August 13 2014

I've got into the routine of the MTC, but I am still extremely tired all the time. On Thursday Elder Van Quill randomly decided to invent fruit week. He vowed to eat nothing but fruit for a week (with a spoonful of peanut butter for protein) $5.00, ten stamps, and a Russian hymn book were on the line. He made it two meals... I have started trying to write down a quote of the day, the best ones for this week are "eminem is doctrine" "if I wasn't a Mormon I would be a jew" and "do you even conjugate bro?" we have been playing only foursquare and basketball during gym and I do pretty well in Basketball, I am really good at foursquare though. Probably because I am good at reading where people will go. and you have to try foursquare before you write it off, it actually gets really intense and competitive. My ankle still moves out of place pretty often playing basketball it's really annoying. I have started calling Elder Simonson DJ Kip Reid. because that's his first and middle name, but mostly because he is so hardcore. He reminds me of Timmy because he over analyzes everything is extremely sarcastic and is very smart. he also speaks sign language fluently because his parents are deaf. I have hung all of my letters and whatnot on the wall next to my bed and people always come in and ask me about it. I got a package from home on Monday, it had a rubik's cube, yo-yo, and some other stuff in it. I can already solve the first layer of the rubiks cube and I'm working on the middle. At first I could barely get  the yo-yo to come back to me but now I can do a couple tricks and actually look like I know what I'm doing. Elder Gardner and me made a bet that if there are ten or more LDS churches in the Vladivostok mission by the time we leave he has to give me $100 he even signed in my journal where I wrote it down. I had Elder Stuart draw a goat on the whiteboard then had someone come in from the hall to try to guess what it was and the guy guessed centaur. It was pretty funny. Russian is an extremely difficult language, there are either too many consonants or too many vowels in a word, never a good balance. You have to change the ending to every word in a sentence based of Gender, Number, and case. I haven't even really heard about cases before and there are six of them in Russian. but i am having a good time! I miss everyone back at home hope you are all having fun.

August 6th 2014

The MTC is crazy, they shuffle you through a maze of people and buildings as soon as you arrive to get you all set up, and as soon as I walked into the classroom the teacher started speaking Russian to me. I waited until he finished and he was just staring at me waiting for a reply and I just said I got nothin' man. I thought i was going to have a couple days then we would start speaking only Russian, but he hasn't even said a full sentence in English yet. Learning Russian makes learning Spanish seem sooo easy, I have already learned the cyrillic alphabet and can read at probably like a first grade pace (which is so much more impressive than it sounds). The food here is alright you just have to know which meals to avoid, for example the waffles, the problem is that they offer like four different options at every meal so i end up eating two lunches and three dinners every day. We have a pull up bar outside our Dorm though so I'm using that a lot. and I saw another elder bracing himself between the walls horizontally, so he wasn't touching the floor at all and i have started practicing that, I went up and over a doorway yesterday! My companion is Elder Van Quill he's from Provo and he is pretty cool. We work pretty well together and share a lot of interests. We both study Russian more than anyone else, but he is struggling more than me. He is improving though and we will both get it down by the end of September which seems like it will never come. The days here are so packed with stuff it seems like they never end, but then you forget everything the next day so it goes by fast in hindsight. I'm almost too busy to even miss anybody, except hank and Logan I think about them a lot. Hope everyone is having fun,

Sincerely, Tanner

When we have gym We play soccer, b-ball, foursquare, or lift weights. I'm surprised at how well I do in all the above sports, and at how competitive foursquare gets. I will probably go pro when I get home cuz I ball hard. We aren't supposed to chew gum in public or say p-day instead of preparation day, or say guys or man or anything like that you have to call everyone elder. The guys in my class (called a district) are pretty cool, when we have study time and are alone in the classroom we play b-ball, we made a hoop out of a wire hanger and balls out of paper and tape, or just throw a roll of tape and try to get it to hang on one of the hooks on the wall.

Elder Perry

I will be doing my best to post the most recent information from a Elder Perry as he spends two years serving the Lord. Feel free to leave comments for him and I will pass them along.