Wednesday, December 5, 2007

"It's been another full week. We are preparing to go proselyting for our very first time this Friday. I felt like such a bad missionary this morning because we went to the police station to verify our visas and I completely forgot to bring along my pass along cards, Books of Mormon, or even my short Portuguese lesson. The president of the MTC has emphasised that we must 'open our mouths, open our mouths, open our mouths', and preach the gospel everywhere. We are never 'just buying bananas'. I'll dive headlong into that type of missionary work on Friday and I'll do my best.

My Portuguese is coming along well, but the hardest thing is listening to the Brazilians speak and trying to understand. I can do well on the vocabulary and grammar because of Spanish class, but listening is whole different story.

The weather down here is vacation weather. I love to walk in the CTM courtyard and look up at the sun coming down through the palm trees. I can hardly believe that it's December. But we still miss the winter Christmas, so we took a bunch of napkins from the cafeteria and made snowflakes out of them and hung them from the ceiling. We also tried to make a Christmas tree out of plastic cups but the janitor cleaned it up. I found out that we don't have to go to class on Christmas. We get to watch movies, what movies I don't know, but we are excited. I also found out that missionaries in the CTM don't get to make telephone calls home because there aren't enough telephones. But Mother's Day isn't too far away so it won't be too bad, especially with all the letters and e-mails.

Keep sending me letters please! And remind my friends to write too. It is awesome to open the mailbox and see a letter addressed to Elder Larsen."