"We're All Pretty Ready To Get There"

This was Alec's last personal day at the MTC. He leaves for Ukraine on Tuesday morning, and will arrive there on Wednesday. Here are some of his thoughts as he prepares to leave the MTC.

Well I'm sure there's a lot of crazy stuff going on in the outside world. Someone checked the election progress on Tuesday night before we went to bed - so we all went to sleep knowing there was a 58% chance Donald Trump would win. Even still, no one really thought it would happen. So when we got to class at 7:00 the next morning, everyone was talking about it and everyone was pretty surprised.  No one really thought it would happen and none of us were around for the real intense part of election season, so we really didn't have any idea what was going on. Hopefully things turn out better than we think.

There's only five days left here - which is a little scary to think about. By this time next week I could be anywhere in the mission already starting missionary work. It's a little crazy. 

I think I actually got pretty lucky with my district. It was crowded having 13 people sometimes (now down to 11 actually cause of sickness/other issues,) but it was nice to have that many people, because if one person was being annoying there were 11 other people to go talk to. :) Luckily most of the people in the district have actually been pretty cool. They all live in Utah/Idaho, except for one from Kentucky, so maybe I'll see some of them next time I visit Utah after the mission. The good thing is that there's only about 40 missionaries in the mission--and only 30 of them are elders. Eight of them are coming home the same time we go out, so when we arrive we'll be basically a third of the mission. So with such a small mission, we'll definitely be seeing each other a lot over the next two years and I'm sure I'll be companions with some of them at some point.

I've also made a bunch of friends outside of my district. In my zone (which is basically the branch we have church with) there are some pretty cool people and our whole zone (about 25 people) has gotten to be pretty good friends. I've also recently started hanging out a bit more with the other Russian speaking zone who have classes on the same floor as us. There's a guy there from Poland who always says hi and gives me a big hug when he sees me. The other zone is where the guy from Chapel Hill is from, too. 

I won't miss the food necessarily - but I will miss having food. It's nice having three meals prepared for you every single day. I expect so many prepared meals may be harder to come by out there. Also, I'm not really sure how good Ukrainian food is going to taste - the pictures I've seen haven't been super encouraging. 

The weather here in Provo has been way too nice. I was expecting it to get cold here already so I could start adjusting to the weather, but none of that has happened. It's still like high 60s every day. Supposedly this winter is supposed to be the coldest winter that Ukraine has seen in 40 years, so that's gonna be fun. Yeahhhhh.

We've had some pretty good devotionals, President Nelson and Elder Bednar were probably the highlights. We've also had the Primary and the Relief Society General Presidents come talk. The Primary President came on Tuesday and she gave a pretty good talk. On Sunday this week, Jenny Oaks Baker (apparently a pretty famous violinist and daughter of Dallin H. Oaks) came and performed for us. That was pretty cool. She brought her whole family to perform, they were all pretty talented. She would give a short little message between each song, so it was pretty interesting to listen to. 

I think our teachers - at least the one from Ukraine - have made us more excited than scared. She's been giving us little culture lessons about stuff we can and can't do, and then just talking about the country a lot. We're all pretty ready to get there. It seems like everyone else got their call around the same time as me, so, we've all beein waiting like 7 months. 

That's very cool about Evan's chorus solo, definitely pass along my congratulations. I listened to the link dad sent me and it sounded super awesome. That was a cool song. 

All I can think of for Christmas presents would be a watch or something - not really sure at all what I'm going to need. I bet by that point I might appreciate some American food like some taco seasoning or mac and cheese (maybe just the cheese packets and I can buy noodles there or something lol.) I guess if you're gonna try to ship it to Ukraine (sounds tricky) I could let you know what I might need later on. If you're sending something today just make sure it's gonna get here by Monday. 

  

We're all expecting it to be pretty cold when we get there on Wednesday. Hopefully they'll let us buy our coats right away. It also will depend a lot on where my first area is. Our teacher says there's a huge difference between the northern and southern parts, so hopefully I get to go where it's warm to start things off. 

After the first week or so getting up early, it hasn't really been all that bad. People talk about how exhausting and everything it is, but honestly I haven't gotten this much sleep every night in like 10 years. Like actually having 8 hours of sleep every single night makes things so easy. I'm sure it'll be different when I'm doing more than just sitting in a classroom all day every day, but for now I don't feel tired at all. It still takes me like at least half an hour to fall asleep, and I rarely sleep through the night, but I'm not tired usually. I never even sleep all the way til 6:30 cause that's way more sleep than I'm used to. I'll usually wake up around 5 and just lay in bed drifting in and out of sleep for an hour and a half. All these Utah kids who never did early morning seminary complain about not getting enough sleep, but I've never been more well rested.

Love you guys!

Alec