Jordan in Moscow: Holidays in the MTC

Name Tag in Russian

This is how we started to learn Russian!!??

December 14, 2010

Another week down and I feel like I need to celebrate every time i make it through a week. The language is so hard!! There should not be 24 different ways to say my, or your, it is just crazy how much conjugation there is. But everything seems to be going great! I use to think that the branch president didn't like me but i had an interview with him and it went really well so now I think he is a good guy. Nothing really exciting happens anymore. The days are really repetitive and just so much class time it is tough to stay awake. We try to play games during study time but we don’t even have games that are fun to play for that long. Like Russian hang man. . . you can only play so many rounds of that and especially when you only know like 100 words. . . if that. It is Christmas season here and I am a little upset that there is no snow. My companion keeps complaining that it’s too cold and I am just wishing I were in a short sleeve shirt. We do have special days though in the week like we started scarf Fridays, we also have retro Saturdays. Which was way fun because my district went and bought suspenders and hiked up our pants really high and had really short ties, it was a good day of people telling us we look funny. Oh and I found some doctors glasses to go with my outfit. Also one of my favorite nights the Paraguayans put on a napkin poetry night. One of the best nights of the week by far!! …

Hope you all a good week and a great Christmas holiday! я люблю тебя (i love you)

Love

Elder Spoerri

Room Mates going to Russia

My District in the MTC

December 21, 2010

The weeks are about the same as ever now. Class, Russian, more class, Personal study, Class and then . . . more classes. But we did find a way to get music playing through lds.org and the teachers encourage us to listen to it which I don’t understand why if we aren’t able to listen to our own music? But I am not complaining. Russian is coming along pretty good. Its still really hard but we are almost able to hold a conversation about like what do you do or study… work…sports…and stuff like that. Last night for FHE we played a game its called zoopark. Dad knows this game we use to play it when we were little, but its the game where you slap your legs 2 times and then do the animal signs and then a different persons animal sign. But we did it in Russian, so instead of just doing the sign we had to say the animal too. It was a lot of fun. Some thing exciting we did back in our rooms with Darren and his room was that we turned out all the lights and had a flashlight that we point towards the ceiling. One person spins around for 30 seconds and after that, take the flashlight and make it like a strobe light…I got so dizzy that I fell over 5 times and totally wiped out Darren’s desk in his room. We have to have some excitement through the day haha. Other than that nothing else really happened…the days are long but the weeks go by like a day. Hope everything is going great at home. Love you

Love

Elder Spoerri

December 28, 2010

This week was a pretty good week. We had a lot of devotionals in which elder Russell M. Nelson came to 3 of the meetings and spoke to us in 2 of them. He might be my favorite speaker of the apostles. I swear that during his talk he had revelation, because in priesthood he was saying something… then all of a sudden stopped and holding his thoughts…then continued and said…I need to tell you this right now and he never went back to what he was saying before…so it was pretty sweet! Also Happy Birthday Austin! Hope you had a good B-Day.

Christmas, I hope everyone had a good Christmas, even though being away from the family it was still a really good Christmas! Christmas morning we were woken up by the Ukrainians playing the violin and singing then all the Russian speaking and Ukrainians started singing for like a half hour. Then my room went down to the Serbian’s room with Darrin Novakovich and took turns opening our presents, Just like a family and taking pictures…it was really fun to do it like that. Yesterday was a sad day though the Serbians, the ones we would hang out with every night left to go to Serbia and Croatia, it was sad to see them go.

The Russian language . . . oh boy is it tough! We have almost made it through how to conjugate in all the different cases, which, let me tell you there are 6 different cases and for each case there is a Masculine, Feminine, Neuter, and plural way to conjugate it. So there are like 24 different ways to conjugate every word in their dictionary, in which usually almost every word has to be conjugated in a sentence. It’s tough, but I am finally getting to be able to form my own sentences, which is pretty sweet. I don’t know if I am conjugating them right but they can somewhat understand what I am saying. Thank you Mom, dad, Austin, Christie, grandma and Grandpa, and the jones’ for the presents it made Christmas a lot better to have presents to open haha. Anyways everything is going well here and I hope everything is going great for all of you. I love you

Love

Elder Spoerri