Monday, December 27, 2010

Week one in Praia

This is going to be an entirely new way of life!! I’m so excited to get started and full of the spirit to begin teaching.

So we were delayed from Salt Lake to France. When we arrived in Paris, the whole city was completely fogged up and you could not see the hand in front of you. We had to wait 4 hours in a line to get a hotel.

We get to Portugal...bags lost.

By miracle...and I mean by the grace of our Heavenly Father, we met again with the rest of our district that is headed to Portugal for their missions and who left a day later than we did. We met again on the flight from France to Portugal. It was the encounter of a lifetime. When we got to Lisbon, we went with them to meet their mission president. The mission president took all of us to the mission office and got us pizza (Which was awesome because we had not eaten for 2 days...the airplane food was not good at all~)

The mission president got us tickets to PCV, and we got there at 3 in the morning a day later than anticipated

I have finally received my new companion today. He seems pretty cool.

The people here speak very easy Portuguese to understand because they speak it very slow. They also speak Creole which I have no clue what they say, but in the city, everyone can speak Portuguese

There is almost no AC anywhere, so that is something that I am going to have to get used to. Somehow, it is not as troublesome as I thought it would be. There is music in the streets everywhere and tons of people.

There are a lot of Chinese people here who open up stores and what not. You can find anything here. There are tons of stores of clothes and small electronics and toys.

What is great about the place is that these are some of the nicest people I have ever met. No one is in a rush. It’s an island and the people act that way. They think that it is so cool that Americans would come to Cape Verde. Most of them recognize us but not as Mormons. They know us as Elders, and they call the Church, A Igreja de Elder (The Church of Elder)

Sleeping is a bit difficult because the mattresses are hard. Luckily, the island gets cool and windy at night so that is not so much a problem.

There are not many bugs here because it hardly rains.

The time was nice this last week with the APs. It went by very slow because I could not start working yet - as I had to wait until today to receive my companion. We will finally start working tonight. The APs seem to be really nice. I like them both a lot, and I think we would have worked well together, if I were to be put with them. One is also from Brazil and the other one is from Utah.

Okay more next week.

Ate Mais
Elder Cuestas