Happy New Year!!

I hope New Years was good over there; it was kind of crazy here. They really like to party here. It was weird working New Years Eve - lets just say we taught a lot about the word of wisdom. They also have no regulation on fireworks, that was pretty crazy. Two streets over people started shooting off huge fireworks that were exploding right outside our window. It was crazy. It sounded like we were in a war zone all night. We went to bed at 11 like good missionaries, but things got too crazy and loud at midnight that I woke up. People where banging pots and pans and honking their horns. In the morning it was a ghost town. We were literally the only two people outside in the whole country of Portugal. Fun.

We have been meeting more people that are open to hearing our message. A consequence of that is that we have been teaching more lessons, which means I have to "communicate" with people in Portuguese. My Portuguese has improved, I can "have a conversation" with some people. It depends because there aren't just Portuguese people here. We talk to a lot of Brazilians, Angolans, Cape Verdeans, even people from India (and they all speak Portuguese). In history class, they were not lying when they said that the Portuguese sailed around the world and set up colonies everywhere because they did. Angolans and Brazilians have moved to Portugal so it's basically a giant mixing pot of people that speak Portuguese. The bad part about that is that they all have different accents. They actually pronounce the letters differently. Brazilians speak differently than Portuguese who speak differently than Angolans. It's easiest to understand Brazilians.
 

Since Portugal is a giant mixing pot of all the Portuguese cultures we eat a lot of different food from all over. We eat a lot of chicken and rice. The food is interesting, I like it. But their bread is amazing! Also their pastries are so good too.
 

We were teaching a lesson yesterday to a couple of Africans. We like to open with an opening prayer and we usually ask what we can include in the opening prayer to help them. They wanted us to pray for their health, their families and that they could have more money. Elder Thompson asked if I could say the prayer. I gladly accepted. I prayed for their health and families but I forgot the word for money in Portuguese. So in English I said "that they can receive that cash money flow". I have grown so much on my mission.
 

We had another pretty cool lesson this week. We are teaching a couple of people in this house with a blind DJ, an amateur Brazilian skater, a homeless guy, another Brazilian and this women. As we were teaching the women (we had already taught her once), she said that she had thought about our baptismal challenge, and that she recognized her baptism wasn't like how Christ was baptized and that she wanted to be baptized. She recognized that she wasn't living the commandments and wants to change.
 

The Book of Mormon is true. I know it is. Joseph Smith was the prophet Christ chose to restore his gospel in it's truthfulness. Jesus Christ is the Son of God and died for our sins. We can change thought his atonement.
 

Elder Fogg