from Brazil...

WOW... Am I ever behind..... here is two weeks of stuff from our missionary in Brazil!

Here are some pics. Brasil won again and everyone is happy. A pic of a family and us, my comp is the one in the back without glasses. His name is elder nunes da silva. His name is really big. On the trip here i found out where all the rice comes from. We drove for over two hours with never ending rice on both sides of the highway. We also had 70 investigators at church this week!! It filled up the chapel. What you see in the pic is the whole chapel. Behand the pulpit is the baptism font, bathrooms, and the branch president´s office.

The rice fields

The chapel

If any one has wathced family guy, the chubby guy on the left is an exact replica of peter griffen with the same voice and everything. This is the little girl who got baptized on sunday with her mom and dad you can cut out the two guys on the right they are leaders of the district. They are why we had 70 investigators, they invited everyone to their daughter´s baptism and a bunch of people came. There was lunch afterwards too.The last pic is us with the branch mission leader with the star of the day and her dad.

I don´t think i sent you these pics. President tobias´ coffin, our zone in aparecida de goiania, our zone with president and sister, and we recieved our `envelope´ that we can´t open until we are on the airplane.

A cool bridge in aparecida de goiania, and me and the ward mission leader in aparecida de goiania.

hey everyone

This week we worked alot to try to baptize the people who went to church last week. It was good, the only bad part is that everyone is going on vacation this week. But today me and my comp went to get to know the city today we went to the statue of christ and also a fishing pond. We fished for a while but we didn´t get anything. The fish there were huge but the water was still a bit cold and they weren´t hungry. The statue of christ is just like the one in barra do garças but i think it is a little bit bigger. This week we´ll have are first zone conference with president prieto, it will be interesting to see how he is like. It feels wierd the president tobias left. But it will be fun to get to know another mission president. But everything is going good here in jataí and i am still healthy. I even gained 1 kilo since i´ve been here. I need to gain more. See you all later. Elder Lewis.

Nashville in a day...

I've done this before and I did it again... Nashville in a day! Last week (yeah.... my blog is a bit behind!) I flew on an early morning flight to Nashville....

I had a while to wait... so I sat in the food court, plugged in the laptop... AND... played on the computer! Actually it was kinda fun! But the scenery wasn't the best!

Then Aimee and the girls got to the airport. they were on their way to AZ so I flew out to help them make the trip back here! AND there was a play area right by our gate!!!

So I'm back on the plane home but this time with some cute company! and THAT was my Nashville in a day trip!

Busy in Brazil...

Woo Hoo...We got two emails this week!!

Hello,


Hi everyone i dont have much time today because i was transfered. I´m going to Jataí. I´m going there to be district leader. It will just be me, my comp, and two other missionaries. Just us four for 50,000 people. Jataí is a small city and it will probably be my last area. Next wed. president prieto gets here. I better go i have a 6 hour bus ride ahead of me. I´ll tell you about the week next week. See you later. Elder Lewis
 
 
Hey whats up.


I didn´t use up all my time yesterday because of the transfers. So i have some time to write to you guys today. This week we got our `secret envelope´ from president and we can´t open it until we are on the airplane. Brasil also won this week and everyone went crazy. On sunday NOTHING was open because of the game. ONLY and i mean only the 24 hr liquour stores were open. During 3:30 and 5:30pm there was no police, firemen, public transportation, hospital, pharmacy, nothing. It was funny walking down the streets because it was really easy to know when brasil made a goal. Everyone would start screaming and launch fireworks. We arrived in our house yesterday a little before midnight. It was a fun trip to jataí. It is just a small city, a really cool place i´ll have lots of picture to send you. My comp is elder nunes da silva. He is from campinas, são paulo. Bro spencer served his mission there. He´s only been on the mission for 2 months. Since last november i have only been comps with missionaries with less than 6 months on the mission, 4 with less than 3 months. I have pretty much been training since november. But i´m really excited to start working here and being district leader here is awesome too, it´s just me, my comp, and two other missionaries. We´ll have our district meetings in our house and it´ll be great. Speaking about our house, our house is freaking huge. It´s probably 3 times bigger than than the house i was at in aparecida de goiania. We have to tidy up a bit but it´s nice to have some space to walk around. See you later Elder Lewis

Father's Day...

We got together on Sunday to celebrate the dad's in our family! We had a yummy (and manly) Barbeque!

