Sunday, March 12, 2006

The sunset was gorgeous tonight, but I missed it by 10 minutes. I rarely leave the hotel with my camera equipment, but tonight we were already going downtown and I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to get some sunset shots of Florianópolis from a walkway that stretches over the highway and looks directly at Floripa’s skyline of skyscrapers and her classic suspension bridge. The bus from São José took longer than expected; thus, I missed the sunset by 10 minutes.

Teachings of the Prophets: Wilford Woodruff, Chapter 5: The Holy Ghost and Personal Revelation –the lesson I taught to ten or so members of the Kobrasol Elder’s Quorum this morning. It actually turned out being a pretty good lesson – most everyone participated and many personal experiences were shared which for a pretty interesting class. We even had two visitors, Israel – a man in his early twenties, and Anchieta – a man in his mid sixties.

After church I did my usual routine of curling up on my bed with my powerbook and my General Conference DVDs; I set the language to Spanish (another language I’m trying to pick up), and then not more than five minutes into the first session I usually fall asleep – not waking up until the battery has died. Today was no different.

At 3 pm we had our first visitors to our hotel room – Rodrigo (the oldest of the Ruben’s family that just got off his mission) and Eduardo (an 18 year old who became our friend from the CASEI), our hometeachers. That’s right, we have home teachers. Actually, we were hometeachers last month, but they already traded us this month.

It was about 6 pm that Dave and I got a bus to downtown – we were meeting Leandro at the bus terminal at 7, but I wanted to get some shots of the sunset before, which proved to be a bust.

From there, Leandro and us two caught a bus to Deborah’s house, where other friends were, or were soon to arrive. From what I remember, the following people were there (thinking around the circle from our game of STOP): Thiago, Aline, Élida, Flávia, Patia, Deborah, Luiza, Daisy, Leandro, David and me. We played a variety of games – STOP (a brazilian version of scategories), the winking-murder-game, question-random-answer game and uno. Some of the girls left about 10, the rest of us stayed a bit longer. Long enough to realize we had missed the last bus to São José, so Daisy was nice enough to give us a ride with Leandro to his house, and that’s where we spent the night. Leandro’s a super cool guy – I might get to hang out w/ him and his family in April when I go down to Rio de Janeiro, since that’s where he’s from. That’d be fun if it works out.