First E-mail from MTC

HEY EVERYONE!!! I am safe and sound in the heart of São Paulo at the Brazilian MTC. This is seriously an expodentially nicer building than the surrounding area, but no worries we have a huge black french dude watching our back and a fence that is capped in spikes and stuff. It´s seven stories tall and is basically a huge pristine church building. Like even in my room there is just tile floors like you would expect in a nice church or something like that. The surrounding buildings are really shabby though. Looking out my window is weird because there are just thousands of 10 - 20 story buildings that tower over the jungle. But where do i begin even describing what it is like here...? Well first of all my keyboard has some keys that you wouldn´t normally have. Ç is a new one and then all the accent choices replace the apostrophes and what not so i can do things like this ú ó í really fast or even the occassionaly õ. haha.

Also the first thing i noticed was that the dirt here is red. Like really red. It is basically just clay. I guess i would say just imagine the jungle in jurassic park, then put the 2nd or 3rd largest city in the world right in the middle of it. I am told 22 million people live in this city alone. That is a lot more than any city we have in the US, and is more than most states just to give a spectrum. And from what i~m told at least where i am right now the 10 - 20 stor tall buildnigs are ALL apartment buildings. and there are hundreds of them. There is a river that has been guided into the city by canal that you follow from the airport to the MTC as you come in and it is just full of trash and homeless people bathing. It´s pretty humbling to see the poverty that these people expereince in comparison to us while they still think they are on top of the world. And in a sense they are. I have yet to meet one unhappy person. They all are really happy to correct my portugues and help me out. In fact out of my best friends i have made here only a few are north americans while a lot of them are native brasilians. That makes things intersting since they they speak very little english if any at all but we are learning fast. I am about to the point where i can start making sentences and it´s only the 6th day here. By the 4th day or so we started to be able to describe most things to them just using nouns and uncongigated verbos. I am sure you can tell by the way i am spelling that I am not doing super good seperating the two languages, so we just call our hybrid language that we are starting to share portoíngles.

But I only have around 4 minutes left on this computer (we only get 30) so i´ll have to keep in mind what i want to tell you as i go through this next week. Key things are that I am safe and that I am having a blast. It´s hard for me to sleep at night because I am so excited that by the time i get to bed my mind just won´t stop swirling with words that I forgot how to say or words that i can remember how to say but can´t remember the meaning of. I project based on what i´ve heard that by 6 months out i´ll be fluent and by 1 year I will have a native accent.

But anyways, you can email me back at this address, but i can only email on tuesdays. I´ll email again in a week and I love you all. Untill next time i´ll keep you in my thoughts. LATERSSS

-Elder Christensen