I always have plenty to eat, my companion is great and we’re always laughing, and the teaching experiences are there.

They have huge bags of rice here. 50 kgs, which according to my calculations, is about 110 lbs. Crazy. I haven’t tried lifting one yet, but I don’t think I could hold it for long. I’m not sure how they get them from wherever in the world they buy it to their house.

My electric razor has been working great, and after not charging it since home, finally died this week. So apparently it has about a 3 month battery life with everyday use. And the outlets here are like the ones in the US, so I didn’t need to use the converter and the razor can use 220V so it charged fine when I need to charge it.

Our area is really big. There is a look out tower in town (Mirador of Sachaca) that I will try to climb sometime and take pictures of most of Arequipa. You can see basically everything from there, and I will point out my area. We walk a lot, but we also take the cambis and taxis occasionally. I agree that a bike would be nice, but as far as I know we’re not allowed to have them.

We have hot showers. The other water is all cold. And the showers are hot because there is an attachment on the nozzle/spout that I think, like Brother Riddle said, electrifies the water and heats it up. We also have a lot of hot drinks. The water is all impure here, so they have to boil everything, and then they drink it while it’s hot. I’m not a huge fan, but I’m growing to like them.

We do have a ward mission leader, but I met him for the first time last week. I think he works away from town or something, so he isn’t usually around to help out. We also have an assistant ward mission leader, which is interesting. I haven’t seen us do anything that would help back home, but I have been thinking about it. Haha, it’s weird to be filling out the same progress reports that the Sisters would bring you Saturday nights.

I tried making German Pancakes in our solar oven this week, but it didn’t work. It didn’t get hot enough to cook them. Then my pensionista moved the pan to the electric oven, which I didn’t know we had, and it worked great. They rose and they freaked out because it was growing taller than the pan. This happened while we were out proselyting, though, so I couldn’t explain to them that that’s supposed to happen and that you eat it when it’s fresh and fluffy. When we got home and looked at it, it was not fluffy, super dense, and did not smell good. We’ll be trying again sometime soon and eating them fresh.

I didn’t really take pictures of what you asked, but I have some pictures of the farms I walk by and cows.

Also, we had 2 baptisms this weekend! 2 little girls from a family of investigators were baptized. One 12 year old and one 8 year old. I baptized the 8 year old. It was a great experience. Not many people were at the baptismal service, but there were enough there to make it a spiritual experience for them and a nice welcome into the church. Their parents aren’t married, so they can’t be baptized yet, but we have done all the paperwork and everything so that they can be married on November 22 and then baptized. The work of the Lord is moving forward! And before the baptism we (actually my companion) baked a cake. My companion apparently worked in a bakery for some time before the mission. When he was making it, he was just throwing a bunch of stuff in a bowl and mixing it with his hands. I didn’t think it would work at all. But we put it in a pan, put it in the oven of the lady that washes our clothes (which is really conveniente, by the way) and waited. And it turned out great! Except for the one corner that burned on the bottom. We scraped off the crispy part, put some caramel on top with some sprinkles, and it was good! We brought it to the baptism and ate it along with some juice after the baptism.

For the baptism, the family lives far away from the chapel, so we went in a taxi to pick them up. There are 5 of them in the family. So we squeezed 8 people and a baby into a car the size of the Pickle [Hyundai Accent]. That was fun.