I'm scared of dogs

Yes. I will not lie, the dogs in this new area are huge and mean, and I'm not kidding every time I walk past a dog I get nervous cause they start barking and following you. The other day we were walking and this huge Dalmatian starts charging at me and for half a second I was ready to fight to the death and I backed up into the road and nearly got killed by a combi. Luckily the dog was a coward and preferred just to bark but I literally have never wanted to fight an animal so much in my life.

Anyway. Hello.

As I commented the last week, here I am in a new area. It's called Melchor Ocampo. Let me describe it a little bit. It's a lot older and has a lot more variety than my last area. It has deep catholic roots and there's some really old cool churches. This presents a problem. It means that the people here are kinda mean. We knock a lot of doors and contact a lot in the street and sometimes I really have to hold my tongue. Anyway let's talk about the week.

I arrived on Monday and the house is bigger than my last one and has a literal organ (the instrument) it also has hot water BUT the house often runs out. We have a water tank we can fill with a switch but sometimes even that doesn't work so we go days without water sometimes. its also extremely cold in the house. My new comps names Elder Alvarez from Oaxaca. I got in late and we went to the church. We've got a family history center with 5 computers with touch screens so that's cool. We then started walking around to contact in the street. There's this insane dog that loves the missionaries names Duke and he'll jump on you and follow you for miles unless you throw him a rock  which he likes for some reason. 

Tuesday was district council and all that fun stuff. We walked a lot and the streets here are really tight with a ton of shops and crazy driving. There's a lot of super fancy rich houses here but you can't see what they look like cause they all have huge gates. The day we spent walking a ton and it was kind of a blur cause I still didn’t know the area very well. Theres a ton of variety here. Huge farm fields, extremely busy streets, small streets, large streets, a ton of hills, a lot of small old houses, and a lot of super rich houses also. The areas halfway in between being extremely old and really new.

On Wednesday we walked a lot too. We taught a few lessons, the problem is, is that I still don't know a lot of peoples names. We did have one cool experience when we walking out of the church, and some guy we didn't know ran up to us asking for a blessing with oil. (he wasn't a member) we gave him one and then we taught and he accepted a baptism date. That was all, but maybe keep an eye on that guy. his name is Luis I think. In the area also, there's a super fancy bakery with ice cream so we went and got some. It was a couple hours later that I had realized I had lost my wallet and that I had probably left it at the bakery cause we had looked in the church and it wasn't there. I was so scared to tell president I had lost my mission card cause he hangs missionaries for that kind of stuff so I decided not to tell him. 
The next day we went to the church and the wallet was just laying on the floor and I praised the heavens (literally) that I didn't have to tell president. We had our first exchanges of the transfer and I went with Elder Larson. As you can tell by the name, he’s a white guy too and I suppose people here don't take kindly to us "Mormons" and the fact were both just two gringos walking around. All of our lessons fell in the last minute and we didn't have keys to the church so we had no choice but to contact and knock some doors, which Im really not any good at. As I had mentioned before. this place has DEEP catholic routes so the first 3 doors we knocked were catholics who were rude to us, then we approached an old man on a bike (theres a lot of those here) who started bashing us about the old testament or something. We then tried to knock some rich houses and I turned to Elder Larsen and said if we got a contact from one of these houses we’d be the first missionaries to ever successfully contact a rich guy. (No one answered). After, we went to a plaza by one of the old churches and tried contacting there but  some guy flat out ignored us and the other lady gave us a good old fashioned "no". After all that success we felt bad for ourselves and went to buy some ice cream. 

Friday was new years eve so there was a lot of fireworks and more being rejected in the street. We did eat with a nicer old woman and my companion assured me she was a member but in her house she had a bunch of crosses, paintings of the virgin and a large photo of the pope on her wall, so that was interesting.

Saturday was new years day and there was a TON of drunk guys lighting off fireworks at all hours of the day (even like 10 in the morning) the problem with these fireworks is that they're literally just meant to be loud to bug people and some of the guys go into super crowded plazas and light them off or in the middle of the road and if your standing next to them it literally brings physical pain to your ear drums. We got a call that night from a member who sent us a reference and the member who sent it just so happened to be one of my recent converts that I had baptized not even a month back so it was cool to get to talk to her for a second. 

Sunday we made it late to church cause we had had more water problems that morning. it was only 1 hour for some reason and after we taught a sick woman named Elizabeth. We gave her a blessing and the member who was with us during the lesson gave me a Las Vegas Raiders scarf. It was nice and for some reason he gives NFL scarves to all the new missionaries. We ate lunch that day with the family of the Stake President and he literally didn’t say a word to us the whole meal cause I think he’s had problems with recent missionaries so that was awkward. 

Anyway thats all I got today I’ll talk more about the people were teaching next week when Im a bit more familiar with everything. see ya.
I'm writing this on our computer so I literally have 0 pictures :/