And Kristin made these yummy and manly (cute) cupcakes for dessert to go along with our Barbeque theme!

Most of the pictures we took are CRAZY... everyone is fighting for a position to be on the bathroom wall (see Just a buncha stuff post for that story!) so now I will have to add more frames cuz I have a lot more pics to choose from. But we did manage to get in a nice family picture! I hope everyone had a great Father's day!

Day trip!!!

In celebration of Father's day... Mike and I took a daytrip to San Diego on Saturday. We got up WAY early and jumped on a flight and made our way to Old Town San Diego. We have never been to that part of San Diego before so we thought we would check it out...

We got there early before most places were open...

So we had breakfast here... It was only $2.99 and way yummy!

Old Town is just what the name implies.... OLD... lots of historical stuff... like this cool old church...

and the Whaley house. I researched this online and it is SUPPOSE to be a very haunted house.... so we took a tour and there was not one single ghost! very dissappointing!

So we walked some more... the scenery is very lush and green...

There were cool flowers everywhere!

Then we ended up here... I thought it was just going to be a small boring place but were we pleasantly surprised!!

The building is not old but recently remodeled.

There was a wonderful tour, a great movie with LOTS of special effects. NOT boring at all. We were entertained and learned some things we didn't know. The tour starts off in this room with pictures... but are they really JUST pictures?!?!?

The tour takes us through several different rooms... This is where they talked about what the Mormon Batallion brought with them... this gun was VERY heavy!

View from the top of the tower.. The Mormon Batallion Historical Site was great and we spent an hour there! Ya gotta go see it if you are in the area.

See the hummingbird?

Of course by now we are hungry again! (how could we NOT be hungry... everywhere we walked we could smell food!)... so we walked back to the old town market place and ate in the outdoor Mexican food restuarant, Casa de Reyes. (note... before we left I told Mike... we are NOT going to go to San Diego and eat Mexican food!!! we can get that in Arizona anywhere we look!!! But in Old Town Mexican resturaunts are EVERYWHERE and it smelled SO GOOD!!!)

So we polished off a basket of chips and salsa and then we got THIS!!! YUM!!!!

So we walked more to little shops and intermingled among the shops were historical little buildings and things.... everywhere.... and most of the old buildings smelled OLD.... go figure!

I took a LOT of pictures of the flowers!

So we pretty much did and saw all that we wanted to in Old Town... so we figured out the light rail system (we were afraid we were going to get on the wrong one and end up in Mexico or somewhere) and made our way to...

Seaport Village!

We had been there before but it is always fun to roam around here.

AND... we wanted to see the ocean. You can't see the ocean from Old Town.

The shops here aren't very exciting... but the street entertainment is fun to watch... like this guy that balances rocks...

there were all kinds of birds around....

even a bunch of parrots!

No Mike... he CAN'T come home with us!! We already have three!

One of the best things about Seaport Village... Ben & Jerry's ice cream!!!... YEP.. we ate good on this trip!!

Well... it's time to say bye to the sunny skies and cool ocean breeze...

we had a GREAT time on our little day trip (thanks to my wonderful traveling buddy!) and can't wait to do another one!!! Life is good!

Lots of pictures from Brazil...

Oi família,

This week we had the last zone conference with president and sister tobias. That´s why i didn´t email yesterday. It was really good and the lunch was really good too. It will be sad to see them go but it will also be cool to see how president prieto is. At the end, we all gave president and sister a hug goodbye, president said we could hug sister. But while i was hugging president he revealed my tranfer to me. Transfers are next tuesday and he said to me, elder lewis are you ready to go to jataí? Jataí is another far away city and i´m way excited to go back to a small branch. But president is known to change his mind alot when it comes to transfers, whos knows if i will really go to jataí, but i hope i do. Everything is going good here and we are still working alot. Thats about it for this week. Any questions just ask. Tchao. Elder Lewis.
 
Sunday, we went to the farm to eat lunch again. This time we took a tour, we saw the cows, pigs, the geese that were trying to attack us the entire time, we also ate a bunch of fruit while walking around. Starfruit, 3 kinds of oranges and tangerines, caja manga, avocado, and some others.

There is also a lake with tons of fish. The member who lives here caught a 20 pound fish in this lake. And also one of the ugliest chickens i have ever seen.

A pic of president tobias, our zone, and a coffin for president and sister when they die on the 30th.