Braden Hampel Mission: 3rd week Madrid Spain MTC

"One Big E-mail"

" The reason for my title is I don´t have a lot of time to send a bunch of different email's, so just for the family so as usual just a big one. Tell Kenzie, no I didn´t see it drive past unfortunately but it was sitting in front of this really ritzy hotel with a bunch of Mercedes S Classes, it was still awesome though. I refused to look at the front after I found out that the owner had put a Batman vinyl on the front of the car, so I just took pictures of the back and sides. I will send you those later this evening when I have more time. I guess it will be morning for you guys, still can´t get used to that. Today was the most exciting, so I will tell you about that or at least the waking up part. Last night we all agreed on the fact that we would wake up at six twenty this morning because it is July fourth and we hung an American flag in the hall and basically shouted the pledge of allegiance as loud as we could to wake up the girls because they are on the opposite side of the door where the flag is hung. Then we sang the National Anthem and that was earsplittingly off key, but still just as fun and exciting. So, then we went to the temple felt the spirit. I am kind of getting used to it now, it's really not as weird as I thought it was, especially with so many people who really want to feel the spirit in the room with you. Then we got a tour of the temple. Oh, and we ate before we went to the temple that was way good, it was like a chocolate center with bread wrapped around it, it was so good I thought I might cry. Some mornings we get freshly squeezed orange juice, never going back ever. After this, we will have lunch which the President of the MTC himself told us it would be KFC chicken with banana splits, I am so psyched and then we are going to go to the Real Madrid Stadium later to day. Last P day I got my self a Real Madrid pin to stick in my box so that will probably come home with my SD card when it gets full. Then who knows what we will have for dinner. We will have a devo tonight which will be good and then to bed. That's my plan for today, plus one more email with pictures. It's really slow to load here so we´ll see how many I can send.

My Spanglish is getting better everyday, I can now mostly understand what is being said and I can get my point across in the investigator lessons, but those get harder everyday as well because they stop taking it easy on us. So that's fun, both my fake investigators smoke and one has no idea about the chuch and at first thought that the only reason we were there was to help him quit smoking so that was a fun obstacle to over come (not to mention that the teacher being the investigator can be a turd sometimes, I mean that in a good way, he just comes up with hard questions.). I can stand the food better, I finally figured out why I´ve had a hard time with it. They refuse to use salt and pepper, so now I overdose my food with salt. Not a good practice for the field because even less salt is used than that what they put in here. I really don´t care, I got tired of wasting food and throwing it away. I´ve now eaten shark, I have no idea which species but it wasn´t the most delicious thing on the planet. Some of the Elders are emailing home and saying they got a shark-bite on their arm or their leg. I figured really funny for us, not a good idea to send that home and let Mom fret about that for a week. I still haven't used my card here, I still have alot of cash left so that's good.

Tell Trevor perfect.

I´m almost out of time, so this is it for now. I´m sure I will have plenty to talk about after Real Madrid and I will try to send those pictures as well.

love you all

Braden

Elder Hampel on Madrid Metro