Cousins reunited!

Hey everyone!

This is going to be a really short email; we found out that we actually aren't allowed to prep emails before hand. Last time was just a miscommunication. So it's back to one hour for writing.

Man, it’s been a great week. Time is flying by so fast here. It’s hard to believe that in 4 more days I'll be in the field. I'm definitely going to miss the MTC and everyone I've come to love here, but I'm so excited to get out and start serving.

Here’s a really cool thing that happened. I was studying in class and president came in and pulled me out. He then proceeded to tell me that, because he trusted me to be brief, I could go outside and say hi to Elder Brasher who was going to the temple. It was definitely cool to see him again. I'm really grateful that President gave me that opportunity to go see him.

So back to last week: After email and the temple, we went on our excursion for the day. We basically just walked around and went to see the royal palace and the cathedral plus this one overlook; it was pretty cool. That was a pretty fun excursion.  Friday came and went, then it was on to Saturday and the park.

The Royal Cathedral

You can see the Royal Cathedral and the Palace to the left

My companion for the park this week was Elder Blaur. He is a really awesome guy; we have become good friends while we have been here at the MTC. He is serving his mission in Malaga, Spain; that's the southern mission of Spain. The park was a really great experience, maybe the best one I've had so far. We set some pretty ambitious goals, so I focused really hard on being 100% obedient to make sure I could have the Spirit with me. I definitely was able to see the blessings from that throughout the day. We didn't really come close to meeting our goals, but we did our best and ended up having some really amazing and special conversations with a lot of people. I'm really happy with how it went.

Elder Blaur is on my left; Elder Harris is the one that's giving the creepy smile between us; Elder Lukatch, the Ukrainian, is the only one wearing suit; Elder Moreland is the one with his eyes closed.

One guy was extra special. Right off the bat, we came to the station and before we even get on the train to go to the park, we just start talking to this guy. Turns out he is going to Retiro Park, too, so we got to spend most of our time with him. At one point, we got separated, because a bunch of guys pulled Elder Blaur and I away from him, so they could just argue with us. I did my best to be polite, but they were kind of drunk and weren't interested in listening to us at all. We left a card with them and left. Then later on, that same guy from the train found us in the park, and we were able to talk to him for another 45 minutes. We were able to give him a copy of The Book of Mormon, but he didn't want to give us his number, but I think that he will definitely check out more about the church, which makes me happy. We came back from the park and had a great testimony meeting and then it was onto Sunday.

Retiro Park (photo cred theculturalmap.com)

Sunday was really great, Elder Heninger and I led the discussion for priesthood about effective study and converting yourselves from chapter 2 of Preach My Gospel. It went really well. Later President Pack came and all those who had recently gotten to Madrid got to have a really quick personal meeting with him. That was really cool. Another fun thing, they gave us some cookies that they said came from the real Costco here in Madrid and told us that Costco has muffins, too!

I was so excited to hear that; turns out I might not have to wait 2 years to eat a poppy seed muffin after all! Ha-we will see. The devotional they gave that night was good.

The past couple of days have gone by so quickly. This week on the 4th floor of the MTC where we spend most of our time, we can only speak Spanish. That's definitely been a struggle for a lot of missionaries, but it does help. We got another one of the elders from Russia, so that's kind of cool. The next day after he got here, the Russian district’s door broke, and they were stuck in their room for 2 or so hours. Luckily they are out now, and we saved them some food so they got to eat.

We were going to get to the mall today for our excursion, but it got canceled, because we need to go pickup our residency visas. A lot of missionaries are a little bummed about that, but oh well. We can’t really do anything about it, so it's just better to move on.

Well, I can't really think of anything else to write so I'm going to be done. I love you all. Thank you for all of your support!

-Elder Bassett

PS Since we are transitioning to the field next week, we are also transitioning preparation days, so it's going to be an extra week or so before I can write. (We will have a half hour or so to write this Monday, but I'm not sure exactly how it will go down.)