Let me start off with this: I'm very tired right now. My brain wants to shut off for about a day. This last week the sisters in our district decided that they wanted to speak Czech for ninety-five hours during the week. I said to Elder Price, "We have to match them," and I'm sure he said something in his head like, "He has no idea how much that is." Let me tell you how much that is. Basically we are only awake for sixteen hours a day: we wake up at six-thirty and go to bed at ten-thirty. That gives us a max time to speak of one-hundred twelve hours. So to get a ninety-five hour week, you need to speak about thirteen and a half hours a day. That leaves only two and a half hours a day that you can speak English. However, personal and companionship studies are a pain if you do them in Czech. So there go two of our two and a half hours. Okay... then you have P-day, and you know it's going to be hard to speak all day when you're not out contacting people or giving lessons in Czech. So we ended up making our P-day an eight hour speaking day. So now, we have fourteen-hour days for the rest of the week. Basically, only Czech besides our study time. BUT THEN: you have some meetings that have to be in English like District Meeting (where the whole district gets together - all four of us / two companionships - and basically revitalize each other and get ready for another week of work), investigators who speak English (we only have two - a family and a girl who's going back to America this Saturday - but the family didn't meet with us this week because the father was sick), and a few other things that have to be in English. What a pain! So getting ninety five hours of speaking is extremely difficult. We didn't quite make our goal, but we did manage to speak Czech for eighty-six hours.
So as I said, I want to just have a break for a while, but I can't; we decided to have another ninety-five hour week. My Czech has increased so much this last week. In one of my prayers, I was tired and I wanted to just pray in English, so I did, but in the middle I couldn't remember the word in English but could in Czech! What's this nonesense? The word was zajemcí (investigators). I still can't understand or comprehend very well, but that'll just have to come with time. I know that it will. I've already started to become used to hearing Czech. Sometimes when Elder Price is on the phone, I'll zone out and could almost swear that he's speaking English. When I ask him about who he was speaking English with, he'll tell me that he wasn't speaking English. This has not happened only once. It's been multiple times. So my ear is growing accustomed, but I still need to work on being able to put the words that I hear with their meanings. Translating in my head is way too slow but I understand the meaning better, but by the time I've got one or two words translated, they're already two sentences down the road. So, that's not going to work. I'll just have to start trying to listen and kind of hear what the sentence means. I'm already starting to get the overall meaning sometimes. I can follow converstaions fairly well, but as soon as someone wants to talk with me, I give very noncommital answers so that the conversation keeps going without me having to really say much. Everyone keeps telling me that I speak very well, and I'm not sure if I want to believe them. I feel that I can get my ideas across, but I feel slightly handicapped when I speak. Many times I won't say something because I'm missing one or two words from what I want to say.
By the way, if any of you want a really cool way to say "hello" when you answer the phone, say "Zdar" (Zdaaar) or if you're a guy and you want to be really cool, say "Zdarec" (Zdaaarets). Basically it's a shortened form of the greeting "Nazdar" which is very imformal and can be kind of rude. It's kind of the American equivelant of saying "Sup" or "Yo." I love the Czech Republic because it's kind of like the 90's. Mullets and other such old things abound. I love contacting and you knock on a door, and a good-looking guy who could be very well respected answers the door and has a mullet. Bahaha. It's great. You get some pretty weird people when you go knocking on their doors.
Oooo, another weird Czech thing: come home and drop your pants. Many times people don't wear pants while they're at home. So, I've seen lots of people answer their doors without pants! You can kind of tell what kind of person they are by how they answer the door in this circumstance. There are two basic groups: the kind that hide behind the door, and those who don't care. The first will barely open the door and kind of peak around it. A few times we've contacted these kinds of people and they'll just stand there like that and talk to you for five to ten minutes. I can't imagine standing like that, peaking around the door, for ten minutes. And then there's the second kind of person. They'll open their door just a little to see who you are, like every one else, but as soon as they see that you're not going to hurt them, or whatever they were looking for, they open the door and just stand there in their underwear like it's no problem! One time we were at an investigator's home, her name is Boržutová, and were teaching her and she was feeding us like she always does. Then in the middle of the conversation, her son who's seventeen years old comes walking through the room in his underwear, gets what he needs and leaves. Not even an embarassed comment. Sometimes while we're at home, one of us will look at the other and say, "I'm gonna be Czech now," which basically means I'm going to get changed, but we start by getting rid of our pants.
These past few weeks, we've been meeting with Denisa a lot. She's had a few tough things, but she's doing awesome. She's just amazing. I'm not sure what we did to deserve such an amazing investigator. Basically, we've already taught her everything, and she's accepted it all. Once, after a meeting Elder Price freaked out a little because he was like, "It's supposed to be hard! You can't just say 'Okay' and be fine with it." This was after the lesson on tithing. Giving one tenth of your money to the church? She accepted it easily, as she did with the Word of Wisdom, law of chastity, and everything else we've taught her. We're running out of things to teach and her baptisimal date is still about a month in the future (it got changed to the 13th of February because of some difficulties). Gah, she's amazing. That's all I've got to say. I attached a photo of her. I'm not sure what the blog is going to do with it. I hope that it attaches it as a picture so you can see her. It might be sideways. Elder Price took the shot and he decided to be artsy because he was a photography major before the mission.
Anyway, my time is up. I enjoy hearing from all of you each week. By the way, I don't get snail mail until each large meeting because that's when they distribute mail from the mission home. So I usually don't get that until the middle or the end of each transfer. Email is much better.
Love hearing from all of you. Love you all and I hope that you're having as much fun as I am.
Starší Monk