Another baptism? It's like South America!

Dear Everyone,

This week has been super good. We had a baptism! There is a recent convert family in our ward who the whole family got baptized in January except the 18 year old son Adrian. He was a little rebellious and didn´t really believe in it. Well a few days ago, the bishop calls us up and tells us that he got a call from Adrian who said he wanted to be baptized this week. He´d already been taught everything by us and previous sets of missionaries so we baptized him yesterday right after church because that´s when his whole family could attend. He´s a super great kid. Our district here in Tarragona has completely changed. It used to be all americans (and one canadian) and now we have 2 hispanic missionaries. The new sister missionary is a actually a mini-missionary who lives in Palma de Mallorca! So I already knew her before. Well, my time is running out so this might have to be it for this week.

Love Élder Coleman

The rains came down and the floods came up!

Dear Everyone,

Transfers just happened. I´m still here in Tarragona. My companion Elder Frederich got transferred to Huesca, which is a huge honor because the area just opened to missionaries a transfer ago. It doesn´t even have a branch there. All the work he does there will go into establishing the beginings of a branch. My new companion is Elder Green. He´s from Gilbert Arizona, and I´m excited to work with him. We already have lots of people we are working with. Grau, our investigator, got baptized on Friday! He is so great. He even made his own baptismal programs. I´ll include pictures. Well as I´m typing right now, it´s pouring rain. It´s just dumping rain. It usually doesn´t rain here, but I´m worried about how we´re going to get back to our apartment without getting 100% soaked. Yesterday we went to a camp out with the ward. We didn´t really camp out, we just showed up at the ward campout for 2 or 3 hours and those who were leaving said goodbye. Also about a week ago, we had a family home evening at a member´s house with Grau before he got baptized. It was great, we had some great food. I tried whole sardines for the first time with the head and everything. But as we are getting ready to go, it starts just pouring and there is thunder and lightning is striking every 5 seconds. One of the family members goes down to the basement to check things out and comes up yelling "se están cayendo granizones" which means huge hail stones are falling. We went downstairs and sure enough, the garage door was being pounded in by hailstones. When they opened the door to look at the hail, however, a flood of water entered the garage and we had to sweep/shovel it out. Anyway, that´s about all for this week. 

Love Élder Coleman

The Eagle's Nest

Dear Everyone,

This week has been super good. I´m writing on a Tuesday because I didn´t get time yesterday because we got stuck super far away. We went on a hike called the Nido de Águila which means Eagle´s Nest. It had some really cool waterfalls and ruins and things. My companion has been planning a lot of hikes recently, which is lots of fun but it means I never get to buy shoes or do any other errands. I love exploring Spain though. On the hike, one of the sisters had a big rock fall on her head and the other one slipped and fell into the water at the waterfalls. (It´s just a calm pool so she didn´t get hurt.) But it was a super interesting trip.  This week is going to be a really great week because our investigator Grau is getting baptized on Friday. Normally I don´t put up the investigators we have on date because sometimes things donñt work out and they never get baptized. But Grau is super solid. His girlfriend is on a mission to Argentina and he has been getting emails from her encouraging him to talk to the missionaries and read the Book of Mormon. He was never interested before she left, but he started looking into the church because of her encouragement and he´s come to the conclusion that it´s true. He is one of the most down to earth, just legitimately cool people I´ve ever met. I´m so excited for his baptism and so is the ward. I´ll try to put up pictures of our hike this week, but I´m kind of running out of time. We have to go to a family home evening really soon. Until next week.

Love Élder Coleman

 Exploring Spain!

 Say cheese!

 This is an abandoned house we found while on our hike.

Hey shrimp! Are you looking at ME?!

Just a little preface:  I did NOT say that he bores people with the things he says.  I DID ask for some of the details of his daily interactions, specifically anything unique, funny, weird, etc.  More specifics, less generic.  You get my drift.  I could've deleted that line from his post but I didn't.  You get the whole experience as is!  

Dear Everyone,

I hope everyone like the video. People come up to me all the time in the ward now and say "I didn´t know you spoke french". It´s also all over everyone´s facebook here which is really great. I hope people see it and it peaks their interest about who we are and what we do. This past week I ate paella for the first time. It´s pretty much the typical Spanish foods. If you ask anyone what foods are Spanish foods they will say paella and tortilla de patata. Well I´ve officially tried both now and I must say I really like it. The kind I had didn´t have shrimp in it though. The shrimp here, they eat with the head and legs still attached and everything and it just feels like it´s staring at you. My mom asked me to spice up my blog entries because I guess I bore people with the things I say. One of the ideas she gave me was to talk about weird people that we see on the street. In Spain, there are an insane amount of weird people. I see weird things every day, but I typically don´t remember everything that happened to write about it on Monday. But actually right now as I´m typing this, there is a guy next to me in the locutorio (internet cafe type place) talking to me about UFOs and how the government is covering up all the evidence. I should make a list of all the weird things I see every day for a week and send it. You´d all get a chuckle. Well, today we went to some Roman ruins. We went to an aquaduct name Pont del Diable which is Catalan for Devil´s bridge. The legend is that the builder of the aquaduct was frustrated with how long it was taking to build, so he make a deal with the devil that if he would build it for him in one night that he could have the first soul to cross over the bridge. So when it was done, he made a cat cross the bridge first and thus tricked the devil. There is a lot of history here and legends and just interesting stories. I will send you pictures next week because I don´t have my card reader with me. As for stories, I can´t really think of any more. Oh, I´m pretty excited because a recent convert who is Catalan is going to teach us Catalan everyFriday at 8 from now on, and we´re obviously going to teach him the missionary lessons, but I´m pretty excited to learn. Només parlo un miqueta ara. Well, that´s it for this week. I love you all.

Élder Coleman

Una Invitación a conocernos

Even famous people get hurt.

Dear Everyone,

Today was a pretty good preparation day. We caught a bus decently early to Salou, which is a city in the other Elders´area. We rented bikes as a district and biked along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It was pretty fun. I got a fair amount of pictures this time. Also, on Thursday we went for a whole day to a place called Tortosa, which is super far away. It´s the same distance from here to there as from here to Barcelona. I went with Elder Jackson, who isn´t my companion, because both companionships had visits in Tarragona and neither of us could sacrifice a whole so we did splits. Our goal is to start a branch there. There are a lot of members there who don´t come because it´s super far and expensive to get to Tarragona. We met with all the members in an FHE and we think we could start a family group out there that could grow into a branch eventually. People there are really receptive too. Almost everyone we talked to out there gave us their number. Also, another cool thing that I think everyone will love is that our ward did a youtube video. It starts off with the "Gracias a Él" video from the Church that I´m sure everyone´s seen and then it has a bunch of members from the ward introducing themselves. And a bunch of missionaries too. And, I show up! Twice! They wanted me to say something in French, so I did and then I show up at the end with all the missionaries. I´m not a very good actor, but I don´t think I look bad. They wanted it to be a multi-cultural video so we have people speaking Catalan, Spanish, English, Russian, French (me) and then the bishop offers an invitation to meet us. I think it was really well done. Here is the link so you can check it out. http://youtu.be/akS9g5vG-dE 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akS9g5vG-dE&feature=youtu.be    (He's famous now!)

 Another baptism!  It's almost like South America with the number of baptisms!

 An English class activity where they wrote on their faces.  Kids will be kids!

 A cool statue in Tortosa---NOT Tortuga!  No Captain Sparrow here!  

 Yeah, that's the Mediterranean behind him.  I know, he's got it really rough!

 Bike ride!

When the bike has the last laugh!  A war wound!  So it's not all jolly holiday on the Mediterranean after all!