Week 3!

Hey everyone! 

Sorry I didn't email last week. I couldn't figure out how to send it to everybody and I didnt have a lot of time but if you want to read last weeks or look at the pictures go here elderericeliason.blogspot.com .

Im not very good at writing these emails so Im just going to tell a bunch of funny stories and they will be all jumbled but its ok. 

So last week some of the older elders put alarm clocks in somebody else's room set for the middle of the night and they got really mad but it was funny. We were talking about it and me and my companions said "if anybody puts an alarm clock in our room then we will throw it out the window" and a few days later guess what we found??? an alarm clock. They didnt even hide it good because they set it in the window and we literally open the window every night to talk to people. We didn't want to make liars out of ourselves because we are missionaries now so we threw it out the window and it landed on this ledge next to our classroom on the second floor. So the next day they saw it because I threw it perfectly in front of the window and they got all mad. It was elder porrits alarm clock and it rained and got broken but during lunch I crawled out the window and we dried it out and put it under there bed but the batteries fell out and it didnt go off but it was still really funny. Because they just found their alarm clock in their room. haha

We were playing basketball the other day and everybody always goes super hard, I dont really know why but I was surprised nobody had gotten hurt. BUT... I knew something would happen. Me and elder guajardo went up for a rebound and he is always super aggressive and his elbow smacked me right above my eye. I started bleeding so we went inside to clean it up and it was actually a really big cut right below my eyebrow. They said they were going to have a doctor come but I wasn't about to let some dominican doctor operate on me. Nobody ever came and sister gulbransen said that it looks ok so I just tried to tape it shut that night and it looks pretty good now. 

On Sunday we finally got to leave the temple grounds to go to the park across the street and elder porrit almost got hit by a motorcycle his fifth step away from the temple and they just honk here they dont slow down. The park was pretty cool and it used to be an old zoo. We went to the store yesterday and I bought the coolest shirt ever and a bunch of snacks. The guy at the register said something to me and it was so fast and I thought he said "do you want more" in spanish but that didnt make sense but apparently he was asking if I was part of the stores club. On the way back we saw a horse in this little field in the middle of the city. Its not very nice but the older missionaries told us this is the nicest part of the DR that isnt a resort.

The older missionaries left on tuesday and that was really sad because I liked all of them a lot and we got new missionaries yesterday. There aren't very many of them so instead of having 60 missionaries at this mtc we have less than 40 probably. One of them said something about him beating us at basketball when we were going outside to play so I think we're going to have to show them how we do things around here a little bit.

Im going to try to attach some pictures but if you cant see them then go to that website. I miss all of you and I love all of you. Feel free to send me pictures because I dont want to forget what any of you look like. Also we got to go on top of the MTC and it was a super cool view.

Elder Eliason

Email Numero Dos

Hey Everyone!

Thanks for all of your letters. I dont have lot of time to write back but I read them all and I appreciate all of them:)

The CCM is a lot better than it was last week. The first days here were terrible but now Im good. First of all when we got here you would have no idea that a hurricane or anything just happened and theyre telling us that hurricane maria is coming today but its just kinda windy outside which is a pretty big disapointment but Im sure the people here are happy that their houses are not getting destroyed.

Sunday was a really good day. I got to take a nap because Elder guajardo had a meeting in the morining because hes the district leader so that was actually really nice because it doesnt feel like we get a lot of sleep here. We have some freetime on sunday too good and we walked around the temple. You can see the ocean from the front doors of the temple which is pretty cool because they never let us out of the walls here. But... GOOD NEWS! I saw the tiniest ant I have ever seen which was cool and I also saw like 5 lizards and the lizards here are like a foot long so that was awesome but theyre too fast to catch and I dont think President gulbrandsen would like that. oh well

My spanish is getting better. I learn more everyday but its still kind of stressful because i cant understand everything people say and I cant communicate as well as i would like to without taking forever to think about it. All week we just went to classes so thats not very interesting but here are some interesting things that happened this week. 

1. Every night we have to be in our rooms at 9 but at 9:30 everybody sticks their head out the tiny little windows and we dont really talk about anything interesting but its just kind of funny.

2. Presidents wife sister gulbrandsen was gone but she got here the other day. Shes super nice and the complete opposite of president so its nice to have her here. haha

3. They finally told us that we would get to go outside of the temple grounds yesterday to go to this park that is apparently an old zoo to do some service but there was a rain storm so they didnt let us go so we cleaned up the temple grounds. I dont know why. But its good that they have us to clean up the temple grounds because Im not sure if they pay a bunch of people a lot of money to come everyday and make it look super nice and trim the bushes so they look really nice and mow the lawn so it looks like a golfcourse... but we did pick up some leaves.

4. We get PIZZA every pday which is awesome because all we eat is dominican food but i do have honey bunches of oats in the morning so thats good.

5. The older missionaries are only here for one more week until they go out into the real world then we will be the "experienced" missionaries which is funny because we really looked up to the older missionaries and now we will be the older missionaries.

6. There are power outages like every other day but there have been i think 4 today because of the storm.

7. My dad gave me all these old ugly fat ties so we started making them skinny by cutting them and sewing them to make them look cool so we have this little sweatshop in our room.

8. On the bottom of the bunkbeds it says "a banana a meal makes your poops hard like steal" so im making sure to eat lots of bananas.

Email Numero Uno

Hey everybody!

I'm here at the CCM in the Dominican Republic and it's so crazy already! I flew out on Monday night to New York then we flew to Santo Domingo. There were like 15 other Elders that were on the same flight but I don't really like talking with big groups of people so I didn't say very much. 

When we landed we had to go through customs and there was this guy there to pick us up. It was so hot and humid when we got there and I started sweating a lot. We got on this old bus that took us to the CCM. I was really tired and miserable so I wasn't looking out the window the whole time but it was crazy! We drove through the city for a little bit then along the coast for a long ways. There is trash everywhere on the road and there are empty water bottles like every 5 feet. There were just like giant piles of trash in random places so it was super dirty. The first day wasn't very good so probably the highlight was when we were in the bus I saw this giant flaming pile of garbage and nobody even cared, they just drove right by it but it was like a legit fire so that was pretty cool/ghetto. 

When we got the the CCM we had an interview with the President of the CCM. He's pretty strange, he always has this smile on his face but it doesn't look genuine at all and he looks like he's just waiting for you to make a mistake so it's pretty scary being around him. They just told us to unpack our bags so we didn't do anything the first night so that sucked. We didn't go to any classes and I didn't want to be there. I missed everybody even though I had only been gone for less than a day and it sucks to think that I won't see any of you for two years.

Yesterday was a lot better. We had some classes and the food was pretty ok. We eat in this little cafeteria and there are like 40 people here. We hardly learned any Spanish and they always talk in Spanish. They just gave us these 2 papers with words and some books so I think they want us to teach ourselves which is dumb. It's pretty hard and stressful and I'm never organized but it's getting better.

My companions are Elder Durham and Elder Guajardo. I have two companions so I like that a lot and I'm really happy I'm with them instead of some other Elders I came with haha. We played basketball yesterday and I schooled some fools. We play 4 on 4 to two or three buckets so it goes fast but the rim and ball are so bouncy that only layups go in. The temple is right next to us and we went today so that was pretty fun and a good change of pace.

Here's some pictures, there's not a lot to take pictures of because we're in the same building all day long. The pictures are of my view and the temple and the CCM. It says I can only send the pictures on google drive or something so if you cant see them just imagine what it looks like. I miss all of you and I look forward to reading your emails! ​