The Yellow Canary

 My favorite place in Montreal. The fruit market:)

Me and Nueces in the Fruit Market

Bonjour! 

It is a cold chilly cloudy day here in Canada. Actually this morning it was blue and sunny and then we went into Walmart for like 20 minutes and wa-BAM! It was gloomy and cloudy. Sister Lopez was not amused, nor was I. What's the deal Canada?  It might be time to start praying for blue skies again. 

This was a pretty good week, but as you can see from my title we ran into a lot of nueces (Translation: crazy people). In my attempt to be multilingual I was speaking to Sister Lopez the other day and I was trying to tell her she was nuts and instead it came out in Spanish so I said, "Tu eres nueces!" She thought it was so funny that we've been saying it all week. And then we started calling all of the crazy people we saw nueces on the metro, on the streets, in our mission:) Nueces everywhere. Sometimes the nueces are funny but a lot of the times their craziness is just more weird. Sister L and I decided to start a novela when we get home called "Nueces enomoradas" staring William Carlos Omar Levy Ricardo Romero. Yeah. We're s

Language has been a topic of comedy here. The other day Sister L and I were talking and she said, "I think I sound like Encarnacion when I speak English." To be honest I've never actually thought about it so when she said it I started laughing super hard because it's kind of true. And so all week we've been singing the Encarnacion song from Nacho Libre. I've also been making her say "My favorite animal is puppies." Not to worry though I've had my fair share of English mess ups this week. For example the other day we went to buy some frozen pizzas at the store as a district for lunch. And I was walking across the street and this guy walks by and said something to me and I laughed and smiled because I had no idea what he said. And then I turned to one of the French Elders and said, "What did he say?" And he looked at me like I was nuts and said, "Pizza's ready." And I looked at him like he was nuts and said, "What does that mean? Is it like a French thing?" And he said, "No. It's English. It means the Pizza is ready." Yeah. I needed the Frenchie to explain that to me. And on Saturday Sister L and I went to find a referral we received by mail that only had a street but no number. So we decided to knock the whole street. So, people would open then door and we would say "Bonjour nous cherchons pour Loulou Tarascus?" And if they didn't know what we were talking about we would contact them. There was this little old lady who opened the door and here is Quebec there are a lot of apartments that have two doors and to get to the actual apartment you have to walk up a hallway of stairs so we usually just yell from the bottom. Since the lady was old I yelled really loud, "BON-JOUR! nous cher-CHONS pour  Lou-LOU TARASCUS!" And in English she said, "What?" So I Yelled it louder "NOUS CHER-CHONS POUR LOU-LOU-TA-RAS-CUS!" By this point Sister Lopez is laughing super hard and trying to tell me that this lady is actually speaking in English. Yeah. I'm having a hard time. 

We've been doing a lot of member work in this ward. So, we've tried to visit every member in our ward starting with letter A. We've found out where a lot of members don't live anymore. But my favorite was the other day we went to find this older Quebecoise sister and so we walk up to this door and ring the bell and I'm looking in through the window and I see all of these picture of this Asian couple on the wall and I look at Sister Lopez like "Mayday Mayday!" But she was already asking this crazy Asian lady if she was Soeur Bougie but she didn't speak English so we both ended up laughing really hard and tried to contact her. Fail. 

Oh good news. We didn't get blown away in the Hurricane winds last week. But we thought we were going to. I've gained weight, but I guess not enough because Sister L and I were fighting the gale force winds everywhere we went. It did not do good things for my hair. 

Every Thursday night we have the honor of teaching the one and only Daniel Bolduc English class. Daniel is member of our ward. He's a real life Ghostbuster. Really. He told Sister C he does a Ghost check on the church once a week. This week for English class he wanted to talk about idioms. Embarrassing fact I've learned more about English than I ever knew before teaching English class. Like I had no idea that idioms were called idioms. So he asked me to write some on the board and explain them. So I did a couple and the one of the Elders started writing some other ones on the board....So I decided to be funny and started making up idioms. Like "It's like two pirates in a supermarket." It means that it's pretty crazy or unusual. Also, "It's like trying to perform a root canal on a walrus." It means it's a really difficult or big job. So if you hear any of these floating around 2 language English speakers you know who to thank.

This week my District Leader gave us this really amazing talk by Elder Bednar  called "The Atonement: And the journey of Mortality" to study for the week. I've already read it 4 times. It's amazing. Elder Bednar talks about how the Atonement wasn't created to just make bad men good but good men better, and how we can use the Atonement for more than just repenting of our sins. He stresses how we can use the Atonement not to remove us from the circumstances we are in but to use it to give us the power to change our circumstances. My favorite quote says, "As you and I come to understand and employ the enabling power of the Atonement in our personal lives, we will pray and seek for strength to change our circumstances rather than praying for our circumstances to be changed." Every time I think I understand the Atonement I realize there is still so much to learn. But what I do know is that the Lord will strengthen us if we ask Him. 

I hope you have a great week and stay warm! We will be starting our seven-layer bean dip bundling this week! 1 degree today! 

I love you!

Bisous Bisous!

Soeur Perkins