Roosters, New Instruments and Warm Cream

Qui-quira-qui! Or something like that. That is the sound the roosters make in the morning. And there are lots of roosters here.

The dog dazer is mostly just for fun right now, because Elder Davis' bike pedal is broken. The dogs go nuts when you're on a bike, but they're not so bad if you're just walking. Therefore, we are paying them back by dazing them unmercilessly. I'm trying to train them Pavlov-style by raising my hand at them whenever I hit them with the frequencies, so eventually I'll just raise my hand and they'll run away and the Mexican children will believe in

my magical powers.

Yesterday, I managed to play hymns for people on: piano, guitar, contrabass and keyboard (accompanied by two recorders). So that was really weird. It's super fun to play piano for sacrament meeting. They haven't had a pianist in the branch yet. I played the Spirit of God, which everyone knows, so that was really loud. And I played a sacrament hymn that no one knew, apparently, so that was also pretty loud.

The food really has been good so far (except for this one thing: it was just a cup of warm cream and corn an a single tortilla chip; that was weird and I ate all of it) there's just usually way too much, and you always have accept and then eat all of it. Last night we passed three members houses on the way back home and all of them gave us lots of food.

I'm going to go ahead and send this and then attach more pictures to the next one.

picture is the city of Costa Rica! (It's not really a city, but don't tell the Costa Ricans that). I don't know our street address, but I can see the chapel on the picture. It's to

the east and a few blocks away from the train tracks. Our house is two blocks south of the chapel. And yep, we're surrounded by caña. Sugar cane. Apparently Coca-Cola owns the all of the surrounding fields.

The fields are really cool. We were teaching a lesson out in the coloñia of La Treinta (which is the somewhat separated portion out north of the main portion of Costa Rica) and ash started falling with the rain. Apparently they were burning a field, but I just figured the world was ending. It's nice being in such a small place. We work in half the city and the other copmanionship works in the other half. It seems much safer than my time in Culiacán. If you just say "buenas noches," they can't mug you anymore. It would just be weird.
We're trying to focus our efforts on finding people through the members referrals more than just contacting door to door. We are seeing lots of success from this method. Apparently transfers are in two weeks, so it's possible that I or Elder Davis will leave really soon.

As for writing me... We answer e-mails at a cyber and we have half an hour, so it's hard to read everyone's when I have a lot, but it's really nice to have a couple notes to respond to. I can print out e-mails here and read them later, though. So e-mail is probably the best way to contact me if anyone wants to do so.

Clothes: good. Still fairly white. That's how I can tell them apart from everyone elses when we wash them. Shoes: also good. They're doing better than my feet. I lost one pair for a week, but they were just under a bed. Besides being extremely disty, they're fine. I shine them on Sundays, and they look just as dusty once we've walked to the chapel. We leave our apartment for our first appointments at 10:00 a.m. after we finish our morning study. Then we work until two, for la comida. We go back out and work from three until nine or nine-thirty. It's awesome! We definitely don't take a siesta, but that would be nice. From what I've seen, that's somewhat of a false stereotype, unfortunately.

We went into Culiacán on Friday or Saturday to sign some sort of passport thing. My whole MTC district was reunited for about an hour and it was so fun. We're all having basically the same experiences, except Elder Brown has a stick and a bucket to clean his clothes. A lot of the other missionaries from my generation mentioned the difficulties they are having with their companions. Elder Davis and have had no problems and we get along really well, so I'm really grateful after hearing about how others are not having it so easy.

Pues, gracias.

Love,

Elder Tingey