My Good Friend Habib

The last two days have been pretty great I have to say. Saturday I ate lunch at Raimundo, Dina, and Nalva´s house, a family that I baptized here in Valparaiso. They were also feeding the missionaries so it was a pretty fun experience chatting with them too. Elder Palmeira (far left on the couch) was trained by my MTC companion Elder LaPorte and Derek Hall was teaching his parents before when he received his mission call to Brasilia. I had met him before but it was fun to chat with him again. I got to hear all the updates from the mission and joke around with the missionaries so that was fun. They were talking about how much dust there was and how large the area was etc. It was funny because the family responded with, "Well when Alex and Heward were here there weren´t as many asfalted roads and there was only one companionship in the ward." So we kept joking with them about how easy they had it now etc. It was fun, they´re funny guys so it´s good to joke around with them. We ate Lasagna which is definitely one of my favorite brazilian meals. It is so good, it´s not the same as we eat in the States, but similar. They had two huge pans of Lasagna, one with white sauce and the other with red. So good.

Anyways, after the missionaries left we were waiting around for Adriane to meet up with us (she has a car) to go to the famous Lago Paranoá, the artificially created Lake surrounding part of Brasilia. While we were waiting Alex and Nalva put on some music and were trying to teach me to dance Forró, it´s kind of a mix between swing dancing and more Latin like dances that you´ve seen (eg. Salsa) the legend is that Navy seamen from the US brought it to the northern part of Brasil but I don´t really know about that. Alex is really good at it but I look like a fool, so I just let them do it. I´ll have to get it on video it´s pretty sweet.

Well we went to the lake and it was a really pretty area. I had obviously seen the lake before but I couldn´t really stop and walk around because we were always on a bus on our way to something important when we were in Brasilia. I took a picture of the famous "Ponte JK", ponte is bridge in portuguese and the JK stands for Juscelino Kubitschek who was one of the Presidents of Brazil and actually designed Brasilia and everything although it was only finished well after he was president. Alex called it "just kidding bridge." Anyways there are tons of things here in Brasilia called JK, and in Palmas (it was modeled after Brasilia). It´s supposedly the third most beautiful bridges in the world, but I don´t know how you´re supposed to back that kind of statistic up. Hold on a second I´ll wikipedia that...ok I couldn´t find a definite list of the most beautiful, though it seemed to make honorable mention on a few blogs about bridges it didn´t even make the top ten most of the time. Well I think it´s beautiful, and the area surrounding the lake is definitely beautiful. Just look at my photographic skills.

Well after we hung out there taking a few pictures we went to the famous Habib´s fast food restaurant. I´m not sure exactly where the food is supposed to be from in the middle east, Alex says it´s Morroccan food, but anyway it´s pretty good and they have chains all over Brazil, actually I just looked at their website and it says they are the second largest chain in Brazil. These little guys are the happy and sad esfihas, in my opinion the best food Habib´s has to offer is esfiha. I ate 13 of those little esfiha guys myself. Those happy faces turned into scared faces real quick when they saw I was an esfiha eating machine.