is delicious. 

My jet lag is gone now. It was actually gone after the first couple days! Doing good! Eating, sleeping, and praying a lot! You can definitely see the Lord's hand in everything once you are in the right mindset. There are so many questions that I've answered from our investigator that I have no idea how I understood him or even remember how and what I said to answer. The Spirit helps in every lesson. We watched General Conference again last week! They get it a week later here so we had another ten hours of sitting in really uncomfortable chairs listening to Conference. I got so much more out of it though. It was really cool. 

Hmmmmm. I'm really not sure what else to talk about. Everything is good! I'm happy and so is everyone else! Oh! We had this like stress mangagement class that was really needed. My whole district was really down in the pits about the third day just with having to learn the language and everything like that, but this class lifted our spirits luckily! Not much else to say.. Enjoy the pictures!
 I love you all.   

Elder Krueger                  

 P.S. I can not tell you how many times people have asked if Taggart and I are brothers. Gotta explain the same last name but no relation haha it's fun.