Merry Christmas! (They’re still celebrating it here!)
One of the kind of cool, kind of not-cool things about Peru: They celebrate a lot! Christmas celebrations for them start on the 24th and keep on going to the 25th, and then after that they just keep on celebrating until New Years! It’s also pretty awesome ’cause almost all their celebrations involve blowing things up:
Sorry if the camera was a little shaky — there were a lot of explosions going off at the time!
Funny story: The guys below us bought a type of firework called “la mama rata” (the mother rat) or something like that and it’s basically a stick of dynamite! When it exploded, it was so loud the windows shook and my compi and I — On the balcony of the second floor! — could feel the shockwave! (It scared the guys below us so much that they didn’t light any more of those after that!)
I don’t really have any funny stories or interesting events from this week, aside from a few photos I took, so I’ll just share those and an explanation:
We had a mission Christmas party:
While there, we had lunch — actual steak!
One of my Christmas gifts:
How nice — they included a user manual! (Yes, a 2-inch-long flashlight apparently needs a user manual) (Good thing I read it, too! 5 pages of how to twist it to turn it on and off! I never would have figured that out just by looking at it!)
Here’s basically what our companionship study is like:
(These were gifts for my companion and me. They dance in the sun, so we did companionship study outside on the balcony to see if they work)
That’s all! Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year, too! See you in 2017!
— Elder Schroeder