"Hold up --- that was Greek?"

If you couldn't tell, I struggled writing the last email. At a certain point in the MTC, the days start to blend together, and you are really doing nothing but classes, sports, eating, and devotionals. Not that it's always boring, but it can get repetitive and tbh, doesn't make an interesting email.

Soo... let's start off interesting.

Last Preperation Day, E. Huhtala and I went to the city of Chorely to pick up his suit that needed to be dry cleaned. Literally across the street, there was this little Greek place we had heard about. The food was wonderful, and the Γύρος was spot on. I guess in a few days, I know how well it compares to the real stuff though. HOWEVER, walking into that resturant, he and I heard quite a bit of talking from the kitchen. I had no idea what language they were speaking.
"What language is that?" I asked Huhtala.
"Greek."
"Oh crap"

At first this was discouraging, but we spoke to our MTC teacher, and she explain how even she has a hard time understanding those guys that speak Greek in that restaurant. Still, it was a funny exchange.

I will say, Greek as been improving this week, by quite a significance. It wasn't in the way I expected. Yes I learned more words this week and finished learning most of the basic grammar(if we spent time to learn all the grammar we would hear, we would never leave the MTC. The book is 600 pages of small print, man). However, I would say the number one thing we learned in the MTC is SYL-ing. "Speak Your Language" is an action where you use Greek as much as you can. I would say our district struggle doing it ALL the time, but we have greatly improved our ability to produce "Greek Salad". Greek Salad is taking whatever you know and throwing it into a sentence to comunicate and praying to God the Holy Ghost can make some sense of it to the other person. If I were to translate a sentence of Greek into English that was conjugated wrong, it would sound something like this, "I am baptized in Sunday and he pray to you know that right thing for you do?" Gonna be honest, if you don't know Greek grammar, this will make no sense at all, and barely makes sense for people that do. However, this is a direct translation because in Greek, you can't say a verb without saying what is doing that verb. "I know" is Ξέρω. "You know" is "Ξέρεις". If you look closely, it is the verb endings of the word that tell you who is saying something. You couldn't just say "Ξέρ" to say "know". As you might expect, it can be common to put the wrong ending on a word. This is something people speaking Greek and learning Greek expect, and so the sentence said above, could be re-interpretted as "Will you be baptized this Sunday and pray to know that is the right thing for you to do?" based on the context. You can't learn a language without making mistakes. Just speak it and get corrected. That is how you will learn. It was something I struggled with, but I feel more comfortable doing it now, and it's made Greek fun at times.

Once in class, I wanted Sister Hall to sit down in a chair as part of an object lesson. I had no idea how to say that, so I just gestured with my hands and said in Greek, "Chair? Please?" It was funny, but she knew what I meant, and that's what matters.

On a random note, the word "yeet", is pretty much a literal word in Greek they use to describe flight. So when a plane "flies", it is "yeeted". They have another word for "throw", so the only way to describe it is by using the word, "yeet".

There is an Italian Elder here and he doesn't speak much English we love him to death regardless, and we can still communicate well enough that Sister Lopez and he can argue if Italian Culture or Spanish Culture is better. I just found out he can understand French really well, so we've actually been able to communicate fairly well the last few days. He's been here a week and we just found out lol.

We do role plays with the teachers weekly, but I signed up to do on more than usual because Elder Pettitt and I are doing one in French tomorrow! We said it as a joke but we actually will be. We're actually super excited for it.

My district and I took pictures (Lumix Gx7 for the win) and they turned out awesome. Something that happened while we were taking pictures though, a lady came walking past us and stopped. She took a breath, and said, "My eye started bleeding yesterday, and my doctors appointment is in four days, so I thought I would go worship while I wait and hope everything goes alright." We told her that's a good idea if she can't get into the doctors yet, and I told her we'll pray for her. I don't think we'll ever meet her again.

Something interesting about missionary work in Greece is Jordan, Israel, and I think one other country was part of the mission. We would not send missionaries there, but the mission President and other authority and I think Senior Missionaries would travel there, but not to preach.

This MTC is the MTC of missionaries that should be okay with hearing like 6 different languages a day. There are so many languages floating around, it's almost like a traveler's dream. It's really taught me that everyone can get along, even if you don't share a common language. It's been a real humbling and cool experience.

I was talking to my teacher in a one on one discussion, and I expressed that I felt like I could have been doing so much better serving somewhere I could pick up the language better, but over time I felt that Greece is where I need to go. She told me in tears, "The Greeks have enough prideful missionaries, too concerned about the wrong things. Try to bring the positivity you've had in the MTC," basically. I don't know how much I can take credit for that, but I really think that God has helped me so much to change my outlook on things, or maybe strengthed it. I know that God will magnify our strengths or turn our weaknesses into strengths. If you serve a mission, don't forget that.

I hope everything is going well at home. I heard theres been snow! We got rain here instead lol.

Next email will be from Greece!

Elder Dylan Hansen

P.S. My email is hansen.dylan@missionary.org. There has been some mix ups here, so if anyone needs to double check, here it is.

PSS sorry for any misspellings, my keyboard doesn't tell me if something is spelled wrong and I don't have enough time to check.