CTM Weeks 6 & 7

Sao Paulo! Brazil is really cool. Sao Paulo is huge. The city just keeps stretching off into the distance in every direction. I have been companions with Elders Francis and Welburn for the last week. They were my roommates in Provo who left a week before I did. Elder Toala just showed up today and we are companions again. On the trip over, we couldn´t land in Dallas Fort Worth because of a thunderstorm. We had to land at a maintanance hanger nearby and wait in line to be refueled. After 2.5 or 3 hours we finally were able to take off again. We took off, made a big u turn and landed 10 minutes later. We were so low that I could read the signs on the front of stores. It was so weird because we were so close to the main airport, but we weren´t near the storm. It must have been directly over Dallas Fort Worth. Anyway, all the flights were delayed, even our flight to Sao Paulo. But, we took so long refueling that we missed our flight by about 10 minutes. The church put us up in the local LaQuinta Inn. It was weird sleeping in a real bed. A soft one. My roommate was Elder Reeves. His girlfriend and Carolyn just met online the week before so we had a lot to talk about. In the morning we went down to the continental breakfast and enjoyed some pancakes shaped like Texas. I couldn´t believe it. Only in Texas... We then had the opportunity to spend from noon to 7:10 in the airport. It was a little boring. After a while I was feeling pretty unproductive, tired, and lazy and felt like I needed to do something. We had each recieved 2 pass a long cards with our travel documents from the church. So, I said a prayer and told Heavenly Father that I would like to give both of my cards away and asked for help with talking to strangers in an airport. I got up and asked if anyone wanted to join me and Elder Meredith said he would. We went to the map of the floor and looked at it. I asked Elder Meredith where he wanted to go and he said he wanted to head toward this weird musical walls thing over in the corner of the airport. I looked at the map and the gates that were nearby. D16, D17, D18. After looking at it for a few more seconds I said lets go. So we started walking. In front of the board that says the status of all the flights I noticed that someone had dropped a boarding pass. We picked it up. It was for a flight out of D18. We went to D18 and stood in line to turn it in. While we were standing there we saw a family walk over and sit down. the daughter started checking her pockets. Then her parents. We walked over and asked if they had lost their boarding pass. They said yes. We gave it to them and they were really grateful. We started talking and at the end of the conversation I gave them a pass a long card. Crazy. I was expecting to do more work than that, but sometimes are prayers are answered quickly. I was able to give my other pass a long card out later also. After that it was a reallly good day. We had an overnight flight to Brazil and the next morning I was in Sao Paulo. I sat directly in the middle of the plane so I couldnt see anything. The only windows I could barely had the wings blocking the view. So i didnt see brazil until we landed. The CTM is pretty neat. The Brazilians are super friendly. We get to go outside and buy the things we need in the nearby streets on p-day. So its been pretty fun here.