Whoa!

Hey Yáll,

So this week was a little bit insane. We had four baptisms on Saturday! Wooooooo! And one day in the future I will actually send pictures of all these baptisms. So you know that I´m not lying. Raquel, Renata, Guilherme and Steven all got baptized Saturday and confirmed on Sunday. It was awesome. We had cake. It was the first baptism that I´ve had with cake. But we figured if someone made cake, then more people would come to the baptism. Success.

So I´ve reached a whole new stage in how I ride the Ónibus. As far as I can tell, there are three stages:

Stage 1: You freak out every time you get on the bus because it´s pretty much like riding a rollar coaster while standing up. You almost fall down every 5 seconds and you sometimes almost stab people´s eyes out with umbrellas.

Stage 2: You´re determined to look like you know what you´re doing, so you concentrate a lot on where you put your hands and feet, how you move, time everything with when the bus turns and goes over speedbumps and such.

Stage 3: (Where I am now) You stop caring about what you look like, and have accustomized enough that you use enough physics to move about in a state of constant falling. Get on the bus. Swipe your card. Use the momentum from the bus speeding up to through you through the revolving gate thingie. Grab the nearest handle to your desired seat and use that to direct your fall into the seat. It works pretty well.

While I was with Sister Sorensen, we developed a fun game to play during rush hour on the Ónibus. Brazillian Twister. The rules? Put your hands and feet in spots that don´t already have hands and feet and try not to be the first one to fall down. My dream is to drive an Ónibus in São Paulo. One that is covered with big dots in all the primary colors. Plus green. :)

For the record, as I was writing this, I was eating these tasty chocolate wafer thingies that I´ve developed an addiction too. Only just now I found a rock in one of them. Or rather, my teeth found a rock in one of them. No longer hungry...

So for the baptism, I told Renata I would do my hair. So we show up to their house on Saturday morning and I´ve got my hair all straightened and contacts in and stuff. She decides to do our makeup. She does Sister Bruno´s and it´s very Brazillian, but cool. Then she does mine. They don´t have a mirror in their house, so I pretty much just hope that it doesn´t look ridiculous. Then Raquel comes home. She takes one look at me and demands to know what Renata was thinking. She insists that those colors are only appropriate for going out at night. She then takes all my makeup off and redoes herself. Still don´t have a mirror, so I didn´t really see what it looked like until I got to the baptism. It was dramatic, but nice.

Anyway, while we were at the baptism, someone told me that my hair was tasty. I wondered if maybe there was some other meaning for that word that I wasn´t understanding. That night I asked the Brazillian sister that we live with, and she said nope, it doesn´t make sense to call hair tasty. So yeah. That was new.

I´m trying to remember what else happened this week...I´m back to eating these tasty wafer thingies, in case anyone was curious. It´s a pretty hopeless situation. They are here, and I must eat them. I´m just chewing them a little more slowly, so I don´t break my teeth on any more rocks. Oh yeah. This week I was looking at a bunch of pictures of sisters from this mission. Before and after pictures. It was terrifying. I vowed never to eat again. Then I went out and bought some chocolate wafers. So much for that...

Thanks for all the letters this week! Our zone leader decided to read all the names of the letters from the pulpit, so I looked super popular. Jared, Rachel and Jacob&Tammy. I am in the process of responding, I promise. :)

Anywho, I think that´s pretty much all for this week. I really need to get back in the habit of writing things down as they happen. This week just flew by. I think because we were working so hard with our baptisms this week.

Have a great week!

Sister Peart