A Letter That In No Way Is About The Mysterious Production Of Eggs.

Dear Family and Loyal Blog Readers,

Its been an interesting and exciting week here in the MTC. Right now you might be thinking: "But why Elder Brasier is it so exciting?" Well do not worry, I will tell you!!!

 

First of all, the older districts are all gone as of Tuesday. That means that we are now the older Russian districts, which is pretty awesome, but also a little bittersweet. The bitter part is that a lot of my good friends are now gone, like Elder Arndt, LeFevre, Rooney (whose awesome desk I inherited as well as his huge supply of salt water taffy), Woodard, Bradford and worst of all Yefoshkin. Elder Yefoshkin was only here for four weeks because he already spoke Russian and is now in Donetsk, Ukraine. I am really going to miss him, because me and him became very close over the short month I knew him. It was a really blessing to have him around because I was able to learn how to connect and talk to Russian people and I was able to ask him about pointers for being in Russia. Besides the great learning experience he was, I really enjoyed him as a person. We both traded contact information so hopefully I will be able to keep in touch with him after the mission. The sweet part is that we are now the experienced missionaries around the block and most importantly we have less then six weeks until we are in Russia (or in my case Russia, Belarus or Kazakhstan). So we have officially passed the half way point.

 

This week I decided that I wanted to become more involved in the activities provided by the MTC. So I joined the MTC Choir. Elder Porter has started to teach me how to sing and says that I am actually pretty good for just starting. I picked a great time to join up though, because for our first number we sang "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" which was amazing, yet relatively challenging. It was a real baptism by fire for my meager singing talents. I was pleased though that after a bit of practice I was able to hold my own with the more experienced singers. Another interesting side effect of my recent Choir joining is that on Friday we have a special devotional. We usually don't have a devotional on Friday but a few General Authorities are currently on campus to train new mission presidents. Also, the Choir is preforming a "special" musical number on Friday. So connecting the dots, I think that we are about to have a high ranking General Authority speak to us in devotional. You didn't hear it from me, but the rumor is that its somebody who's name starts with a D and rhymes with Bavid B Gednar..... That's just the rumor. Also, I joined the Russian soccer team for the daily Russian vs. Italian soccer games during gym time. I officially now play left defense and have been doing pretty good. I think this week we won 3 games and only lost 2. It helped that some of the good Italian players shipped off to Rome or somewhere this week.

 

So the Russian is going quite swimmingly. We are now teaching in almost 100% Russian and as such my grammar has been starting to slip big time and I sound like a character out of the book A Clockwork Orange, speaking in some weird Russian combo English vernacular. Its pretty fun though when we run into non-Russian speaking Elders and they have a hard time understanding what we are talking about. Also, things have been getting better with Elder Stegeby. He still struggles teaching but we have been getting along pretty well recently which has been nice. I've really started to learn that he is a great guy, just really weird, which is perfectly fine.

 

I feel like I want to address a question I've got a few times: What is Cyrillic? I'm sorry that I haven't explained it, since I'm just used to saying it and having everybody know what I am talking about. So here's a quick linguistic lesson. Cyrillic is the alphabet used by Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and a few other Easter European Slavic based languages. All those weird characters on my name tag are Cyrillic characters. The alphabet was created around 800 AD by a Catholic Monk who wanted to bring the scriptures to the Eastern European tribes. It is a combination between the Greek and Latin (the one we use) alphabets, but is more closely related to Greek, since it has a lot of characters roughly analogous to Greek characters such as Pi, Theta, Beta, Epsilon, Lambda and a few others I can't remember off the top of my head. So that's what Cyrillic is, its just a different alphabet.

 

So I hope everything is going well for everybody. Feel free to write, but I'm sorry if it takes me a while for me to write back. Also, one day I'm going to figure out how to use Cryllic characters in these e-mails!

 

Looking Dashing As Always,

Elder Zach Brasier