Elder Oliver: Street Performer

This week has been pretty great so far. There are all sorts of things going on here at the CCM. One of the new sister missionaries in our district was having some trouble assimilating into the group (one of the ones from the Provo MTC). The other day she asked us for a blessing, and all of the Elders in our district were in the circle. It was a neat experience. Our investigators are doing great (they are fake investigators). We challenged them to baptism the other day, and kind of got a yes. It was more like, I'll think about it while I'm out of town, kind of thing. we accidentally told one of our investigators something in a very tactless manner, but it's hard to be tactful when you don´t really know how to speak their language.

The temple here is gorgeous. Every P-day we get to do a session. It's kind of a small temple though. It´s a little cramped. Last Saturday we got to go to the park again. It went really badly for me and my temporary companion. He was too proud and confident and I was too frustrated with the language. We seriously only talked to 3 people in 1.5 hours. The best part of the park was something amazing, so I´ll give you some background.

Brother Tindale is a teacher here. He is from England, moved to Málaga when he was 10 years old. He served his mission in Madrid. His Spanish is perfect. He is also a musician. He is a very talented pianist and is teaching himself to play the violin. which means he brought a violin and lets me play it during free time (we´re going to do a musical number one of these days).

Anyway, I brought the violin to the park, and was playing some hymns and similar stuff like that, when I heard a street performer on the saxophone I went over to investigate, and he saw me and the violin and invited me over. He started to play La Cucaracha and I joined in. We were going back and forth having a jam-session/battle kind of thing. It was awesome! During the performance, there was a crowd of about 50 people standing around us, cheering and smiling and doing all sorts of crowdy stuff. Look to see if anybody posted a video of it on YouTube!

Today we are going to go to the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, which is one of the biggest soccer stadiums in the world, home of Real Madrid. I´m not a soccer nut, but it is pretty exciting. It seats around 90,000 spectators. That's a lot. Last week we went to the Plaza Mayor, and that was pretty cool, too. We saw the royal palace, and a bunch of gypsies chased us around asking for money. We play soccer at the nearby field almost every day. The other day I left my t-shirt and shorts at the hotel and played in my slacks and white shirt. It was interesting. That teacher that sent the picture of me in front of the temple left today. He is Frere Protellano, the French teacher. He is officially my first french friend. We were so sad when he left.

Our district is pretty cool. We are all pretty good friends now. It´s like a little family, that actually isn´t little because there are 10 of us. 6 Elders 4 Hermanas.

Anyways, it´s always great to hear from people! I really would appreciate letters from people in the mail. It´s kind of depressing when everybody else has a letter in the mail except me... But I was super happy when I got a letter from Melissa and Brooklyn! Thank you so much.

I hope all is well at home and with all my other missionary friends.

Love,

Elder Oliver