Monday, January 13, 2014

Blake was transfered to Santander on the Atlantic Coast. He took a 6 hour train ride to Bilbao and then 2 hours on the bus. He loves it!!

This is now the up to date letters:


Hey,
 
Holy cow Santander is beautiful. It isn´t huge like Barcelona but there are still tons of people here. So we missed the train and we went back to the piso I was in which is on the other side of Barcelona from the train station so we just chilled there over night and woke up at like 5 to get to the train station to catch our train. Dragging luggage through the metro system stinks and we had a 6 hour train ride to Bilbao then we had a two hour bus ride to Santander. It was a freaking long day and dealing with bags stinks. I don´t know how people do it here. I guess they just don´t move when they find a place they really like. My companions name is Elder Perez and he is from Chile so is the other guy I came here with his name is Elder Soumartt. The other guy I live with is Elder Magallanes. He is from Argentina. they understand some English but really it´s only Spanish that is spoken so sometimes it is difficult to communicate but not that bad. The best part about this place is that they only speak Spanish here none of the other weird languages they have in Spain. 

You guys can just send a package to the office in Barcelona and it will get to me. I might not have it for my birthday but I will at least have it two weeks after which isn´t a big deal. I just don´t want to have to deal with a package coming to my piso. The piso I am in is huge compared to the last one. The only thing is that it is super old even though the building looks brand new. 

Wow the ward here in Santander is amazing. the members here are the best. I loved Barcelona but I love Santander even more. We somehow fit 130 members into a little tiny branch building form when the ward use to be a branch. lucky for them the are starting to build a chapel in April  I think. the Bishop is a Spaniard which is really hard to find around here. There aren´t to many Spaniards in the church. 

We walk everywhere here and to get to the pueblos we take buses when we have money for it but lucky we can get it reimbursed or we would run out of money. On the bus ride out here form Bilbao it was along the coast the whole way so it was really awesome. We have to take a bus twice a month to Bilbao to go for zone confrence and meetings with president. 

The thing about Santander is that there are a ton of menos activos so we visit a ton of members and recent converts and try to keep people coming. so we really haven´t taught like lessons to investigators this last week but we do have a few lined up for this week. but we stay really busy. like yesterday we left piso at 9 to pick some people up and get them to church and we didn´t get back till 10. we never had time to go back to piso. Santander is the perfect example for how missionary´s and the ward need to work together.

I love that book you guys sent me. I think it is called something about the atonement I can´t remember how it is called  but it has some good stuff in it that makes you think about what Jesus did for us and how much are Father in Heaven and Jesus Christ love us.

Love Elder Blake Billingsley

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