Week 2... Officially the Middle Batch!

 Roomies

 Views from MTC

 Manila Temple

 The two Krueger's!

 Travel buddies

 He hasn't lost his personality... thank heavens!

View of city at night

Hi Everyone! 

It's really hard to read through those emails and answer all the questions, so I'm just gonna write what I was planning and hope I cover a bunch of them! I love hearing from everyone though! So this week I actually have an outline so hopefully I won't be as scattered. 

First thing first I STILL don't have athletic shoes! The sizes are so screwed up because they're either fakes or replicas. Ha ha! Some even have the wrong logos! So hopefully I'll get some like tomorrow. I was also talking to our Filipino roommates and they were saying that I could get a good handmade guitar here for one to two thousand pesos!!! That's like 25-50 bucks!!! So cheap it is crazy! Not like the food though... Anything that is American at the supermarket is so expensive! Like at least 5 times more expensive than Filipino brands that taste exactly the same. Needless to say I don't buy anything American there. Stick with my Jack-n-Jill brand chips and such. Another cool thing to get here are these PAT rings. It's weird that it works out like this, but PAT is the Filipino CTR. So I now am getting a PAT ring with my mission and name engraved on it! 

Oh, I actually have a question to ask you guys! Someone sent me some flip flops and I have no idea who it was. Gotta figure this out! 

We have a lot of devotional type stuff here and one was this video of Elder Holland that he gave last year and it was INCREDIBLE! That guy can speak! So uplifting and, at times, even scary. He called us missionaries "lower case 'a' apostles" which was good for some laughs, but it made us all realize just how important this work really is. I'm so excited to be here and to be doing this work. We've been told that China, as well as the rest of Asia, is really reliant on the work we do here. The Philippines is the stepping stone. This work is so important for the church. 

The language is coming well too! My teacher is impressed with my progress and says I notice intricacies in the language that no one else does, not even her. It usually takes like 3 or 4 teachers collaborating to answer any question I have. Ha ha oops. But I really do love the language! It is really cool sounding. I also really like my District. They are really cool guys. Me and my kasama (companion) Elder Lindley get along really well too. We are really good team teachers. We play this game in our district called "What if?" where you all write a question on a piece of paper and then switch papers and write the answer on the back to whatever new paper you have. After that you mix them up again and the first person reads their question and the next person reads their answer and you just keep going around. It get's really funny cause the answers don't usually match up quite right and you get some hilarious results! 

The food here is good too. Every two weeks we get burgers, pizza, and spaghetti, which is all incredible. It was nice to take a break from the plain white rice being 75% of my diet. And I haven't really gained too much weight. I don't really know though. My pants shrunk a bit and they still fit fine, so I'm assuming I'm the same. I do work out every day though. Me and E. Lindley have a routine for each night, so that helps us out a ton. 

It's also true what they say about Filipino men and American women. They LOVE American women. I showed my roommates some pictures of like Xan and Audrey and everyone else in that picture book and they were like, "She's your girlfriend!? WOWWWW!!" or like "American women are so beautiful!!!" They liked Audrey too ha ha and I was like, "Yaaaaaa.. She's 14." But everyone has some admirers here! Those roommates are gone now though :( They were only 12 day MTC guys, but we got a new batch today! We are officially the middle batch! The greenies are pretty cool and me and my kasama got some more Filipinos for roommates and they're super sweet guys. We were gonna tell the new guys that the word for companion was asawa instead of kasama. Asawa means spouse ha ha but we had mercy on them as they looked pretty shell shocked. 

I guess the only other thing that happened is that after the two Filipino missionaries left it was only me and my kasama in our room. So we obviously had to turn two of the three bunk beds in our room around to make two GIANT beds! I call them the Super Beds and now everybody knows what they are. It was nice for a couple nights but now we have six people in our room so it's back to a single bunk.. Oh well. It was good while it lasted. 

I'm having a blast here and it is so much fun! I love you all!

Elder Krueger