Oh my!

                                                              Our lovely bathroom

The front of our house

On the metro

This week. Was crazy.

First of all. The weather in São Paulo is insane. It literally changes seasons several times a day. And since it takes over an hour to get to our house from our area, we have to either carry around our cloest, or stash clothes at different members´ homes.

This week it was like 90 degrees when we left our house, but I carried around a jacket all day, just in case. Then, after lunch, we walk outside and it´s rainy, windy, and about 50 degrees. What? The lady´s daughter lent us some coats, but she´s Brazillian. So the sleeves were about 5 inches too short, I could only raise my arms straight in front of me and it wouldn´t button all the way. Sister Sorensen was in the same boat. Aren´t you glad that we´re the ones out here representing the church? Luckily, nobody would talk to us that day. Or that week.

My favorite contacts from this week were The Buddhist, and the 7th Day Adventist.

7th Day Man: we walk up, start talking to him and he asks us what day we have our meetings. We said Sunday, and he went into a 5 minute rant about the Sabbath Day being Saturday and we didn´t follow the Bible. Sister Sorensen literally only got to say one word ("yes") before he stormed off yelling a very sarcastic "Good Luck". If I hadn´t been so cold, I might have had the energy to be offended. Luckily, we just laughed and kept walking.

Buddhist: very nice, very friendly, very courteously blowing the smoke from his cigarette DOWNWIND from us. Then, in the middle of the conversation, literally in the middle of the sentence, he said "Good night" and walked off. Okay....

Oh yeah. I also got to go on a field trip to the Federal Police station this week. They gave me a paper so I won´t get deported. Only it took 7 hours to get that stupid piece of paper, so someone in authority had better ask to see it at some point. It wasn´t all bad though, because my pride was healed a little bit. It´s very devastating to not know what´s going on at all times. Especially to someone as nosy as myself. So I was kind of dejected and not listening to Sister Sorensen when she said I was learning Portuguese faster than anyone else she´d ever trained. But then I got to go on the field trip to the police station with all the other Americans that came in the same day I did........when I got back to my area I was like: "Sister Sorensen? You´re right. I AM really smart." I may still sound like a gringa, but I´m not the worst one out there. :) You´d think I´d learn some humilty here, right? Not yet I guess.

Apparently Sister Sorensen has an uncle that she´s never met that lives outside the mission, but still in São Paulo. We get to go visit him sometime this week. And apparently he lives in the rich part of São Paulo (hence, not in our mission) so we went and bought nicer clothes today. Maybe they´ll have peanut butter.

We had lunch with a richer couple yesterday and they brought out peanut butter, Hershey´s chocolate syrup, and maple syrup with the ice cream. They´d never had peanut butter before. I´m not even sure where they got it. But we pretty much put it on a shrine.

Sorry, I don´t have a whole lot of funny stories from this week. We pretty much just walked around in the rain all week. I learned the smell of marijuana. I saw some 14 year olds smoking hookah in the middle of the street. Realized that there is either a bar or a church on EVERY street corner in Brasil. Learned how the Brazillians make their french fries. They are totally better than American fries. We also had cookies for the first time ever in Brasil. They don´t do cookies here. The only people who have had cookies, or know how to make them, are Mormons who served missions with Americans.

Also, I...totally forgot what I was going to say. But I´ve decided that I want to bring my camera with me and take pictures of the graffiti that I use as landmarks. That´s pretty much the only thing that looks different in any given place.

Oh yeah! Yesterday we were walking to church, and there were a bunch of guys with wheelborrows of firewood in the streets. (Fyi, I have no idea how to spell wheelborrow, and neither does the Portuguese spellcheck.) I saw one guy scraping all the bark off of a piece of wood. I asked my companion why he was doing that, and she informed me that it was not, in fact, firewood. It´s food. That I´ve eaten before. I probably would have been a lot more hesitant to try it if I knew what it looked like before it was fried, but it´s pretty good. Tastes kind of like a potato.

Anywho. That´s all for this week folks!

Tchau!

Sister Peart