Rhino Charging....

From: Christopher Russell
Subject: Hey Everyone
To: "Steve Russell"
Date: Tuesday, September 7, 2010, 11:51 AM

Hey everyone back home!

Happy birthday to My Grandma Russell and to Krista Parker!!!!! :)

So this week our russian teacher had to figure out how to put our names in cyrillic and he found a name for everyone but me because there is no "u" sound like there is in russell. So I took him into the other room where the name of Russell M. Nelson was on the wall in cyrillic and we got it figured out....I'm special!!! Yay!

So for gym I've been known as the rhino because I play defender and I can sprint at about 15-17 mph and I'm 200 pounds. So people fear me charging :). I've also started playing volleyball, which is not as much fun at 7:30 in the morning as one would think it is....can't feel feet. So I'm playing that in the afternoon now. Our TRC task went a lot better than I thought it would, I apparently know more russian than I think I do. We had two SYL days this week and in order to keep it going we have a pink beanie baby seahorse that we give to the last person that spoke in english. I never got it which made me happy. My companion is having a lot of trouble with the language since until a week ago he didn't really know how to study it...I'm just really grateful for the mind I've been blessed with that helps me to understand these concepts, and my french knowledge has helped a lot. I've been talking with some elders recently about how long they're here for and they say "oh I'm leaving in a couple of days and I went crazy after the first two weeks here, but now it's the third week and I'm out of here" to which I say "I've been here six weeks with six more to go" they then stare at me like I'm crazy and apologize for my suffering. I then think that we are all called to different missions because of what we're able to handle, both in language and the training and the field, cool!

We get five new missionaries today from germany, japan, and somewhere else. And this wed we get some more american missionaries as well. Used gloves today and they are amazing! It's getting a bit chilly here since the fall is coming. Taught a native russian teacher with my companion yesterday and she speaks really really fast! Russians apparently onlyy use backpacks through elementary school so I'll have to figure out how to deal with that issue. Having a little trouble figuring out what to study since I can pretty much say what I'm trying to say by using other words to get around it. Teaching the first lesson on Wed againn so that should go better than the one that we did last week.

Oh, so I have a ridiculously low voice and one day we were singing onward christian soliders in russian and I was doing the bass part of the chorus but there's a point where there's only bass singing and nobody was singing with me (they did for the first two verses) so I belt out a super low note and I'm the only onee singing so everyone started laughing, it was pretty funny.

Have to go!

Elder Russell