"Here in America we don't tolerate that kind of crap, sir!"

Not much to report on since my last post, but here goes.

Tuesday we went to Avenida Paulista (the commercial center of the city - kind of like wall street). While there we went to an exposition with a bunch of video games you could play for free. One of the guys in our group, Brad, played Halo 3 against some 12 year old kids and threw down some US style domination. We had a good laugh about it. I also dominated at Mario Kart.

After that Jeff and I hung around the Avenida for a while going down some side streets and stuff. We bought some coconut candy and I became a junkie. We also bought some cheap fig newton knockoffs filled with guava jelly (goiabada) and some amazing sugar-coated gummy candy. We also went to the Livraria Cultura, which is supposed to be São Paulo's best bookstore. It was pretty cool, but a disappointingly high percentage of the books were in English. We also got some sugarcane juice (definitely mankind's greatest achievement) and pastels.

Yesterday (Wednesday the 29th) we went to the Campinas temple. I acted as a witness for some baptisms, then we did a session. It was way cool because we didn't get any English translation. I also got some pictures of the temple. I've been wanting to get those since the MTC when we went but couldn't take our cameras.


Today we got to go to the US Consulate. Dr. Fails knows one of the guys who works there so we got a tour, then had a few guys from the State Department and Foreign Service talk to us about what it is they do there. It was really interesting. Apparently consulates are like smaller versions of Embassies, which means I was on US soil for a few hours today. We all kept thinking of the Simpsons episode where they go to Australia. They didn't have a machine hooked up to the toilets though, so we had to put up with clockwise-spinning flushes.

Thats all for now. Ill get in another post next week.

-kev

Happy World Land and the World's Nastiest Cake

It's been a pretty busy weekend, so I'll try to fill y'all in.

Friday afternoon (the 24th) we went to do baptisms for the dead at the São Paulo temple. Two of the girls in our group haven't been endowed so we wanted them to be able to do something at the temple. It was a unique experience that lends a lot of credence to the phrase "the church is truer in Utah." Long story short, what we expected to take 45 minutes took 3 hours. It was still a really great experience, though. Even with all the hassle I left feeling really good.

Saturday five of us went to a theme park called Hopi Hari. It's about equivalent to Lagoon in terms of rides. The good news is it was just a little rainy on Saturday, making for really short lines all day. We rode everything we wanted 2 or 3 times. The annoying part was the music playing from most of the speakers. If anybody has seen the Tiny Toons "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" movie, the music was just like the Happy World Land theme song. They also had some weird arabic music (I think the theme of the park, if it had one, was the middle east, but they didn't stick to it very well.) and a knockoff of the Superman theme. It was a lot of fun though.

There was one incident at the end of the day. They had one area that was Sesame Street themed for little kids, and they had a ride that was like the teacups at Disneyland except with Oscar the Grouch's trash can instead of teacups. Jeff, Rebecca, and I got into one and discovered that whereas the Disneyland ride kind of limits how fast you can spin, this one doesn't. We got spinning ridiculously fast and were probably pulling several G's throughout the course of the ride. Between the lightheadedness, spinning lights, and all of us laughing hysterically it felt kind of like what I imagin being on drugs is like. When I got off I got really motion sick and threw up into the closest garbage can. It was the first time I've ever thrown up because of a park ride. I know it sounds like I'm ragging on the whole park experience but I seriously did have a blast.

On Sunday Jeff and I went with a guy named Aaron from our group to visit one of his old mission areas (he served here in São Paulo in the Interlagos mission). It was kind of a poorer area, and reminded me of some of the poorer places from my mission (until now we've mostly hung around the prettier, tourist-friendly parts of Brazil). It was fun though, and made me really excited to visit my mission next weekend.

One of the families we visited gave us a piece of the world's nastiest cake. This was after we left a really poor house that smelled like the walls were molding. Jeff described the cake best by saying that it tasted like the moldy house smelled. Other than that the day went really well.

As you can tell, I'm keeping pretty busy. I may not get a post up again until next week. Hope all is well in the States.

-kev

Argentina, Curitiba, Twilight, and a Snake Museum

For day 2 of our time in Foz de Iguaçu we went to the Argentine side of the waterfalls. Without meaning any disrespect to Brazil, I have to admit the Argentine side was a lot cooler. The first thing we did was go on a catwalk that takes you right up by the Devil's Throat, which is where the waterfalls make kind of a circle and all dump into one place. (As a side note, why is it that really cool things are so often named after the devil? That kind of reflects badly on human nature.)

After that we went on some paths that take us along the whole length of the falls on the Argentine side. Basically the format of the falls is like a long hall with waterfalls on either side and at the end of the hall is the devil's throat. I don't know how well that explains it, but you can always look it up on Google Earth or something. It's probably worth the 30 seconds of effort.

