Here are some excerpts from Mitchell’s last letter to me, I hope you enjoy them!
Right now I’m in a place called Flegreo which means field in a place called Napoli, or Naples. Well this place is the most dangerous place in all of Italia pretty much. It has a Mexico look. Everything looks trashy on the outside but it’s nice on the inside. Really everything is beautiful here. It’s just a little trashy (I’ll explain more later) and just interesting.
Well the trash rarely gets disposed of here. There are two mafias: one collects the trash and the other has land to bury it on. They are currently disagreeing so trash gets burned…eventually. There is graffiti all over everything. That’s really the only thing I don’t like, other than that everything is incredible. I live in an apartment with three other missionari. It’s pretty cool. We have a pretty nice apartment. It’s hard to describe, but I will take pictures. Our branch is very cool. The building is incredible. It’s a small, three-story building. Top has offices and classrooms, middle has classrooms. The bottom is the chapel. From the building you can see the Napoli bay and some islands. It’s very incredible. Well the people here are awesome. They are a lot nice than the people in the United States. They are very lazy though. Work here is scarce, but ya. Can’t really explain it that well.
The food here is incredible! Everything and I mean everything, is better. Some examples…the Fanta is made with real orange juice. The pizza and ice cream is very good as well.
Well some more about the branch. The branch is ½ Italiano and ½ English. There is a NATO base here so that’s why we get the English people.
So I have a much easier time sleeping out here. No one snores and we are all pretty tired when we return home from walking all day. So on my first p-day here we went to the castle on Monte Sonto. The name of the castle is Elmo. We really couldn’t see much of it out of the top. The top was quite amazing though. You could see all of Napoli (both sides of the bay), you could see Pompeii and most importantly, Mount Vesuvius…Then we walked around downtown Napoli for a bit. There is good shopping there. I’m scared to take you there for the fear that we won’t have any money after. Just kidding :)
Well I did buy three ties for three euros which was really cheap. Napoli is a very beautiful place. However, I have to drink bottled water here and you really can’t go swimming in the bay because of pollution.
I would tell you about our progressing investigators but we really don’t have any at the moment. We do a lot of finding work which isn’t bad because everyone knows who we are. In a way, we’re the most popular people in Napoli.
We are often confused for TJ’s or Jehovah’s witnesses which sucks cause people here hate them. Also gives us the chance to explain who we are and what we’re doing. A lot of people have respect for us and the fact that we have given up so much to be out here. Like we ran into two old guys who loved us for that. One of them invited us to his restaurant which might be the nicest in Napoli for free gelato. So we are doing that on Saturday after old guys cook for us in the park.
The language is coming along alright. i just have a difficult time understanding what they are saying. They speak with a thick accent and ya. The language is coming along. Words that connect sentences and nouns I have a hard time with. Verbs not so much.
So onto some people we’ve met…okay the most interesting person I have met is probably Enzo. He is about 70 years old, beat me in arm wrestling. Well he is very cool…people in Italia are honest and I love it. We don’t teach him yet, but we are going over to his house tomorrow for lunch and we’ll see where that goes. Well, he is short and has short arms, but he moved 200kg oil barrels for 42 years so I am not embarrassed to have lost to him. We just ran into him one day and I’m excited to see him again. He was an awesome guy to talk to.
I can’t believe I’ve been here for a week now. Well, I will tell my parents all about my first day here in the letter after this one. I will also tell them about the kids here. I just need to tell them stories.
So here is our new schedule here…I wake up at 6:30 to exercise and eat. From that time until about 8 AM I have to get ready. At 8 AM I have personal study where I mostly just read the book of Mormon. At 9 I have companionship study. We are out the door by ten. Then we go around talking to people till 1 or 2 PM. After which we have an hour for lunch and another hour for language study. It doesn’t matter if we were out during that time because people take lunch between 12-4 PM anyways. Well so we go back out after lunch and teach people or find more people. We do that until about 9 PM and then we came back and had the most incredible cheese pizza for dinner. They are incredible.
…there are street vendors all over the place. This place is awesome. So we mostly walk or ride buses/trains everywhere here. We get a monthly bus pass that is very nice. Things are very difficult and different here. We really couldn’t understand the culture here...as of tomorrow, 1/10th of my mission will be complete. Not that I’m counting down the days, more counting up!
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