Party party everywhere! Finally some pictures, but no time to spare!

OK so wow this week I have like no time at all. We have to be in a visit super soon. We went on a zone activity trip to somewhere called Bakio. It´s super cool and I´ll send pictures. This week was crazy. We had a member come down from Norway, call us up and ask us to teach his girlfriend who lives here English and about the Gospel. It was super random and out of the blue. Also it´s been a constant party here, which is super cool. Everyone is dressed in tradicional Basque wear and there are lots of random singing groups everywhere and concerts and parades. There was a really cool old men´s  Basque choir that sang the other day and they were super good. Today we went to a cool hermitage up on a mountain on an outlet in the sea. I´ll send pictures and I´ll write more next week.

Love Élder Coleman

Conference, Christmas, and contacts.

Dear Everyone,

Wow, Conference was great! I hope all of you got to watch it. I loved being able to hear the voices and counsels of our apostles and leaders! General Conference is so much more exciting on the mission. We invited a lot of people to come watch it. Turns out no one came, but that´s life as a missionary. This week it has been getting a lot colder and I heard from a member that it might snow! Bilbao is about the only place in Spain it ever snows, so I´m hoping it does while I´m here. I love a white Christmas. Christmas is just around the corner right? I´m really coming to love the members here even though I just got here. I am practicing my Guaraní (the native language of Paraguay) with a Paraguayan member here and were are going over to eat with the members here more than before. You have no idea how much eating visits mean to the missionaries, especially if they aren´t getting any. Invite the missionaries over to eat! Especially if you don´t know them really. Something interesting happened yesterday. A couple from Sandy, UT (which happens to be where my companion´s from) walked into the church last night after General Conference. Apparently they just go all over Europe on vacation and they always stop by the church. We just happened to be there. It was interesting to hear a little bit about them and my companion really related with them. It was an unexpected surprise. There are a few amount of tourists in Spain. The other day, a young man from Germany stopped us and said he was a member of the church, his dad was the stake president in Munich Germany, and he was just on a class trip to Bilbao. It´s always interesting to meet different kinds of people from different places. 

Love Élder Coleman

(I'm just going to start posting photos of Bilbao because Preston keeps promising pics but none are forthcoming.)

Eating Nemo?

Dear Everyone,
This week I had fish head. A Peruvian member invited us over to eat
and we were super excited. Then the plates start to come out and it´s
a soup kind of thing with un-shelled shrimp and oysters and the centre
of the whole thing is a big fish head. Like imagine you pull a fish
out of the ocean, cut it in half and stick the top half in a bowl. It
was cooked and all, but its eyes were looking at me. Also, this woman
got baptized this week after coming to church for a long time. She got
baptized by the other elders here, but she´s 90 years old. And she is
100% still there mentally. She awesome. She comes up to me and says "I
hear you´re Canadian. My family has a lot of postive feelings towards
Canadians because they helped us in the war." I don´t really have any
time left and the Internet isn´t working at all. I have lots of photos
to send though. I guess I´ll send them next week. Take care all!

Bilbao the Beautiful!

Dear Everyone,

Bilbao is beautiful! I promise photos next week. Today we went hiking to this super awesome lighthouse and old canons and underground tunnels from the war. Instead of the Mediterrenean Sea, I am now right by the Bay of Biscay. I don´t know why it has it´s own name, as it´s just part of the Atlantic Ocean. But yes, from one side of Spain to the other. I absolutely love the city. If I ever come back to Spain to live, it´s going to be here. The city is so well put together, unlike any other city I´ve seen in Spain. Oh also last week, Red Bull came to town and did a bridge jumping thing off the main bridge here in Bilbao. So the downtown part was pretty clogged because of that. I suggest all of you go to Google Images and type in Bilbao. You will all be impressed by how beautiful this city is. As for the work, I haven´t really met everyone yet but we are always teaching. We have some great new investigators because people brought friends to church. It´s awesome. So, all of you, bring your friends to church! I really am loving it here. My companion is great. Did you know he´s my first companion from Utah? Another side note, I am living with Elder Hardy, a missionary from Calgary and there is a Sister missionary here from Ottawa. So we are 3 Canadians here!

Butterflies, borscht, and Bilbao!

