Hola hola hola!
I'd say there were three highlights from this week:
1. Hermana Johnson is now practically a senior citizen
because she turned TWENTY
2. Feria de San
Miguel
3. GENERAL
CONFERENCE!
Let's get into it:
1. Hermana Johnson had her birthday on Tuesday! Holly decorated a birthday tree for her companion.
Their daughter Karen and her three crazy
little kids were there, and so was Karen's husband. Karen is a less-active
member and her husband isn't a member of the church, so it was super awesome to
get to spend time with them not only because their family is just so crazy but
also because we got to share a message with them which was really special.
After we ate dinner, Norma came out with this super cool
Argentinian cake, and Norma, Ramon, and Karen started singing happy birthday to
Hermana Johnson IN ENGLISH! These are three people who really don't speak
English, at all, so at first, we weren't even sure what language they were
singing but then we realized it was English and it was the cutest thing ever!
Then they sang it again, in Spanish, and then sang ANOTHER Spanish birthday
song and were started on their fourth song when Karen decided Hermana Johnson
had probably had enough. I guess they weren't sure how old Hermana Johnson was
turning, because the cake had one of those candles that can be like a number,
but instead of being a number or having a 2 candle and a 0 candle, they just
had a question mark candle! Pretty sneaky... They also made these bon bons that
are also Argentinian and we've been eating leftover cake and bon bons all week.
But the funny thing is, the Argentina candy they gave us a few weeks ago, the
cake, and the bon bons all had kind of similar flavors... so I guess you could
say we know what Argentina tastes like now. It tastes REALLY GOOD.
2. Feria de San Miguel
So what we're pretty sure of is that every city in Spain has
its saint. By pretty sure, I mean like 30% sure. What we're more sure of is
that Torremolinos' (did I put the apostrophe in the right place? Who knows, who
cares) saint is San Miguel, like the archangel Michael. For weeks, Torremolinos
has been decked out for some big fair about San Miguel, and it finally happened
this week! Every time we walked past the city center this week, we saw
something new: a massive dish of paella, a concert, a party, and ALWAYS tons of
women wearing flamenco dresses and massive flowers in their hair.
We went over to Arlessa's piso on Friday night, and when we
left and went in the direction of Amparo's piso afterwards, we got trapped in a
massive crowd of people all along the street for a few minutes. There was some
sort of procession happening that involved, como siempre, a ton of people in
flamenco dresses, but also a lot of army people twirling guns, some sort of
military trumpet marching band, and a group of people carrying a massive statue
of San Miguel! Pretty cool. When the trumpet people started playing, all the
people in the crowd around us started singing some song, which was...
interesting, and very confusing. So that was a kind of fun, random thing that
we literally ran into on the street. Then the procession passed, the people
spread out a little, and we were able to get by. Spain is fun.
3. General Conference!
Every 6 months, the leaders of the church, like the prophet,
the members of the quorum of the 12 apostles, and other leaders speak in a
worldwide church broadcast called General conference. They speak on whatever
topics they feel the church members need to hear and it's super cool! It's
broadcast from a huge building in Salt Lake City called the conference center,
so there are about 20,000 (I think?) people there and the rest watch via
satellite. There are 6 meetings (sessions), about 2 hours each: one the weekend
before for women, one on Saturday morning, one Saturday afternoon, one Saturday
night for the men, and then one on Sunday morning and one on Sunday afternoon.
There's an 8-hour time difference between Utah and Spain, so it makes watching
general conference a little tricky (claro). Since there were some technical
difficulties at the church, we downloaded the talks from the women's session and
have been watching them at night, just one at a time. But we got the wifi fixed
so that we were able to watch the Saturday morning session at 6pm here, which
meant it was live--which was cool, except a little weird when the session ended
and we walked outside and it was night. We set up the sessions in English in a
classroom so it was pretty much just the members watching in Spanish in the
chapel and a room of missionaries watching in English. It's fun being so close
to Málaga, because there are a LOT of missionaries who live close. There were
probably 8 or 9 sets of missionaries at the church to watch conference.
Then on Sunday we watched the recorded Saturday afternoon
session in English. Lorenzo, our investigator, came to the church to watch the
Sunday morning session live at 6pm, so we watched that later session in Spanish
with him. I got the majority of what the speakers were saying, except by the
last talk I think Hermana Johnson and I were both kind of mentally exhausted
from almost 2 straight hours of just listening to people speak Spanish, so we
re-watched that last talk in English afterwards. Lorenzo really liked
conference! He was impressed with the choir (apparently, he really likes to
sing) and told us he wants to be at the conference center in Utah for the next
general conference. We want him to be there too! We taught him the Word of
Wisdom (a health standard revealed through the prophet Joseph Smith) last week,
and when we asked him on Sunday how it was going, he said he's stopped drinking
alcohol and tea completely and gone from drinking three coffees a day to one.
We're really excited for him! Hopefully we'll get a chance to meet with him
this week. Hermana Johnson and I are watching the recorded Sunday afternoon
session of conference today at the church.
Another thing from watching conference in Spanish: we
English speakers don't realize how lucky we are! Yes, they translate the talks
(it's a translator's voice over the speaker's voice), but they don't translate
the words on the screen (186th (?) semi(?)annual general conference, first
counselor, first presidency, cosas así) from English, and the choir sings in
English! The words thing was kind of a surprise, but the choir really shouldn't
have been. But it's still just weird to think about the people who don't speak
English, and so they don't get as much out of the musical numbers or the names
on the screen and they don't even get to hear the actual voices of the
speakers. The more I learn about the church here, the more respect I have for all
the members of the church who live outside of the states. They're awesome!
This week we didn't have a TON of citas, but we got to
meet with a few people, like Fátima, Hermana Blanca (I don't know why we call
her Hermana Blanca, but we do), and Lidia. We also got in contact with Andrea
again! She's the woman who's AWESOME and we taught once a few weeks ago, but...
Bad news: She went on a two-week trip to Hungary
Good news: She's back from her trip!
Bad news: We called her because we knew she would be
back, but she didn't answer the phone even though we called on a few different
days
Good news: She finally called us back!
Bad news: She's moving
Good news: Her new piso is still in our area!
Bad news: They're doing renovations on their piso so
they're living outside of our area for the next three weeks
Good news: She said she'll be in Torremolinos on
Wednesday and we can meet then!
We're not EXACTLY sure where her piso is, but we have the
general idea of where it is and so we're going to go searching for her building
today or tomorrow and if we can't find it, we'll call her. We're really excited
to get to visit her again!
All the talks from general conference were super great, but
one I really liked was Elder Uchtdorf's talk from the women's session. In his talk,
he shared a story about three sisters. One was sad basically her whole life,
one was mad, and one was glad. The point of his talk was that it is we
ourselves, not the events or situations in our life, that determine how happy
we are. Don't get mad, get glad! I could write a lot about every talk from
conference, but I'll just leave it at that for the sanity of everyone.
Hope you have an amazing week!
Love, Hermana Walker
This was a yummy fish dinner served to us this week.
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