Olá from Portugal! I actually already did this once, but it didn´t come through for some reason, so i´ll just copy that in again i guess:
so, its hard to type on this keyboard, because it's a portuguese keyboard, so things are in weird places, but it is good for typing in português. Anyway, I made it to portugal ok, today is my pday, so i won't send a real email or letters until next week, but i'm just sending to say that I'm alive and Portugal is amazing. I am absurdly tired because i didn't sleep on the plane at all and I barely slept the night before so basically I've got about 3 hours of sleep in the past 40ish hours.
Elder Ammon
So yeah, i don´t know what happened with that, but i tried to send that last week. So, first I´ll answer questions:
1. I basically have no idea what my mailing address is, roads aren´t very well marked, so we have a vague idea of what road we´re on but we don´t know what town we´re in and i think the only really useful thing is this number that i don´t know, so all this to say, i´m not sure what my address is, but you can send letters to that general address i have and it´ll get to me sometime, either when i get a real address (which will hopefully be by next week) or when i head over to the mission office, which will probably be for transfers or something, i dunno, i´ll try to have it for next week.
2. I did get my messenger bag, it was extremely helpful and now it has traveled all over the world.
3. Christmas box...Warm things, scarves, socks, thermal garments, thermal anything, etc. And just cool family stuff. For most things it will probably be substantially cheaper to just have me buy it here, maybe not though, things are expensive.
4. Today is my Pday, so quarta-feira, or wednesday as they say.
5. The weather here is cold, ergo the christmas wishes. It´s not that cold, probably in the forties or fifties, but it rains almost all the time (yesterday was a blessed relief, especially because it meant i could have dry underwear). No one in portugal has driers, ourselves included, which means we have to hang our clothes up to dry, which means if it rains, we have lots of wet clothes, or we have to hang them up inside, but it´s so humid and cold that they don´t really dry. A full length raincoat would probably be handy, but my coat and an umbrella works fine. I wear the thermals i have everyday (which might be a little gross) so my legs stay warm enough, so if you have something handy i´d love it but don´t spend a ton of money sending it over here just for the winter..
6. I have an hour for email, which should be plenty, and with the letter situation up in the air, write all you want.
So yeah, I´m in Portugal! Ok, so i´ll talk about my travel first. It was absolutely absurd. So we got up at 3:30 a.m. because we had to finish getting ready and clean our rooms, so we do that and then head over to the travel office who gives us our passports and stuff and sends us over to the bus. We said goodbye to the elder and Irmã that were going to cape verde, since we won´t see them for a couple years, and then we were off. We got to the airport at 7 or so, that's when I called. It was sad that it got cut off, and i couldn't remember Dad's phone number. I had written it down, but it was written down on a piece of paper i threw in my checked baggage.
So. we ate some at the arport and got on our flight. that was pretty regular, just a flight to new york. The new york airport was sort of intense, and we had to go to the international terminal, which made me feel verry intrepid already. We got on air france and and had a bit of time to eat lunch and then we went to our air france plane. That plane was HUGE. There was coach, first class, and then something before first class that was very shwanky, but even coach was by far then nicest seat i´ve had. There was a tv in the seat that showed where the plane was and what countries you were flying over and altitude and temperature and stuff like that. They gave us a several course meal with some really great bread. It was actually the best food i´d had in a while. That flight was long, and i couldn´t sleep, because the guy behind me made weird gutteral noises at me when i tried to put my seat down, so that was strange. We got to the Paris airport early in the morning there.
The paris airport is massive. We got off the plane and there was a lady waiting for us there that led us through the airport and to the front of passport lines at a brisk jogging pace. We probably walked about 3 miles in that airport and that was after the airport had taxi´d for about 15 minutes (it was just driving along for a while) and then we got to a bus which drove us out to our plane which we got to about 5 minutes before it left. It was intense, if we hadn´t had our guide there we never would have made it.
The lisbon flight was nice, they gave us a decent breakfest (europeans know how to do travel, they gave us good meals and didn´t make us take our shoes off in security.) and i actually managed to sleep a little on this flight, but woke up as we were flying into lisbon, which was nice, it was a great view of lisbon.
So, we went to get our luggage, all of it was there except for two bags, so that was ok. One of my wheels had fallen off my luggage and had dissapeared, at the time i blamed the french, but then the same thing happened later as i was walking to my apartment, so i´m letting the french slide on this one. A word of wisdom: If you plan on taking baggage to europe, or really anywhere that has cobblestone roads, go for baggage with solid two wheels. The four wheels are awesome in airports and stuff, but because they can pivot, they're not strong enough to handle the trauma from roads with a bit of history. So yeah, that was sort of sad, one of these p«day´s i´ll have to see if i can jimmy some sort of solution for next transfer.