Dear Everyone,

I got transferred! Well after being 3 transfers (about 4.5 months) in sunny Catalunya in the heat of the summer, they moved me to the cold part of Spain for the winter. I´m now in Bilbao, the capital of Basque Country (a region of Spain). Here they don´t have Catalán, they have Basque. But it´s such a difficult language that I´ve heard that very very few speak it fluently and many don´t speak it at all. It´s super chilly where I am. It actually reminds me a lot of Seattle, the weather (it rains a lot here), the city, and just everything about it. I like it so far, but I haven´t met anyone yet. It was hard to leave all the people I had come to leave. Let me tell you a story. When I first got to Tarragona, like my first or second day, we had the ward night that we do every week where we invite everyone to come and share a message and play games, but not a lot of people come. There´s a Russian recent convert mother and her 2 recently baptized children who always come. Well that first night we played charades and I was supposed to act out a butterfly. But after flapping my arms a fair amount, and still nobody getting it, I got a little more and more exaggerated with my arm flapping until someone finally guessed it, but everyone was dying laughing at me. This Russian family brought it up again and again on many occasions, they thought it was so funny. Also, during a family home evening with them in my first week, I mention I had tried borsch soup before and I loved it. Well, fast forward 4 months and I´m leaving. We have a family home evening in their home because we´ve gotten really close to them. They bring me a little box with a bow. I open it and there´s a little butterfly magnet. And they made borsch for me too. It´s just touching to think about how much small things like that can mean to someone. I hope to have many more spiritual experiences and meet lots of amazing people here in Bilbao. I hope you´re all doing well.

Élder Coleman   

 

Wannahockaloogie!

Dear Everyone,

This week has been pretty interesting. First off, on Monday all 4 of us went over to our Russian recent converts´ house to learn to make a Russian dish. I don´t remember what it´s called but it is like raviolis but filled with different stuff. It´s got meat and onions and a few other things. Well, on our way to their house, a man got off the bus, but before he did, he looked at Elder Arriarrán and me, as we were sitting next to each other, and spat on us. I asked him what his problem was in kind of an unfriendly way and he just replied "¡por mirón!" which loosely translates to "for staring!" Thing is, we weren´t even looking at him. Well I can say I´ve had that experience now. On Tuesday we helped another recent convert family move. I think I said something about a recent convert´s house flooding a little while ago, well we helped move them this week. It was sure an experience seeing as they aren´t the most organized people ever. For example, they showed up an hour and a half later to the church than we had planned. Later that day we went with a less active family to a restaurant as their way of saying thanks to us for changing their tire (if you remember that story). We went to a place called Peggy Sue´s. It´s an American food restuarant modeled to look like a 50´s diner. It had a jukebox and the TVs were only playing comercials from the 50s and 60s. They had pretty good burgers, but what really surprised me was they had Dr Pepper. It´s been such a long time since I´ve seen anything other than Coca Cola and Fanta here. In that less active family, both parents are return missionaries and are always telling us stories from their missions, but I don´t know why they won´t come to church. They have a 9 year old daughter who seems super interested but hasn´t been baptized. Our recent convert Grau, the one we baptized just a couple months ago, has already been to the temple to do baptisms and just yesterday, he got his patriarchal blessing and he was so excited. He is a champ. He takes his home teaching assignments super seriously, always inviting the people he home teaches to go do stuff with him. He´s also having family home evening with his girlfriend´s family, in their house (his girfriend is on a mission in Argentina) and he invited his mom to one. She loved it. Well, that´s about all the news I´ve got this week. I love you all.

Love Élder Coleman

One year mark!!!

Dear Everyone,

It´s September already. In 3 days I hit my year mark. I already have less than a year left in the field. It´s super crazy. So this week a woman came from Pamplona to clean out the sister´s apartment so they can give it back to the owners. So we had to help her a fair amount with that. Also a recent convert proposed yesterday in church. It was interesting. As it was the 5th Sunday, Priesthood and Relief Society were combined. So he asked the bishop if he could propose to another recent convert he had met 2 weeks earlier, after the meetings were over. The bishop said sure and I was given the task of recording it all. It was super interesting. Everyone was dying laughing and clapping. Also, he was wearing my tie because it was the bride-to-be´s favourite colour. As for missionary work, we´ve been doing a lot of it. We´ve been especially trying to do what the apostles have counseled us to do and work with members, getting to know their friends and helping them get excited about missionary work. It has been going great, but I am sure excited for fall to come around and things to start cooling down. I don´t really have much time today, but I hope everything is going well back home.

Love Élder Coleman