Estoy resfriadaaaa :(

Apparently my body doesn´t respond well to mission life, because I am sick again! This time it´s a cold that is still going strong...It started on Thursday. But I´ll survive of course, people keep telling me to rest so I´ve started to listen to them. But the whole medicine thing is too much bother to worry about here. 

Anyway, I still love Málaga and our ward. It´s just great. We even had ward council yesterday so life doesn´t get much better than this haha. So as for the Romanians...I have no idea what is going on exactly. On Tuesday we paid a surprise visit in the morning since the Sunday visit fell through. It was just Andrea there and so I was like well she doesn´t understand enough Spanish for us to teach the Plan of Salvation so we might as well just talk about baptism. So I asked her if she knew the word and she said no. Ok. I tried explaining it with my hands in other words. She thought I was talking about fishing. Perfect. I finally got her to understand what it was and then asked her if she would be baptized when she knows what we´ve taught her is true, and she said "creo, creo" (I believe, I believe) while pointing to the BOM. So we committed her to the 30th of November and set up a return appointment. We walked away hoping she actually understood haha but also amazed are her willingness despite the language and reading barrier. When we went back for the return appointment with Lorena (a 10 yr old member) the family members wouldn´t answer...umm yeah. So we are going to try and go back when only Andrea is there in the mornings and see what happens. We´ve also started teaching a woman from the Ukraine named Lina so we´ll see what happens with her! Again, we seem to only teach people from other non-Spanish speaking countries here oddly enough. 

Let´s see, not a lot of interesting things happened this week. Oh wait, I almost forgot our lesson with the jehovah´s witness, Marcelo! I told you about him last time but we taught him again with the help of a member and this time the topic was the Plan of Salvation. First of all you have to understand that he a bit on the older side and has some health problems and that I made sure we had really good scriptural references to back us up. So when we showed him certain verses in the Bible that he didn´t know existed about the spirit world and baptisms for the dead he started getting a bit sweaty and nervous and was holding his heart. And I was sitting there like uhhh I really hope he doesn´t die right here in front of us while talking about the plan of salvation. We stopped short for his benefit without getting to talk about the 3 kingdoms of glory, but I don´t think we´ll be going back again. He wouldn´t let us pray again but this time his excuse was because we are women...yeahhh.

So last Pday we went to the Catholic Cathedral in central Málaga. It was funny because they weren´t going to let us in for free at first because we technically aren´t what they recognize as "priests" or "clergy", but one of the elders from our group was like, well in our church we are priests sooo...and then we got in for free. The architecture was gorgeous of course, like all of them are, but the absence of the spirit was definitely notable. 

Anyway, today we won´t do much since I am sick but I do have a request from any of you wonderful family members who wants to do research for me! I wanna go to the Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga and another art museum with the initials MAUS to see a Shepard Fairey exhibit if I can get permission...so will someone email me the addresses, entrance fees, and phone numbers please?? ¡Gracías!

Love you all and have a good week! Also if you want longer responses to your emails, send me handwritten letters instead ;)

Hna Thompson

ps photos!

1. and 2. inside and outside of the cathedral

3. and Michael (recent convert) and I on the exercise equipment they have out in the public parks here haha.