(Pause for half a minute......)

The highlight of the day was a boat ride we took. The boat went right up next to the falls. We obviously couldn't go underneath the falls themselves, but the water hitting the surface of the river splashes up enough to create a kind of cloud that's almost like a secondary waterfall (this is really hard to describe, sorry) and we went into that cloud and got absolutely soaked. It was really fun.

After that we bought some souvenirs and stuff, then went to the Three Corners area where Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay meet. We couldn't jump back and forth because the boundary is actually at the intersection where two rivers make a kind of T shape, but over the course of the weekend we did go to all three of those countries, so I'm up to 5 countries I've been in now (thank you Canada!).

Saturday night we went to a really nice churrascaria called the Búfalo Branco. After eating more meat and grilled pineapple than was probably wise, safe, or legal in certain countries, I went to try and take a picture of the kitchen where they have a bunch of meat roasting on spits. The people in charge saw me and let me go back in by the grill and get a picture with a big chunk of meat on a spit. It was pretty cool.

Sunday afternoon we left for Curitiba, the capital of the state of Paraná. It's one of the cleaner, more modern and European cities in Brazil. We spent most of the day Monday visiting parks and stuff. Monday night we went to a mall and they had a booth set up where if you buy a can of some Coke product you can play Rock Band as much as you want, so a couple of us hung out there for a while. We absolutely dominated.

On the ride back from Curitiba to São Paulo the girls kind of revolted that we'd been watching mostly guy movies and somehow convinced Gustavo to turn on Twilight. Since I had nothing better to do I watched it. It was hilariously terrible, and I laughed pretty hard during most of the "serious" parts.

Yesterday we played soccer for a few hours. I got schooled. I also got a huge blister on my left foot. It was a lot of fun.

Today we went to the Instituto Butantan, which has a snake museum. They had a mini-zoo with a bunch of exotic snakes and frogs and stuff. They had 3 or 4 anacondas in one of the tanks. They weren't full size yet, but were still pretty big. They also had a huge Indian Python, and at one point got out some false coral snakes and were letting people touch them. I felt kind of stupid because most of the people in line were little kids. On the other hand, how many times do you get to touch a Brazillian snake (without getting strangled, poisoned, or robbed by it I mean).

This Saturday a few of us are going to Hopi-Hari, which is an amusement park. From what I understand it's supposed to be "better than Lagoon, but not as good as Six Flags." We'll see how that goes. It's only 75 reais for a day pass and the bus ride to and from the park, which seems pretty cheap to me. It's supposed to be lousy weather on Saturday, which will hopefully translate to shorter lines.

That's about all the latest news so I'll go ahead and close this post.

Best Dam Trip Ever

Hello everyone. Right now we're at a hotel with free wifi so I figured I'd get a quick post up on the blog here. I'll try to add some pictures as well.

Yesterday was a ridiculously long bus ride from Sao Paulo to Foz de Iguacu. We left at 6 in the morning with a 15 hour trip ahead of us. That would have been the case except that when we stopped for dinner around 7 the busdriver discovered that the weird sounds we'd been hearing during the trip were because one of the axles was breaking. We had to wait for a replacement bus to come before we could continue on, which took quite a while. I'm not sure how long it took for the replacement bus to get there, but I do know we watched Bolt from start to finish and the new bus still wasn't there yet (for those of you who haven't seen that movie yet, go see it now. If you don't absolutely love it then you're probably reading the wrong blog). When our ghetto replacement bus showed up we had another few hours drive and got to the hotel at midnight.

This morning we went to the Iguacu cataracts, which are some of the biggest falls in the world. It was pretty cool to see. The city we're in is called Foz de Iguacu and is right on the borders between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. Tomorrow we're going to see the falls from the Argentine side and get right up close to the Devil's Throat. (We saw the Devil's Throat today from a bit of a distance. It's pretty impressive).

In the afternoon we went to Itaipu, the world's most powerful hydroelectric dam. It supplies 90% of Paraguay's electricity with one or two of it's turbines, and the rest supply 20% of Brazil's power. The dam tour guides took us on the dam tour, where we learned a lot of dam facts and they answered all our dam questions. I decided not to buy any of their dam gifts from the dam gift store since their too darned expensive. (You all thought I'd slip up on that last one, didn't you?). As a random side note, on the way out we saw two pink tour buses. They were pretty gay looking, as you can imagine.

For dinner we went to a pizza buffet. Luckily the hotel has a gym of sorts where I could atone for my sins afterward.

Random Stuff in São Paulo

All right, for this post I think I'll talk about some of the highlights of living in the fabulous city of São Paulo.

