Letter dated 11Feb2013

[Dear family and friends, I am hoping this note finds you happy, safe and well. Here is the letter we received from Weston this week. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did! If you have a note you would like me to pass along to Weston, merely copy this note and I will get it to him! Thank you for your prayers of support! Weston's editor - BWS] Dear Family, I wish I could have seen all that snow you got! I think that´s the one thing that I´m missing here in Terrassa. Sure, it´s cold, but you need a bit of snow to brighten up your day! Besides, a snow day sound delightful! Besides that, we had a great week. We've been making progress with many people and it´s going to be a great next few weeks coming up in the very soon future. Right now Joan is making a ton of progress, it´s insane! Yesterday, on Sunday, we were sitting in church and they were just starting and Joan walked in and sat by us. As the program was going Joan took his phone out of his back-pack and it was receiving a call from Andres, the Ward Mission Leader´s son, who thought he was still at home and asleep. He turned to me and said ´´Pero estoy aquí´´ and I laughed! I was so impressed by his motivation to come to church all by himself and at the end of our Gospel Principles class our teacher asked him when his baptism would be and Joan replied ´´muy pronto!´´. Then, finally in the final hour, Andres told us about what happened in the Young Men´s class. They were talking about the temple and the temple trip that they would be having in March to go to Madrid and Joan said that he was excited to go. Andres told him that a person has to be baptized in order to go to the temple and Joan told him that he knew that! ^_^ Tight! For the mission we recently received many new sister missionaries and we´re still expecting tons of Elders as well. It´s going to be exciting around June because there is going to be about 35 new missionaries coming in at once! WHOA!! Now I've got some good news and some bad news... the bad news is that my companion got a really bad case of the flu at the end of this week so we had to take a moment to recharge. The good news is that I´m not sick! It´s crazy because every single family has been hit by the flu and the Spaniards are saying that it´s a bit of an epidemic going on. So here´s what I think: 1) I´m the most immune person in the world and I´m basically going to be like Will Smith in ´´I Am Legend´´ and I have nothing to worry about, or 2) All the diseases and sickness of all the people are going to catch up to me and I´m going to die of the black plague within the next week.... I like option 1 the most ;) So they also have a tight holiday here in Spain (and other Hispanic countries) called the Carnaval. It´s like Halloween but way tighter. We walked by the main street on Saturday night and the street was filled by people and nearly everybody was in some kind of costume. Sure, there wasn't much candy, but it was just a great excuses to put on some face paint and costumes and have fun with the city. Oh, and I´m doing a lot better in writing in my journal. I´m going to try to get every day from now on but we´ll see how that goes! I love you all so, so very much, it makes me sick (in a good way!) Élder Xander Weston Schindler P.S. We have to go back, Kate...