Week 1: MTC Adventures

January 9, 2013

Hey!

My first week has been mostly great, a little stressful and kind of adventurous. Upon arriving at
the MTC (Missionary Training Center) the first thing they told me was that there was a flu virus
going around and a ton of people were sick and in bed. So we weren't allowed to shake hands, or
hug anyone. That's all passed now though, but I guess it was big enough to be in the news down
here.

The first day was great. There are four sisters besides me going to Finland and my companion
is a solo sister going to the Baltic mission (so... Estonia, Belaurus, Latvia area). She is learning
Estonian. All six of us sisters share a room, which has actually worked out pretty well. We all
seem to get along very well.

In my district (a district is a small group of missionaries working or training together) there are
the five of us sisters going to Finland, and three Elders. We all seem to agree we must have
known each other before we came here; we just feel like we've always known each other.
(Sister is “Sisar” in Finnish and Elder is “Vanhin”).

Last Friday we started practice teaching in Finnish….. to a Finnish man named Esko, and
we weren't allowed to use any English. Just Finnish, and we'd only been learning Finnish for
24 hours or so. Since then we've had to teach him two more times, and have another lesson
scheduled for tonight. It's incredibly hard, but everyone has gotten better each time we've taught.
The hardest part for me is that I can't understand what he's saying back to us.

And you'll never guess where we went yesterday... as a district. So... we had to go to the Finnish
Consul to get our fingerprints and what not done for our Finnish visas... and it just so happens
that the Finnish Consul is in Los Angeles. So yesterday, my whole district got to go to L.A. for
the day! It was really fun. The visa stuff only took like half an hour but, we still had time before
our plane came to take us home. So we went to the Cheesecake Factory and ate outside right by
the ocean! It was Fantastic!

Oh, and I have a story to tell about yesterday morning too! So... the night before when we went
to bed one of the girls in my room was like "what would happen if the fire alarm went off? Could
we hear it?" Well.... The next morning at 4:15 guess what happened... That's right we were
rudely awakened by the fire alarm! All the sisters! I guess a pipe had burst and set off a sprinkler
in the basement. So everyone had to evacuate. The five of us sisters going to L.A. missed our
first bus to the airport, so we barely made our flight. The Cheesecake Factory was our first meal
of the day... at like 2 in the afternoon! Oh and we drove past the temple in L.A! Super cool!

Anyhow... The MTC is good, I work hard for 16 hours a day! It's crazy.

Sisar Kastendieck
p.s. will post pictures later, having a few technical difficulties.

*Note: Rachel would love to have letters from any and everyone! You can go to dearelder.com and write up an email which they will print off and send to her by noon the next day. It's FREE so you should take advantage of it while she's still in the MTC.