Hi for this week. Here is a picture of the little car we drive back and forth. It is a diesel Opal and we haven't figured out the gas mileage yet. We park here along the street, between two trees. (Its a little tough to get into sometimes this time took me several trys but today I got it in the spot on the first try. rfh) This seems a good place to park because, for some reason, there are several places availabel at 10:00 in the morning and the trees provide shade for the care in the afternoon. On the right of the picture is where the train runs underground and it is coming up out of the ground and will be above the street level and we drive under neath it in some places. We then have about a mile to walk to the office, but it is level ground. It is so hard to park downtown, so we try to find the best place that we can. We would walk from the apartment but going back after we are in the office is all up hill and too hard for Roy. Right now this is hard enough for him and he is worn out when we get back to the apartment.

Here is one of the scooters we have to watch out for. They drive everywhere and they also have special places to park, because there are so many of them. It is quite funny as you are driving with two lanes, they whip in and out of the traffic even driving between the two cars, like they have their own lane right between the two cars. There are lots of round-abouts over here in Spain, probably all over Europe, but we can just turn around and go back the way we came if we missed a turn. Right now on this street they are setting up a festival, similar to Peach Days with rides, etc. The Elders told us that it was a very very BIG celebration for the town of Fuengirola, and we are going to miss this celebration. We have to go back to Madrid on Monday to get our residency papers. We are going to take the bullet train up to Madrid and back again.

Here is a picture of what looks like a bridge above the street, but it is really the train that is now up out of the ground, where in the middle of Fuengirola it goes underground. This is where we go around the round-about and go up the hill to our apartment. This will be one of the trains we ride on to go to Madrid. This train will take us to the city of Malaga where we will catch the bullet train to Madrid. We leave Monday morning around 9:00 and get into Malaga where we have to catch the bullet train at 11:00. We come back on Wednesday night. We hope that this time we will get to go to the Madrid temple.

This picture is taken from the balcony of our apartment. The bell has just rang and the students are going into the school. This looks like an elementary school, and right across the street kiddie-cornered is what looks like the high school, I think. At least lots of teenagers were lined up within the wall of the enclosure, so I assumed that is was a high school. After school there are always kids playing over there, either basketball or soccer. So it is a busy place most of the time.

I wanted to take a picture of the street cleaners that come

every morning and pick up the trash from the street. You can see that he has some branc

hes in the garbage there and has a broom and dustpan to pick up trash from the street. This was also taken from our balcony, looking down. They have to wear the bright green on their uniform. In fact people working on the roads wear the bright green also.

The elders told us that if you ever stop on the freeway you also need to wear bright green

vests so people can see you. The elders had some in their cars and I asked what they were for. I found that we have one in the glove box, it has to be readily available, so the elders had them on the back of the seats, the seats were wearing the vests.

We have spent the first week in the office, and sometimes we were really busy and other times not so busy. I think they are gradually giving us more to do. I spent two whole days going through the phone bill for the mission. I was supposed to track whether the elders were making calls to other missionaries outside their zone boundaries. Luckily I only had to look at the 3 digit numbers instead of the 9-10 digits. The missionaries have a network for their phones and they only have to use the 3-digit number to call each other. This also makes it handy for us, because we have to call the missionaries also. In fact, President Mellor asked us to call all the companionships and talk to them about the intervention of spreading the swine flu. So Roy and I each took half of the missionaries and called them. It took a couple of hours to do that, but it was nice chatting with the missionaries and they are so positive about the missionary work where they were working. Several had "investigadores" who had baptismal dates.

We are excited to hear conference. We are going up to the mission home Saturday afternoon to hear the 10:00 Saturday morning session. If we want to hear the others we will have to go on the internet to here them or go over to the Stake Center in Malaga.

President and Sister Mellor took us out to lunch on Wedensday. The restaurant was one they were familer with in another town and has only been in Fuengirola about a month. We had a salad and a Baja Wrap they were both very tasty. We had auga con gas to drink. this is actually cabonated mineral water and tasted a little like alkaseltzer (a little more so than Sprite) but one could get used to it.

This is our newest grandchild. Her name is Mahala Rae Fisher. She was born last Sunday and we got to see her before we left for Spain. She is the daughter of Reg and Amber Fisher and she weighed 8 lbs. 9 oz. and 20 1/2 inches long. We I talked to Amber today, she said everything was going fine and that her kids really missed her while she was in the hospital. We are so glad that she is here and that she is healthy. This makes 5 children for Reg and Amber, 3 boys and 2 girls.

We went to church this morning to the English branch, it is a very little branch, about 14 members, but this seems like it is and international branch. Members from all over the world go there. We had about 3-4 people from the Philipines there, a family from Finland and their daughter and son-in-law and family were there. A couple from England have been there for 7 1/2 years and their kids have been going to school here. Their oldest boy is in Australia going to a music school and will be filling out his papers soon to go on a mission. There was a man from Germany, who had been there last week and will be moving his wife down here at the end of the month. I spent a lot of time speaking with him in German, but his English is getting better. He says his wife speaks better English, but he didn't learn it in school. We met about 30 minutes before the Spanish Ward meets so they overlap. We met several Spanish members also. The branch president is from Colorado, but married a Spanish lady. They plan to move back to the states within the next month. She is learning English and they have a 3 month old baby girl. There were a couple of other couples from England also. We have been invited to attend a family home evening with some of the members tomorrow evening. We will spend our first full day in the office tomorrow.

This is a picture of the school that is below our apartment window. It isn't a very big school but you can see the kids during their play time. On Saturday there were a lot of kids over there playing, some of them older than the school children. To the right of the picture there is a small farmyard with a couple of roosters and geese that are noisy in the morning, but not as noisy as the garbage truck that comes at 1:30 a.m. This has woken us up a couple of times and we couldn't go back to sleep for an hour or so, so have called Andrea and Dennis and Kathleen. This magic jack works really nifty for us, we just have to remember that it is 8 hours early here.