Finally in Argentina!

Hey!!

Glad my letters got there! Sounds like you guys are keeping busy and are getting ready for an awesome Halloween! Haha good luck Mom with that ring! Haha this whole computer is in spanish so its telling me I´m spelling every single word wrong...slightly annoying.

Anyway, I´m here! I think we were traveling for almost 30 hours (including like 8 hours in Buenos Aires) before I actually got to Mendoza. Pretty sweet! Its like I´m in a foreign country or something! Haha the streets are crazy. I´m pretty sure there arent really rules in the streets, and my companion says that police here dont really have any authority..so if there are rules no one seems to follow them. Haha and then we flew to Mendoza...airports are cool here. For the flight to Mendoza we had to go to a different airport, and security basically meant going through a metal detector, setting it off, and then a security guy looking at me and telling me it didnt matter and to just keep going. Haha customs or whatever was awkward though. We got there and told them we planned on being here for 2 years, but apparently right now the church only has tourist visas for us, so they talked for a long time and told us if we don´t get some other visa we need to leave in 3 months. So not sure what will happen there.

Anyway, I´m in an area called Mayor Drummond with Elder Jones. We also live with the zone leaders, one of whom is latino, so we mostly speak spanish at the pench. The accent here sounds crazy. I can understand it okay-ish, but it basically sounds like some of these people are trying to speak spanish with an italian accent sometimes. Sometimes I try to talk with their accent, but I feel super stupid when I do it. Like Im overdoing it and making fun of their accent or something. Their accent is called castellano, and some of them are 100% sure that its a different language than spanish and that they don´t even know spanish...but whatever. Haha another cool thing is that almost everyone I´ve met, the 2nd or 3rd question they ask me is what team I support, and if you say the wrong team sometimes they kind of stop talking to you. So my companion has been trying to teach my what team I´m supposed to support to be able to be friends with more people.

But yeah, its kinda crazy here. The nice parts of my area remind me of the sketchy parts of Tucson, and the bad parts remind me of the ruins you find out in the desert in Arizona. Pretty sweet. The city also has sequias (no idea how to spell that), but they´re like these big drainage things on the side of the street with water and trash in them. They´re like deep enough for a dog the size of copper to walk in and you wouldn´t see him (I know that because there´s quite a few dogs walking in them). They´re uncovered and I have a bad feeling its only a matter of time until I fall in one. Also I just attached a couple pics, but they´re both from while we were driving in Buenos Aires...which was probably the scariest drive of my life. I´ve already been spending a lot of times in buses here, and when you sit by the window and look down, its generally impossible to see the space between the bus and the car next to you. Fearless. And ¨bus stops¨ basically just mean the bus is going to have its doors open for about 5 seconds, stop for about 3 of those seconds, and then keep going. Way fun.

I feel like there´s tons of other stuff to say about here, like how I haven´t found a single toilet that I could figure out how to flush with help or looking for like 5 minutes, but I´m not sure what else to say.

Oh, verse of the week. Mosiah 29:26-27. Yesterday was the election here so I felt like that applied pretty well. Almost everyone here kind of seems to hate their government and don´t want to vote for anyone, but they have to because there is a fine if you don´t vote here. They´re all pretty worried about the country.

Anyway, everything is going pretty sweet. Its kind of weird because almost everyone here totally looks American, so sometimes I almost forget that they speak spanish. The spanish is coming along alright. I can generally say what I want to say (simply), but it will be a while before I fully understand everything they say to me. Oh well. I think my spanish is pretty good considering I didn´t bring the main spanish grammar book everyone else studies, and this is my first transfer ever talking spanish with other missionaries. Not that I´m looking for excuses to not be able to speak spanish.

Well other than that its all good. Fun stuff. I´m super stoked to be here and its way cool. President Avila is way funny and nice and my companion is pretty sweet too.

Hope you guys have a great Halloween and rest of the week!

Les amo,

Élder Webster

PS Oh and I got to see Elder Wengert! He´s with one of the people that came down with me and was in my District in the MTC. So close to being his companion!

PPS and you 2 make an awesome Señor y Señora Increíble