Holy Crap It's Christmas!

Hola people! And HOLA AMAYA! Welcome home. It's crazy that you're back already. I'm sad that I wasn't able to be there for it, but I guess I'll get to see you in like 21 months or something! And great testimony by the way! I enjoyed hearing that! It was great to see how much you've grown on the mission. I can't believe 3 months have already gone by! And I feel like once I know the language a little better it will only fly by faster. But I'm still loving it here, as always. 

To answer Mom's questions again real quick: Glad you liked the pictures! We try to do service like once a week, usually on Saturday mornings, and it's usually helping someone build a house. Actually, that's about all we've done. I have gotten to play a little of the Christmas music, and that's been fun! I usually play a little right before our English classes start, which is twice a week. I still haven't gotten any of your snail mail, but I did get a letter from Kaila Olsen! I think she sent it on like Nov 24? But I'd like to send her a reply, prefferably by email because I don't want to deal with sending real mail here. If you could get her email that'd be cool. 

This week was a little hard, I'll be honest. At least as far as numbers go. We tried so hard to get lessons with members, and and actually just lessons in general, but whereever we went the people we wanted to teach were never home. I guess everyone's working really hard to get some money for Christmas. And plus me and Elder Stocks had to travel all the way to Mendoza Wednesday night for a capacitación for all the training missionaries. All of thursday was pretty much another training session for us, and then we left that night. So that whole day we couldn't teach or anything. And then friday we had a ward christmas party, but I guess because everyone works during the day they did it at 9 o'clock at night! We got permission to be there of course, and it was really fun, but I was nearly dead in the morning of exhaustion. I'm never staying up past midnight again. Haha. But yeah, pray for us that we can teach these investigators more! Because that's the thing about this area. We find so many people to teach, but it's super hard to get them to progress because we can't see them very much.

 And haha this next week is only going to be harder to teach people. We've got p-day today, a Christmas party tomorrow for like half of the mission in Mendoza, and then Christmas Eve and Christmas we can't really do a lot of work, because apparently everyone drinks so much on Christmas Eve night, that night and all of Christmas day can be a little bit peligroso (dangerous). We are in the wine capital of the world, after all. So we can go out to members houses and stuff those days, but we can't just be walking around. We're probably meeting up as a district and playing games and eating food. It'll be fun! But also not very productive. So that stinks. 

We've got a new Elder in our pension! The Brazilian Elder Andrade left, and now we've got another gringo! His name is Elder Johnston from St. George, and he's only got one more transfer than me. So we're both pretty new! It's pretty fun.

I'm looking forward to skyping on Thursday! I think we're planning on skyping at 3 in the afternoon, which would be about 11 in Utah? Sorry I couldn't do it sooner, but we've got lunch at a different member's house before that so that's the soonest we can make it. 

Love you all! And have a super mega fantastic Christmas!

Elder Bingham

Another asado! I ate cow intestines and heart! The intestines were kind of weird, but not too bad! 

Got a picture with President Monson in the mission offices! Or rather, a cardboard cut-out of him. Whatever. 

My traveling group reunited! Mostly! Elder Clarke for some reason wasn't in the picture, and a couple Elders couldn't make it to our training thing, and also like 4 elders have already gone home from our traveling group. Kind of sad. 

Our Christmas tree! Elder Nelson cut down a palm leaf right outside of our pension and we just hung a bunch of random crap on it. But there's our christmas card pic I guess!