Oh Canada....

Dear Family and Friends,

I am glad to hear that everyone is doing so well and is in high spirits.  I am doing really fine myself, especially since the Canadians have the most gold metals and to top it all off, they also won both men and woman's Hockey.  I actually was fortunate to see the first half of the woman's game. They kicked butt.  It was great, because my companion is a good old American boy and I am a Canuck, and we are really into the game.  It was so great to see that we had won. 

My birthday was really good to.  I eat so much cake.  Oh my goodness.  Everywhere we went everyone knew that it was my birthday and they had cake.  It was really good cake too, and then we spent the night with a member family and did Family Home Evening with them and there I made Chicago style pizza which turned out pretty good.  The dough could have used a little more salt and the sauce could have used some sugar but all in all it was really good and the mother of the house hold said that I could now have her permission to get married after the mission. Not because I am a good guy, or the handsome devil that I am, only because I can make pizza.  Who knew?

I have not been good at sticking to the Portuguese only rule.  We have been slowly getting better, but it is still a problem and we know it.  We are coming up with a method of how to keep each other on track. I think punching will be involved, which is bad for me because I am a weak guy and he is an ex- football and lacrosse player who is 190 cm which is like 6 feet and 4 inches.  I am going to have a lot of bruises I think. 

I did not have any baptisms this week, but we did get lost a lot.  Boy Howdy, did we ever get lost.  I have terrible memory. It takes us a couple of hours to find lunch ( if we find it) because we have a list of the member addresses and it is really old and most of the time they have changed.  So we get there and they are not there and then we cannot call them because our cell phone we can only make calls to other missionaries and mission presidency.  Public phones here you need a phone card which is difficult to come between the hours 12 and 2 because all the stores are closed.  All of them.  Then on Thursday I think it was we were trying to get to an area of the city called Planalto, so we grabbed a bus which said Planalto on the front.  The mistake was we needed to listen to the guy yelling out the window like all the other buses in the city.  So instead of going to Planalto, which is on one side of  the city we went to the completely opposite side of the city and had no more money on us to get another bus ride so we walked almost 2 hours getting to Planalto.  Oh the fun times we have, but we did learn our lesson.

I hope you all are going well.  Have a great March and I will talk to you guys next week.

Com Amor,

Elder Caleb S. Carriere