July 2, 2012

I might need to find those talks that say the constitution and declaration of independence were inspired to show to some Brazilians that like to mess with me about the US. Haha. There are some really cool members in the ward. They really help us, and lunches with some of them are the best. Next Monday we planned a family night at the house of one of them and invited the rest over. That should be a really cool night. There should be a few less activies there that we are trying to get re-integrated in the ward.

Yes one night we did sleep up on the veranda, it is actually the fourth floor of our apartment. It was waaayyyyy cooler out there. I slept out there every once and a while on P days during the day too. 

The picture with a bunch of missionaries is a Zone Meeting in Diadema. The difference between Zone meeting and conference is that conferences usually have a couple of zones that meet together with President. Zone meetings are just your zone and are much more common, like one every other week or so. Actually here in Mauá it's every week because the zone is so small we just all meet together.

The big white building is the church. It is divided into two buildings with just a little corridor connecting them. The building on the left used to be the old chapel, but they remodeled it, expanded it, and turned it all into classrooms, and the other building has the chapel and the cultural hall. Also there is a soccer quart outside that doubles as parking. The Chapel here in Mauá is enormous though. I'll send some pictures soon.

NOOO I did not touch that dog. It was pretty gross and I was sure it was dying but it was there the whole time I was. There are definitely no leash laws here. At least not outdoors. There aren't as many dogs here in Mauá as there were in Diadema. But there are still a ton.

That large family is actually two families. There is Patrick who is a young convert that always helped us out, and his mom Magna, she also is a recent convert. Also Magna's sister was there with her daughter, and also another family that Magna works with was there. The other missionaries were J. Santos, and Souza who we lived with. It was kind of on the way home and they stopped by just to pick up the snacks.

I think the cup picture is the one where I'm hiding what's on the cup with a napkin, correct? If so, that was at that same family night, I was hiding the Corinthians logo, which is a soccer team here which is a rival of my team, Santos.

I live right across the street from a big catholic church. But it doesn't look like a cathedral or anything. It actually kind of looks like they used bathroom tile to cover the outside. We all have our own tastes right?

So when you get transferred what happens is you need to get to Jabaquara. Which is where the main metro line starts and where a ton of buses leave to go to the baixada. So if you look up the Sao Paulo metro system or something and find a map, you should see about 15 lines all crossing each other and going all over the place. There are three types of transports in the Metro system; a subway, a light rail (train), and bus. To get from Mauá to anywhere we just grab the train and meet up with the metro. That's how we got to the temple too. Technically the temple is outside our mission. But it's so close that President lets us go every once and a while.

So in the mission you burn a tie at 6 months. I was going to burn one I stained pretty bad, but another Elder wanted it for some reason so he gave me an ugly zip up one to burn. At one year you burn a shirt and you are supposed to burn a suit at a year, but that one is a stretch. Oh and pants at 18 months.

Well that's all for this week. Not much special happened this week. I guess that's good and bad. Até semana que vem. Tchau tchau

Elder Cameron Bruce