Congrats to Amanda. I cant believe she got engaged! Regular mail isn't very reliable but it will still get to me within 2 months. There is one athletic missionary and I don't have him in my group for gym so I have to deal with only 4 other guys that aren't the most athletic. There is one missionary that is 6' 10" too. Here, I am dois e dez. because they measure in meters. The beds are just like the Disneyland hotel beds. I am on the top bunk and I have a really hard time sleeping. I finally just got used to it and it is fine now. I live on the top floor which is 7 stories high so there is a lot of stair climbing we do in a day. Portuguese is really similar to Spanish so my comp. and I are doing really well with the language. Our teachers Irmão David and Vana say that we are at the level of someone that has been here for 5 weeks. So it is pretty easy for me. My bags didn't get anything pulled out of them so I still have the beef jerky, but I do have the most stuff out of everyone haha. I am taking as many pictures as I can but there are lots of strict rules about pictures. I can send prints if you want to see them a week earlier, otherwise I will wait till I can send them through email. When i got to Dallas there were 5 other missionaries there. 2 were from Provo and the others were from Washington and Oregon. The food was really good on the flight and I was crammed in the second flight. When I got on the first flight the lady told me to move to the bulk head seating. I didn't complain. Batteries are ridiculous here! A pack of 4 triple A batteries are 24 reais which is roughly 20 dollars. I might have a enough for a long time though. I will let you know. I still haven't gotten a razor but it is fine because i just use a straight blade to trim off any access I can see. I don't even have to shave because no one can see if i can even grow hair. By the way the keyboards here are really weird too.......... I can't press enter to make a new paragraph so it has to be one huge one. Anyway, last Tuesday we went out around the CTM and within 10min we witnessed a car crash! hahahaha it was crazy. The people here drive like maniacs. We walked around and one of my companions Elder Fulton tried to buy some photo prints. He thought the lady said it has 96 reais but it was really 9,6. He freaked out and thought his parents were going to kill him haha. The next day as a bonding experience our room and district shaved our legs. Wasn't my idea but I thought why not? We wear our pants all day anyway. Don't judge me. ha Class isn't too bad. We have lunch then 4 hours of class then dinner then 4 hours of class. When you work hard it goes by really fast though. Our teachers are awesome! Can you email me my mission home address? I need it as a return address because if you send anything after right now it might not make it to me in the CTM. Today we went to the temple again which is awesome. We aren't supposed to take pictures there but we are going to our last week because we will never go there again probably. Some things that are coming up... on week 5 we go tracting outside of the CTM. Week 7 we go tracting on avenida paulista which is one of the busiest streets in the world! It is going to be crazy. On August 1st the teaching program is going to change here and it is supposed to get a lot harder. It will be good because I need to learn Portuguese faster and the program right now is not the best. Anyway, I am doing great. Let me know what you want me to write about. I usually have some extra time left over because I type so fast.
Love you guys! ELDER JAKE LANGLOIS
