General Conference = A Missionary's Christmas

Great and crazy week! On Tuesday, we dropped Sister Gilbert off at the office so she could go to Abrantes. My two favorites, Sister Griffin and Carter, stayed with me until we picked up our greenies on Wednesday! I'm training Sister Mortensen from Houston, Texas BUT, she actually visa waited in the Utah Logan Mission for 6 weeks AND my best friend from college, Marissa, was her STL (Sister-Trainer-Leader)! Small world! Oh, and everyone thinks we're sisters! Sister Mortensen is amazing and ON FIRE! Her Portuguese is cinco estrelas which is great too :)

So it's been fun introducing my favorite place in the world to Sister Mortensen, and I LOVE to see her reactions. We get honked at and catcalled all the time. She freaked out yesterday because she thought someone was going to kidnap us (Yes mom, we're fine!). She is slowly learning to not get weirded out when everyone watches and stares at us from their windows, and how to say the "lh" sound in "bacalhau." She found out the milk here makes her sick, and comes in non-refrigerated cardboard boxes. Things are unsalted, we have no air conditioning, everyone kisses each other, there are tons of stairs, we use doorbells more than knocking, her name has "morte" in it (aka death), and a ton of other things. But the greatest thing is that she's always excited to learn more and already loves everything here as weird as it can be.

General Conference was AMAZING (better than Christmas)! We were soo sad when it was over! I literally can't choose my favorite talk but I loved the talks from Elder Uchtdorf, Sister Oscarson, Elder Oaks, Elder Holland, and Elder Koch. And I loved what Elder Andersen said about applying everything we learned. Man, it was all soo great! All of the American missionaries were able to watch Conference in English with a missionary couple, the Wests (MY FAVORITE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD). So we had a junk food potluck and had permission to stay up late to watch the 9pm-11pm sessions each night. SO GOOD! Go check it out if you didn't have the chance to!!

BEIJINHOS GRANDES!!

Sister Hillam