to all...

2 weeks in the CTM left......and another week down, and another week down, another elder from the dust... oh my heavens I'm going insane! not really, just a little cabin fever :D so....this week was very not-interesting...except for the fact that on sunday, I played the violin to accompany the elders who were leaving as they sang armies of helaman, the normal choir with As I search the Holy Scriptures...and then I got to sing in the specialty choir which sang an awesome arrangement of I believe in Christ, and the CTM president loved it so much that he actually stopped us from sitting down and invited us to sing it again at his request...which of course we did.

...now onto the stuff that everybody looks for... Does anybody know an Elder Bradley Johnson??? He's from woodbridge and once I told him that I was in the Centreville stake, he started naming off almost every youth in the stake, blew my mind...but he didn't know Koa Beus or Andrew Beaty which was unfortunate, but whatever. Today we went to the São Paulo temple like we do every week in the CTM, (which by the way mom, is not across the street, it´s a solid hour drive in mediocre traffic, usually a bit less, sometimes double if it´s bad) and as soon as most of us got to the Celestial Room, the power went out over that entire section of the city....they have a single back-up generator for the emergency lights in the hallways, but nowhere else...bu a single light right above the chandelier in the Celestial room, it was awesome, although finding my locker in the midst of the hundreds that they have in the temple and getting dressed was extremely difficult in the pitch black.

Yestderday was Chile´s independence day, the 18th, so as always, when there are people from that country in the CTM, they make all of the native foods and have the natives go up and sing the national anthem at the devotional that week...we basically ended up with a ton of Dulce de Leite, popcorn, and Pad-thai (I have no idea how to spell that) along with the mountains of rice and beans :D as always.

One of my wonderful Brazilian roommates, Elder Brito, told me two days ago, right before he left, that he was set on marrying one of the north American sisters as soon as he returned from his mission...he then proceded to show me a picture that he had gotten with the wonderful Sister Robinson, one of my friends that I have made here...and told me that she was his new "Plano A"...he had a list of girls that he had ranked as "Plano A, B, C, ...." I could not stop laughing....especially since he's 5'5'' pushing 80 Kilos...He's also from somewhere in my mission, and he told me that every day he ate atleast a kilo of meat, and drank nothing but soda...great, and that every night that they didn't eat meat, it was lasagna, I'm positive that he was overexagerating, but that's hillarious none the less. He's actually an armored vehicle driver, he works for a private security firm who transports massive sums of money from businesses to the banks, he's 18...talk about a nutty job! His drivers seat has a shotgun where the seatbelt normaly clips in...cool stuff, and he drives a motorcycle everywhere when he's not on the job. He's a funny guy, but he said that he's going to write his mother to take care of me if I end up in his hometown/area.

Anyways, today we're going to clean up a park that's down the street from the CTM, when we arrived, it was kind of clean, but every week we go back and it gets worse and worse and worse...so today, in about an hour or two we're going to get a group to go down and clean it up...we grabbed some trashbags from the janitorial ladies here... so yeah, hurah for organizing a service project in less paperwork than a paper airplane requires... (thank you Mr. Mayo...you know who i'm talking to...)

all's well in zion

not really, watch president Holland's address and you'll know what I mean.

Elder Tyler J. Eliason

P.S. they have a saying here in the CTM... "Un vazio caixa de correio é un triste caixa de correio." hint hint :D

letters sent this week will still get here when I'm here so don't hesitate :D