Canada

Hows it going aye? I've been in Canada only for a day and i've already heard quite a few good ayes, including a drive bye aye.

My flight was a straight through flight to Toronto, about 3 hours. We were greated by alot of friendly people in SLC and on the flight including the Toronto Temple president who I was able to talk to on the shuttle from the plane. (We got off the plane on stairs - classic). Then we met the Mission President who helped me and two other Elders who had a problem with an unfriendly immigration officer. He was the only officer who wouldn't mark a religous exemption on our visas so that we could qualify for health care.

The city of Toronto is very cool, it really does have and incredible amount of diversity. The Assitants to the President were telling us that even if you see someone in the city who you might think is an authentic canadian it will turn out that he is from the Ukraine or Denmark. After eating at a Brazilian bakery we went to a Baptism which was being held in a Mandarin Spanish and English speaking ward. In the mission there are about alot of Mandarin speaking missionaries, five cantonese speaking, two portuguese, alot of spanish, a good amount speaking korean, alot of english, and two who are learning farsee in the mission.

After staying the night in the Mission home we went to the Stake Center for orientation the stake center was adapted from a planned office building and is three stories high, the second largest in north america. The only larger one is apparently in Vancouver and has pull out bleacher seating. I was assigned my first companion, Elder Brennan from Schoffield, England. They then shipped me 4 hours out to almost the very east of the mission to the canadian countryside where it is almost all english speaking and looks alot like virginia (trees) although i'll have to send you a picture of the penitentiary which looks like a castle. My area is called Cataraqui, not sure about the spelling, and is in Kingston. Kingston is apparently where all the prisons are in Canada.

My apartment is a small basement with two rooms and a washroom (restroom). My bed is a box springs and mattress lieing on the floor the Kitchen is tiny with a tiny stove and a tiny refrigerator. I'll be sending some pictures soon to show you. Anyways I'm pretty excited to get to work. I haven't really done anything yet but i'm teaching my first lesson in the field tonight as well as going tracting. So I'll e-mail an update next week.
Love Josh


p.s. if that isn't actually lindsey's address forward it i think it is but i forgot to bring her letter where she sent it to me.