San Lorenzo, Paraguay (November 2, 2009)

Well hello there. So right now I am melting!!! It is hot. It is about 106 here and we are inside and there is no air so it is just really hot and I am cooking. But I can't do anything about that so I can't complain. But this week was a good week. We are finding some people that are way cool and receiving us. We found a lady named Mabel and she reminds me so much of Lorena, my convert in Luque. She does not have all the cute kids, but you can just feel something about her. We are also working with a cool family and it is funny because they have a baby and it is learning how to talk, but is it just yelling all random things so it is funny.
But today was ok. We went to Pizza Hut. I don't know if it was worth it because we had to travel an hour and a half in a hot stuffed bus and then we ate for about 1 hour and then had to make the trip back. At least it is not like the Concepcion travel, 7 hours. By the way mom, you're going to melt out there. haha It's one of the hottest parts of Paraguay. It got up to 125 when I was there. But I am going to plan a couple thing for you guys to do when you come down here so be prepared for fun. But yeah, we are working really hard, and like it is showing because for 4 straight weeks we had a baptism. Right now we are stuck, but we are going to break that and start again.
Halloween here is cool. We wanted to carve pumpkins, but in the middle of South America pumpkins don't exist, so we both bought giant sized watermelons (for about $1 US) and carved watermelons! Instead of cleaning out a pumpkin, we got spoons and ate the inside of our watermelons and ate til we got really sick. But they cleaned out really good and then we carved them. I carved one that looked exactly like The Nightmare Before Christmas, and my comp did one that looked just like a standard pumpkin face, like off of Charlie Brown. We didn't get to start carving until after we were done working that night, which was about 9:30pm.
Crazy story of the week: my comp and I are studying in our house early Wednesday morning. It's about 9am. We study every morning before we go out until about 10 am. All of a sudden, loud pounding reggaeton (Spanish rap) music is blaring right outside our window. Loud music is a common thing in Paraguay. Everyone has speakers on their front porch and bumps their music in the street. It's pretty cool. But this was RIGHT at our house. So me and my comp look at each other kind of confused, and open the window. There, IN OUR FRONT YARD AND PATIO, are about 20 teenage Paraguayan girls, dancing like….well I don´t know, but IN OUR YARD! Me and my comp look at each other like What the?! And slam the windows. We call our landowner and talk to her. We begin to explain that, well, we can't have women in our yard. And we're not sure why they're there in the first place. They all just randomly leave, and we find out later that the landowner (who lives behind our house) has a daughter. Her daughter and all her friends were practicing dancing and didn't have enough room. And so they just decided to go into our patio. I think it was difficult for them to understand that since we ARE missionaries that they couldn't be there. I can only imagine what all the neighbors were thinking… here we are, telling everyone that we don't have girlfriends or anything while we're in Paraguay.
I loveyou all so much and be safe.
Elder Chan