35 Days, Rants, and Defenestration ... Email 8 July '09

Okay, Trent's email started out with some witty banter about his pictures and congrats to his cousin who is getting married and a reference to a list of his gifts/talents that we made and sent him as part of our Family Home Evening.

Hey,
I'm glad you enjoyed the pictures, and I'm glad the portraits turned out well, haha. They better for how much we paid for them, right? ;)
Parabéns to Cousin Benten. That's pretty exciting for him. Do we know his fiance?
I think learning português has removed some english words from my brain, or Katie is still using her Davis vocab without a leash ;) Convivial? Why.... thank you? (Mr Davis is a high school Honors English teacher they both had)

-Besides Elder Didier, who else has come to give your weekly devotionals?

Um, no one super important. Generally they're mission presidents or area presidents. But they all give good talks.

-Are you in the CTM for eight weeks? or When do you leave for Rio?

About 8 weeks, yeah. 61 days. Today is day 35, so we're over halfway. Good stuff =]

-When do we stop sending letters to the CTM?

Um, just send letters until I find out what my new address will be (which I have no idea when I figure that out), and they'll forward the letters to my mission home if I've already transferred. Yep.

and from Kelsey!:

-What is the hardest thing you’ve had to deal with on your mission so far? (learning the language, companion, jet lag, missionary schedule, etc.).

I'm not really sure what the hardest thing has been... my second teacher, Irmão Perrupato (PAY-hoo-PAH-too) likes to go on long rants about what kind of missionaries we need to be. Like over 20 minutes of him just talking. And when you think he's about to finish he goes right on into a new tangent. And he's really good at catching you as you begin to fall asleep and throws whiteboard makers at you. And you can't interrupt him to tell him to stop because... you can't. It just doesn't work like that, haha. So the hardest thing I can think of at the moment is trying not to drop off while he's ranting. So hard. [Note: Trent can fall asleep ANYtime ANYwhere!]

-What is your favorite part of being a missionary?

This went unanswered. Perhaps he didn't see it in the midst of all the others!

-What is one of the funniest things that has happened in the CTM?

Funniest thing? We have this inside joke in our class about "defenestration," which is throwing something out of a window. It came about when someone said one day, "I'm gonna throw something out the window," and Elder Jibson, who is 26 and has a masters in Piano Performance and 2 Bachelors in Electrical Engineering and something else, says, "You're going to defenestrate something?" And we all just kind of stared at him, and he says, "What? That's the act of throwing something out of a window." Good stuff.
So one day we were learning something exceptionally hard (imperfect subjunctive. ridiculous), when suddenly, Elder Murdock stands up next to me and says, "This is ridiculously hard." And he starts walking toward the pencil sharpener, which happens to be right next to the window, and about three people and me all said at the same time, "Whoa, are you going to defenestrate yourself?" We were crying. It might have been funny just because we were all so ridiculously tired, but funny nonetheless.
So whenever we're exceptionally frustrated, we yell something about defenestration. "I'm going to defenestrate this grammar book," or "Perrupato, you're about this close from being defenestrated."

-And finally: how do you focus for so many hours of class every day!?!?
How do we focus? Truth is, it actually goes by really quickly. It's pretty crazy. I don't have any problems with it at all

Kels asked what we do on p-days, and I thought you might like this little tid-bit of information:

We walk around. We've gone to a rodizio twice--the restaurant is called Rodizio Grill or Tucanos in the states, but here Rodizio is just the style of restaurant--they bring around food to you and you tell them if you want it. They've got pizza rodizio, meat rodizio, all kinds of stuff. It's way good. Like, you could pay 20 bucks per person in the states for that kind of food, and it 13 reais (hey-ICE) for lunch, which is about 7 dollars. Goooood stuff. =]

Love you guys!
Paz e amor,

Elder McGregor