Elder Benjamin S. Smith

  The first transfer ended this week which was both sad and exciting. Two missionaries that I was living with left and one came to our pad. The new Elder is a great guy and he likes things to be kept clean so I like him a lot. I still have the same companion so not a ton changed for me.  Part of the cleaning we did was throwing away things that no one owned. Which is a lot of things. Including maybe 25 apples that no one wanted, so I ended up with the job of making apple juice. So I put the apples in a blender then drained out the juice. And it's actually pretty tasty juice. And now we have these blended apple remains. So I bought some cinnamon oat pancake mix and the plan is to put the apple remains in the pancake mix and have cinnamon-oat-apple pancakes. I'm quite excited. We've had a lot of long conversations with people this week. For instance, the other day we were on a walk and someone said hi to us. We started talking with him and he ended up telling us tons of stori...

  We had exchanges this week which meant that I was with a pair of Spanish speaking missionaries for a day. I definitely don't know Spanish, but it went really well. I was able to understand what was going on and speak a few times. I think I said a few Portuguese words too but that's okay. That night I came back to a clean kitchen which was unexpected and made me quite glad. Then I walked outside and there was an exploded watermelon and a bunch of soggy rubber bands... So yeah that was a good day. There's a friend who missionaries have talked with before, but we haven't been able to contact him until yesterday. He picked up the phone and we talked about life for nearly an hour. It was ten out of ten and I am excited to talk with him again. I don't know if I've mentioned memory palaces, but it's something I've been working on for the past few weeks. One of the other Elders told me about them and it's basically assigning items and objects to numbers th...

  I know I said that after a peacock a dragon wouldn't surprise me... But it did. K it was actually a dragon fruit. But it was beautiful. We were visiting one of the members and we went out to their garden together which was an awesome experience. The dragon fruit had these large green spikes on the outside with a bit of red. Then the purple when you cut it open was just beautiful. The picture doesn't do the colors justice. It was also incredibly delicious so catch me growing purple dragon fruit in 20 years. We met Enrique this week and talking to him made me realize again how unique people are. We talk to a lot of people every day and they all face different challenges and have different strengths and interests. It's nice to see people from different paths of life and see how the gospel of Jesus Christ can help each of them in their circumstances.  Also there's these flowers that come out of the fence next to where we live and they are my favorite. We have been pausing...

Someone was moving so we were able to help them out. It was a fun time. That was the first and probably only ward activity of the year.  This week was pretty normal. As a mission, we've been watching some videos of the Apostles teachings to Mission President's and they have been amazing. We made lots of phone calls like usual and went on another hike this morning. So a normal week.  I've have some fun adventures with cooking too. I kinda just go for it. This week we are going to try a salad. Which was surprisingly hard to shop for.  Anyways, I'm going to go play some Gator Ball, so I'll talk to y'all next week.