The singing missionaries: Coming soon to a chapel near you?

Dear Everyone,

This week has been transfer week. I´m still here in beautiful Bilbao with the same companion, Elder Slauson. This week we had a missionary Sunday. We had all the recent converts in the ward bear their testimonies and we (the missionaries) sang a musical number that everyone seemed to like. As a ward we also watched the Work and the Glory on Friday as part of our weekly ward night. We have a weekly activity for the whole ward that we bring investigators to. Also a highlight of the week, we met with this man named David who is from Ghana. He speaks English, one of the first English-speaking people I´ve taught in a long time. We contacted him in the park last week and finally met with him again this week to give him a Book of Mormon in English. He said he´s looking for the truth and he was so excited to get the Book of Mormon that it was the first thing he asked about when we met with him, and he kissed it when he got it. We emphasized the importance of reading and praying to find out for himself, so as soon as we left, he started to read right there on the bench. He is a miracle in and of himself. We also had a really great family home evening with a member family and we are working with them to help bring back their less active family members. A young man in our ward who often accompanies us to visits got his mission call to Lima Perú (he´s originally from Perú). So we´re pretty excited about that. It´s exciting to hear about so many missionaries leaving from home, it´s great! Make sure you invite the missionaries over for a family home evening, and not just the sister missionaries either. 

Love, Élder Coleman

Itsasargi? No, it's a lighthouse!

Dear Everyone,

This week has been crazy. There have been parties everywhere. People in this country find absolutely any reason to party. Also, my companion had to go to Barcelona on Thursday to renew his residency, so I was with a temporary companion. Then he must have caught something while he was there because he´s been sick for the last couple of days. We´ve been teaching a few really good people. There are 2 girls, one from Colombia and one from Venezuela that we have been teaching every other day. They want us to teach them English, but they are also super interested in the Gospel. There is also a couple that have been coming to church for over 6 months now, but they won´t get baptized. So we´ve been working with them a lot. This week we also had an eating visit with a member from Paraguay and there they drink a lot this drink called mate (pronouced mahtay). It´s a huge thing in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Think of how big of a cultural thing coffee is for us in North America, well mate is way bigger there. It´s just an herb and it´s totally fine to drink. Well I tried it for the first time. It´s kind weird, but I like it. You have to use a special filter straw and everything or it doesn´t work. I really can´t think of anything else we´ve done that´s really interesting this week. 

Here's an old cannon we found.

 This sign says "lighthouse", first in Basque, then in Spanish.  The languages are so completely different!

 Here's a photo of the Basque men's choir, complete in their traditional clothes.

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