8-28-07

Hello my family and other peoples.

 

I've been in Brazil for a week now.  My P-days are on Tuesdays.  We went to the Campinas temple this morning.  They say that between the Campinas and São Paulo temples, we get to go about 7 times while we are in the CTM.

All we do here is eat, sleep, and study.  Because São Paulo is pretty densely populated, it's built vertically.  Up the stairs, and down the stairs, eat, and sleep, and study.  But really, I enjoy being here a lot.

The CTM here is a lot better than the MTC in Provo, because we jump right into the language and the culture.  We go proselyting in Portuguese in 2 weeks.

We eat Brazilian food here, and then maybe once a week, they make an attempt on something American.  Besides that, we eat rice and beans pretty much every meal, but sometimes it’s beans and rice.  They do have a lot of meat and fruit as well.  The recommended rule here is to eat different 7 colors of fruits and vegetables each day.

My companion is Elder Arslanian.  He's way awesome.  He just became our district leader for while we're here.  I'm his assistant, and so I've had to learn how to remind him to do things instead of the other way around.

Oh, by the way, Arslanian means "Son of the lion" - it's Armenian.  He's from Nampa, Idaho.  His ancestors were converted and came to America about 100 years ago.  Right after they left, their village was massacred, so the gospel literally saved their lives.

The uncle of one of the guys in my room, Elder Christensen, was my Book of Mormon teacher at BYU-Idaho.  My companion in that class, Elder Newby, is also here.  He's going to the Amazon and leaves in just a week or two.

I'm still trying to find one more Elder to sing barbershop on P-days with a few of us.  It just doesn't work with 3 parts.

MY companion and I went around to a few shops today (yep, they actually let us out once a week).  We did pretty good in our broken Portuguese.

I haven't seen any blue sky since we got here.  When we flew in, we couldn't even see the city because of the cloud cover.  It was like a big sea of white clouds, and then we went down into them.  But, now that we're under the clouds (except most of it is pollution), we've only seen grey skies.

Tudo bem.

I love you all

Love, me,

Elder Allred