Yup

Family! How's it going. It is his hot here... I haven't sweat this much my entire mission. I think the whole world is hotter , someone was saying there's like sun flares going on or something ... I donno , but I'm definitely feeling it here. In every area I could go to bed with a fan and be fine , but now even with a fan we wake up sweating like crazy. It's okay though. I drink an average of 4 - 6 liters of water a day. It's costing me a lot of money , ha. You can buy from places called water stations where they take the water you get through the pipes and run it through these huuuge tanks of filterization until it becomes good to drink. It tastes way good , but costs about 20 pesos for 15 - 20 liters .. which I finish in a few days. With all the money we spend on transportation just to get to and back from the area and for transportation to district meetings and stuff ... my money slips away fast. Still I think I've felt it hotter in Utah before - at least in St George. I'm amazed at Grandma and Todd and Gayes' families - I could not live in that kind of heat. The funny thing about filipinos is that they hate heat more than we do. They often [unless they have to] won't expose themself to the sun all day long. They hate being dark and they hate how hot it is. That seems like unique only to this country ... do mexicans hate the heat? I don't really know anything about their culture. But yeah , we'll be walking and my companion or others will be using like a sunbrella while I don't and they're like it's so hoooo0o0o0o0oottttt and it doesn't feel that bad when they say it. I think I read that a mission in Arizona is the hottest mission on earth. Anyways , that's that about the heat. How's everyone doing? How's Connecticut? Warm still?/yet? How's Wolf? Hopefully still kicking.  This week has gone by pretty fast. Tuesday and Wednesday were pretty regular days. As was Thursday ... haha. Nothing exciting really. A lot of teaching , inviting , hopefully making a little bit of a difference. Friday we held exchanges with the Calasiao elders and I went with Elder Palu. 5'11 280lb Tongan from utah. I've known him for a long time because I was in his zone when he got into his first area , then he went to my old area of Malimpec , then again in Agoo we were in the same zone , now in Dagupan. He's way way funny , ha. Acts like he's from the hood and gangster. But it's really surprising because he's incredibly humble. One of the most humble people I've met , especially when it comes to teaching. It was a lot of fun teaching with him - not to mention he's got an amazing Tagalog accent being Tongan and all. But the funniest thing is he loves hip hop and rap , so we had this one appointment with a less active that we're walking to and he's just like rapping to himself then I'm talking to the lady and we go into the house and he's still rapping and we sit down and he's still rapping ahahaha the lady is like staring at us and me and her just start laughing as Elder Palu continues to rap. Then he like finally realizes and stops , hahaha. And maaan that guy sweats a lot. But it was a fun exchanges. Someone in here is playing Fireflies by ... Owl City , yep.  So the next day we ended our exchanges and went directly to Dagupan at 12 to help with the Bangus Festival! Haha. Bangus is a type of fish , and they have a whole festival because of it. Apparently it's one of the largest festivals in the Philippines and a ton of celebrities come to it. Every year the missionaries in the Dagupan Zone help out by handing out free water to people because it's crazy hot and none of them have water. So .. it ... was not what I was expecting, haha. It was incredibly crazy as we would be filling up these cups of water with the tanks we had and putting them on the table as we get swaarrmmmedd with people. And about 70% were dressed up as woman , because they had these like street dancing things that are like choreographed dances per barangay [neighborhood]. So anyways , there were 31 barangays with about 100 people in each barangay ... so 70% of each barangay were dressed as woman , and maybe only 20% actually were ... hahaha. Being americans ... they were staring and staring and staring at us. But it was a fun experience. Afterwards we went to go check out the actual festival because we had about 20 minutes of free time and it was way cool. There were so many people there. After that we just got something to eat and headed home. One thing I realized I'm really going to miss is Mang Inasal. It's this chain restaraunt where you pick your ulam [again anything you put on rice] normally which is a breast of chicken and then it's unlimited rice ... so you eat sooo much rice and theirs is really good. It's addicting sometimes.  Sunday was a good church service and the branch is making these t shirts for our service project tomorrow [national day of service] so I'll show you some pictures next week probably. Oh also! Haha. At the bangus Festival Elder Blancia somehow randomly saw like a past girlfriend of his or something [here in the philippines they have what are called text mates that become your girlfriend despite never meeting her] so he saw her at the bangus festival , despite that being the first time ever meeting her , haha. He was way shocked.  So yeah , this past week had been pretty good and this transfer is way fast. Now we're headed to Dagupan to get a few things done. Email me with any questions or whatever! love you all, -E Austin W