The MTC is like the Hotel California: You can come, but you can never leave.

February 02, 2018

The MTC is like the Hotel California: You can come, but you can never leave.

What up. I'm Austin, I'm 19 and I never learned how to read. (Mongolian)

Hey! So its P day, so basically Christmas. Everyone here lives for P day. Here's a little overview of my week.

Wednesday: Got here and it was pretty shocking. I got out of the car and was taken to my room, threw my bags on my bed and was rushed off to my classroom where my main teacher was. He didn's speak a single word of English, and only spoke to us in Mongolian. It was insane, I couldn't understand anything he was saying. After that we had some basic meetings about the rules and not to be stupid and met the MTC president who is pretty cool. He's a no nonsense kind of guy and talks exactly like George Bush. Huge texan accent. Then we went back to our room and met all of our zone which was super fun. We are with the Finnish and other scandinavian missionaries and they are all so freaking fun and cool, we get along like brothers. They all had us make a sauna with them and it was dope. They all leave within the next 3 weeks which is sad, theyre super fun and really good friends.

Thursday: Thursday was pretty normal, we had workshops all day and a little bit of mongolian but other than that it was normal. It snowed like 3 inches though so that was nice to have. Nothing interesting happened this day though.

Friday: This is where things started to get normal. We had our first excersize time which was just the best. I've had so much energy just eating and sitting all day long that I ran 3 miles on Friday around the track. The gym is cool. There's weight machines and a track upstairs from the basketball court and you can do everything without your companion so its nice to get alone time and just run or work out. It's seriously the best.

Saturday: This day was really the best of the preceding days. We had our normal schedule which is way nice. We wake up at 6:30 and go get breakfast from the sack breakfast line (you dont have to put on church clothes and we are all about not doing that) then we hangout until like 9, then we have excersize time until 10 then we get back and shower and do personal study. I like to call personal study "natural aspiration time." I'll leave it at that. But I'm reading Jesus the Christ and its amazing, everyone needs to read that book. It is incredible. So then we get lunch around noon and hangout and check the mail and then at 1:30 we have a class. That class is 3 hours long and we study mongolian the whole time (NO ENGLISH WHATSOEVER ITS SO HARD) and we are dead by the time class gets out. Then we get out, go get dinner and then go back to class by 6:15 where we have more mongolian language until 8:50. Then we get home and shower and go write in our journals and go to bed (or sauna if the day was hard).

Sunday: Sunday was good, we just had church and alot of meetings. Then at 7pm they let us watch "movies." I say that lightly because they're all church movies. way fun. But we watched this talk that elder bednar gave and it was incredible. He gave it at the MTC and you can only see it in the MTC. It was really thought provoking and informative, I wish you all could see it. Then we went home and fell asleep, Sunday's are extremely long

Monday: This is when real MTC life began. We had our normal schedule (see saturday) and then hit mongolian hard. This language is outrageously hard. My tongue is not made to make the sounds of this language. Class is so so so hard. But it was good, I'm learning so much. I was reading Jesus the Christ before class and decided to study Lehi's dream halfway through the chapter. Monday was pretty bland, not much happened.

Tuesday: I had to get my blood drawn to test me for AIDS. Some super old lady, who literally wore loops to see stuck me. She was shaking and was like "okay, almost missed but ill get it right next time." I thought I was gonna bleed out and die, it was super sketch, the MTC needs new nurses, she missed like 3 times. So that was fun. Class again was super hard, but its coming along, I can read now, but I sound like a kindergartner.

Wednesday: Yesterday was pretty normal as well. Although we made a sauna later that night because the day felt long. In class though I asked my teacher (Baatsaagan) what Mongols would say if they stubbed their toe and he told me to say (oh chauss) spelled (өө чаавс). He told us it means "oh dang". So I went to our next class and hit my funny bone and yelled it and my other teacher (a returned missionary) gasped so loud I thought she was gonna explode. She asked me "what did you just say?????" So I told her and she told me it means "oh sh*t" in Mongolian. so that was fun, Baatsaagan is a homie, teaching us the swear words. Needless to say that's the only word all of us remember.

Thursday: Today we woke up at 2 freaking am. Elder Scrimsher in our district woke up and thought an alarm went off so he woke everyone up, turns out it was 2 am so we were mad and then went back to bed. We woke up at 5:30 to get ready and we went to the temple which was nice, it was super relaxing. Being in the outside world is weird though, everyone was like "we could run to taco bell and be back soon" but we didn't.

That's my week! Hope everything is going good for everyone, love you all.

- Elder Schofield

I made him promise to send pictures of everything. Which explains the messy bed and food pictures. Enjoy!