Salinópolis 1

Hello!!!!!!!!!
This week was super fun!  My new area is Salinas and it's like a tourist beach town on the edge of the ocean.  There are super cool beaches here and the plan is to visit one of them later today.  There is also a beach called the Coca-Cola beach because the water looks like Coke so that is cool.  The ward here was a branch but became a ward* last week so that is pretty cool.  The members here are super fun and accepting and always like to joke around and also the people that live here are super accepting.  Literally every single house we clapped at we were accepted so that was pretty cool.  We wound up finding lots of cool people to teach and some cool families.   There is one neighborhood here that all the houses are built on stilts for when the tide comes in and it's super cool because during the day when it's dry there are crabs running all over the ground and hiding in their little holes.  My companion is Elder Santon from Bahia and is cool.  I will try to take some pictures today and send them next week.
Love,
Elder Holcomb

*when a congregation only has a small number of people it is called a branch and when it is a certain number of  more people (I think the number varies) it is called a ward.

We got to talk to Isaac using WhatsApp this week.  He gave us a tour of his new place.  It's really nice! We joked it would be the nicest place he lives in his adult life ;-)  It has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a good sized kitchen and living room area, a nice patio; a side yard with a washing machine, clothesline, and a pool (not really- it's an old brick tub for laundry but they call it a pool for fun); and a front yard with two coconut trees.  Isaac says he thinks it belongs to a chef from Portugal who met the missionaries and really liked them so he now rents it out to missionaries.  Isaac had his companion cut open a coconut for us.  He can do it really fast because he is from Brazil and grew up climbing trees and picking and cutting open coconuts.  Isaac also showed us some cups his companion made out of coconuts.  He thought it was pretty funny we were so impressed with his coconut cutting skills because it's such a regular thing, but we said if it snows again we'll video us shoveling snow for him hahaha.  I've included a few screenshots from our call and the other photos are from the beach and Coca-Cola Lake (that is actually it's name) and were sent to me by one of the people that took him there.