We had a nice week these past 7 days. The biggest thing that happened was that I visited the city of Zamora for the first time for exchanges with the missionaries there. They're finding a lot of people to teach there, so for now things are looking good for opening a group there, which is what comes before a branch. It's definitely interesting for them to work in a city where there's only 5 members, a family who comes to the Salamanca branch every Sunday. In the day that I was there, we helped a family from Israel by translating from broken English to Spanish to order at Domino's at lunch, met with a Brazilian college student, and talked to a lot of people on the street. I was with our district leader Elder Trantham, who is near the end of his mission. He is a very good missionary and has learned a lot and is helping me and Elder Santiago a lot, since we're both fairly new in the mission.
Today was another holiday here in Spain, called Lunes de las Aguas (Monday of the Waters). I'm not sure exactly how it got started, we've heard various stories, but basically what they do to celebrate it is everyone takes the day off of work and has a picnic down by the river. It's also traditional for everyone to eat an hornazo, which is a pastry that's originally from Salamanca. Since today was our p-day, we went down by the river and saw a ton of college students hanging out on the grass by the river. We realized that most people just eat hornazo at home and all the college students go there for a huge social event that involves a lot of substances that are contrary to the word of wisdom. We didn't stay too long there, and went back to our apartment and ate our own hornazo.
Cool spiritual experience this week: yesterday evening we were talking to people on the street, and even though we were meeting a good amount of tourists from America which was kind of cool, we weren't talking about the gospel too much. We had a dinner appointment, and as we were on our way there, we saw a guy who plays soccer with us a lot, and he was with his family. His mom, him, and 3 younger siblings were there. We didn't think he had too much interest in religious subjects, but when we saw him he was like "hey, these are the missionaries" to his mom, and introduced us all. Then his mom said "anytime you guys want, you're welcome in our home. Julio (the guy who plays soccer with us) has told us a lot about you." We were in the middle of a busy sidewalk, but as we were walking away we were kind of shocked because of how nice they were and that they actually invited us over. We're planning on talking to Julio at soccer this week to figure out when, but it was an awesome experience to see how the Lord blesses us in unexpected ways for working hard.
I hope you all have an enjoyable week!
Love,
Elder Dobbs
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