The Incredible Journey

Well, I'm now in São Paulo Brazil after the most ridiculous plane trip I've ever been on. I'm traveling with Jeff Peterson, a friend from school, and it's been a pretty crazy trip for both of us. The original plan was to fly from Salt Lake to Dallas, then catch a connecting flight from Dallas to São Paulo. But our flight in Salt Lake was delayed an hour, so we got to Dallas just after our connecting flight left, so instead of getting to São Paulo at 7:30am on Friday we wouldn't get there until Friday at 9:00pm.

To get to São Paulo the airline flew us from Dallas to Miami, where we arrived at 2:00am. They were to accomodating enough to give us a voucher for a free night at a hotel in Miami, with shuttle service to and from the hotel. That really cheered me up until we got to Miami and found out the shuttle service had stopped two hours previously. So we were stranded all night at the Miami airport.

To pass the time, we talked to some of the interesting people who hang out at airports at 3 in the morning. We met one lady from Australia whose flight plans had gone about as well as ours. We also met a Pentecostal Preacher from Brazil. We started talking about religion and wound up giving him a Book of Mormon and teaching him a good chunk of the first discussion. That was pretty cool to do as a regular person. I think his interest was mostly academic though, but that's how it starts sometimes. As a side note, for some reason I'm having a hard time not calling Jeff "Elder." Old habits die hard.

After basking in the luxury of the Miami International Airport for 10 hours (imagine me sprawled face down next to the wall of an airport terminal with my head resting on a bag full of books and you'll start to get a feel for how it was) we finally got on the plane for São Paulo, where I realized my lifelong dream of watching "Paul Blart: Mall Cop." I also watched two episodes of "The Office" and spent a few hours trying to read, which, combined with the lack of any real rest in two days, usually led to blurred vision, hallucinations, and an inability to combine the words on the page into any coherent structure. They had a space invaders style game on the little screens where you watch the movies, and I think Jeff set the all-time high score.

Upon our arrival in São Paulo, we were greeted with the inability to get any money from ATM machines. I still haven't figured out why, since on my mission my card worked just fine. Luckily we can charge things on them, which is how we paid for the 67$ taxi ride to our host home, which we wouldn't have had to take had we arrived in São Paulo 14 hours earlier when we were supposed to, since we would then have been able to ride on the van BYU had contracted for that very purpose.

Our host is a lady named Irmã Genô. She's about 60 years old, and her son is the bishop of the local ward. She had a hot bowl of soup waiting for us when we finally got there at about 11:30 Friday night. Our home is an apartment across the street from the São Paulo temple, almost in front of it. It felt good to get a good night's rest.

That's about all for now. Stay tuned for more exciting adventures and updates.

-Kevin