Sooo...yeah, lisbon. the mission president (President Terry) and his wife were waiting for us outside the terminal and they took us to put our baggage in the van and then off to get our visas validated or something. that took a few hours, and by then i was pretty exhausted from going 30 hours with 3 hours of sleep. But that eventually got finished, and then we drove over to the mission home. Driving in portugal is crazy. There isn´t anyone to enforce the speedlimits, and they´re pretty liberal with things like lane lines and rules about right of way (as in, often neither of them exist) but we eventually got there. The drive was an Elder whose name i´ve now forgotten, but apparently he was from hyde park and had played tennis a time or two with Ben Phillips and had Scott as his teacher once, so that was funny.
We went to the mission home (which is this huge, ex-embassy looking building) and wait, no, i'm getting ahead of myself. First we went over to the office where we were interviewed, had some time to nap and eat pizza and send emails (mine obviously didnºt work) Then we grabbed what we would need for the night and went to the mission home. Where we had some time to relax. I and another elder took a nap. Most people went over to see the Tower of Belem, which is this huge monument where the king used to go to wave to explorers as they sailed off into the world, which is cool, and symbolic, but i really needed sleep, so i´ll have to do that some time later. At some point we had dinner, which was lasagna, and that was pretty good, if a little out of place. Then we had a testimony meeting which was nice and went to sleep, oh, i got to shower too, which was very nice, since i hadn´t been able to do that for a day and a half or so.
The next day was thanksgiving, but it felt like a pretty average day in portugal. We had a very good breakfast, and then went to the church to have some orientation, meet our companions and get assigned to areas. Then we said goodbye to our district members and took various means of transportation to our area.
So, I'll take a bit of time to talk about my companion. His name is elder Oram, he´s from Kayesville Utah, and he´s pretty cool. He has sort of a michael j. fox vibe to him, with a bit of luke skywalker thrown in there. So that´s nice, so far we get along very well and I plan to keep that going.
I have come to the decision that when it comes to Missions, the first few days are extremely different, and then after a few days they suddenly become great. My first few days were very very hard. It was about a 30 minute walk with my luggage, that didn´t roll well, to our apartment. We did eventually get there, and i unpacked a bit and ate a bit, then went to do some contacting. I feel like i know a lot less portuguese than i did this time last week. For the first couple days I actually spoke less than i had at the MTC and i pretty much can´t understand anything the portuguese people say, but that´s gotten better, and now Elder Oram and I are speaking Portuguese whenever we´re out of the apartment, so that´s helped. Anyway, after contacting, we went way out to the boonies of the area. Oh, by the way, my area is Mafra, which you can probably find on a map or something. If you can find the rotary on the north end of Mafra that´s where our house is. But yeah, the area is huge, we drove for about 40 minutes to get to these members house and talked for a while and then they fed us bread and tea and cake. We didn´t get back to our apartment until like 11:30. So yeah, my first day i drank tea and stayed out a half an hour past when i´m supposed to be asleep (it was herbal tea, so that was atleast ok, i just like to throw those two together). Oh, and that was my thanksgiving too, the elders and celebrated thanksgiving on p-day, so i didn´t really do anything for that, triste, mas todo bem.
Ok, I have 8 minutes, so I better hurry this up.
So Mission life has been good. Our house doesn´t have heat, so it is freezing in the morning. I like it when i sleep, because i´ve often said there´s no amount of blankets i wouldn´t want to sleep under, and luckily that´s true. No one adequately prepared me for how difficult being in the field actually is (although Logan described it pretty well, and I´ve been told many time it was hard) I think if missionaries were sent to the field for a week before the mtc there would be no complaints about the MTC. But I shouldn´t make it sound like I´m miserable, I´m loving it. We have an investigator who is going to be baptized on the 20th. He´s been talking to the missionaries for like a year and we actually almost had to give up on his baptismal date yesterday because he missed church again, but it turned out his cousins came over and pretty much held him from going and told him theyd rather have him dead than baptized, but he said he will be baptized anyway, so that was great, to see that he actually is determined to do this. So yeah, what else, I love cooking, the bread here is incredible, and today and fried a pear in sugar, which turned out to be incredible. So yeah, things are awesome ehre. I'll make sure i don't forget my camera cord next week so that i can send pictures.
Moito Amor,
Elder Ammon
