Vila Sônia - Week 3

Hey everyone! This week saw some pretty good stuff happen over here. At the end of p-day last week, we stopped by this ice cream place that we passed by. And they have brigadeiro-flavored ice cream! Which made me so happy. They also have a flavor called...leite condensado! Which is condensed milk, and so needless to say I'm eager to try it.

Then on Tuesday, we did splits with the assistants to the mission president, just me and my companion. Which means that I went with one of the assistants, and my companion went with the other, for the whole day. So I had to take the lead, which I most definitely was not prepared to do. I couldn't really find my way around our area that well, and then I also tried to lead in the lessons. Needless to say, the assistant ended up taking over in each of our lessons. But that's alright, I've still got time. The splits went well, overall.
 

Chocolate sonho

Then on Wednesday, we realized that we had a mini-bakery right across from our house. I'm not sure how we hadn't taken advantage of it before, but now it's pretty much our go-to breakfast place. They sell these big cream-filled bread things for 1,75ish. With coconut sprinkles on top. They're amazing. And it's called a sonho, which means dream :) It's like an enormous cream filled donut pretty much. We had some good lessons as well. We have a good group of investigators, we just need to have more lessons with them. 

On Thursday, our sink fell. So that's fun. It's still pretty much held up by the piping, but it's detached from the counter. So we need to fix that. Also, it was 92 degrees in our house that night, which was great. On Friday, we did splits again, but this time just with the Brazilian Elders in our district. The missionary that I went with was really hard to understand, so we didn't do a lot of talking. But, we got two more people to mark a baptismal date! So we have Vicente, who said that he will get baptized on the 21st (which can actually happen, since he came to church on Sunday!), and then Terazinha, Antonio, and Alfonso for the 28th. Stuff is getting a lot more exciting.

On Saturday, Carneval started. Which means that we go back to the house at 5 in the afternoon. However, I haven't heard or seen anything remotely related to Carneval ever since it started. Before it started, we saw people working on the crazy floats close to our house, but then they took them away when it started, and so we haven't seen anything. Little bit anticlimactic.

On Sunday, the normal pianist wasn't there (the youth had a camp, so all the youth and a lot of the adult leaders were gone) so I had to do a little bit of sight-reading, which was good for me. And I also helped Elder Zenger, the other American that is living with us, with some piano stuff that he's working on. I've had basically no time to practice piano since I arrived, which is kinda bad. We have this one older lady in our branch who insists on kissing everybody's hands in lieu of a handshake, it's really funny. She doesn't actually kiss your hand, it's kinda the same thing as the women greeting each other with "kisses" on the cheek. It's so awkward though :) And she always calls us "meus anjos" [my angels] or "querido" [beloved] and stuff like that.

Also an interesting thing about the language, I'm starting to notice that the learning process is so much different from when I was doing German. Stuff is starting to kinda make sense in and of itself, with little to no relation to English. Whereas with German, it was always very much tied to English. So I guess I'm learning Portuguese a little more organically, which would make sense. It's cool to think that I'm doing what you did, Dad, and I bet a lot of stuff hasn't changed that much. Did you ride the Onibus a lot? Because they are ridiculous. It's like a roller coaster :)

As far as food, it's pretty much always rice and beans, with some sort of pasta, and meat, chicken or otherwise. And salad too, usually. It's all really good. And the deserts are awesome, yesterday we had homemade Snickers ice cream :) We don't really tend to do meals at home. And sometimes Irmã Barbara does dinner for us, if we need it.


Missionary Lunches

And I thought about you a lot this week, Mom, with the traffic here. You'd freak out a lot, with how close everybody gets, and how close we get to cars/motorcycles when we're walking around :) But don't worry about me, I promise to not get hit by a car :) Happy birthday tomorrow, and it's my two-month anniversary thing too! Not to take away from your special day, yours is better :)

But that's it for this week. We're teaching a lot of people, they just need to start fulfilling their commitments. Everything is going well, though, and the time is going pretty fast. Thanks everyone for your support!

Love,
Elder Bratsman