First off, crowded buses! Never get on the bus between 4:30 and 7:00pm. We've had that experience a few times. By the time you get off the bus your concept of personal space is kind of warped. If someone is two inches from your face while they talk to you you'll wonder why they're so far away.

I haven't talked much about the lady we're staying with, so here goes. Here name is Genô (short for Genolina). She's 74, and loves to talk about her family. I think she's a little crazy, and I think sometimes she ignores what I say because she thinks its in English or something. Whenever Jeff and I leave the house she asks if we're going girl-chasing, which is pretty funny. For some reason she keeps making chicken stroganoff over and over again. Before we left for Rio we had it four days in a row (two of those days were leftovers, but still....) then this Sunday she made it again and we've had another two days of leftovers. I used to love stroganoff but I'm pretty sick of it now. I don't think she's realized we're kind of tired of it. Other than quirks like that, she's really nice. She does our laundry for us (usually without asking, which is sometimes not a good thing) and tries to feed us more than we want, need, or could possibly eat (which has led to some pretty hilarious fights between her and Jeff).

Our schedule is usually class from 8:30 to about 11 in the morning, then around 1-2 we'll all meet up to go someplace. We've been to some art museums (my favorite exhibit was a life size statue of a blue whale covered in - you guessed it - blue jeans.) We've seen some really cool parks, and yesterday we went to Ibirapuera, São Paulo's answer to central park. We rented some bikes for an hour and rode around and it was way fun. I've discovered I can stand on the center bar of the bike without falling off. Hopefully someone reading this is impressed by that, because no one around me was. At any rate, I was pretty proud of myself.

Movies here are cheaper than in the US since we get half-price tickets with our student ID cards, so we've been to Transformers 2 and Ice Age 3. Tomorrow we're going to Harry Potter 6 (apparently we all have a thing for sequels....). Movies are either dubbed in Portuguese or shown in English with Portuguese subtitles. Transformers we saw with subtitles, but we saw Ice Age 3 dubbed in Portuguese, which worked pretty well since it's a cartoon and lip sync isn't perfect anyway. When we're in the mall at a movie theater watching a movie in English it's easy to forget we're not in the US, until we get on the bus and reality sinks back in.

I've added a few things to the list of strange meats I've eaten in Brazil. I've now had filet mignon (that's not strange, just ridiculously good), ostrich meat, octopus, sushi, and capivara meat. If you don't know what a capivara is, go out and watch The Princess Bride, and pay close attention to the fire swamp where Wesley gets attacked by the Rodents of Unusual Size. Capivara's, which are the worlds largest rodent, are kind of like the ROUSs. Their meat tastes pretty good though. Tomorrow Jeff's taking us to an authentic Japanese Ramen restaurant he found in the Asian neighborhood, so I'm pretty excited for that. I'll finally get to try eating soup with chopsticks.

For my birthday I got my first surprise party ever. Jeff convinced me we were going to the mall to "help the single girls in our group buy some stuff" (the girls don't speak much Portuguese). I didn't realize it was all a setup, and even when the rest of our group showed up I just thought it was a weird coincidence until we went upstairs and bought a cake (I know I'm awesome enough to merit my own party, but I feel like I should point out that Rob, another guy in the group, has the same birthday, so it was kind a double party).

I'd try adding some pictures today, but I left my camera in the apartment. Sorry I've been pretty lame about pictures. When I get home I'll have about a thousand to post on facebook and stuff and I'll trick out this blog like no other. Until then y'all will have to be content with the "trial version." Sorry.

The Lanhouse closes in 5 minutes so I'll end this post for now. This'll probably be my last entry until next Wednesday or so. Until then.

Tchau,

-Kevin

Rio Trip: Directors Cut

All right, so my last post wasn't all that interesting or detailed. This time I'll try to be more interesting.

I've decided that Rio de Janeiro is at the same time one of the most ugly and most beautiful places on the planet. While I'm in São Paulo I'm always slightly paranoid. That was amplified a great deal in Rio, since we could see a lot of the favelas as we drove in. We were staying at a hotel right by the Copacabana beach, so we were relatively safe, except we couldn't go on the beach at night. (Guess what happened to the three guys who broke that rule? It starts with 'r' and rhymes with "sobbed....").

While driving from São Paulo we stopped in a city called Aparecida, where they have Brazil's national basilica. Its main attraction is a wooden doll some fishermen found and thought looked like the Virgin Mary (except it's black) and it became the patron saint of Brazil. I think it's really creepy, but Catholic people love it. There was a lady walking up the ramp leading to the statue on her knees.

When we got to Rio we went to some historical sites, which were kind of boring. The rest was cool though. On Saturday we went to the Cristo Redentor statue, spent the afternoon at the beach, then at night went to Pão de Açucar, a huge hill that overlooks most of the city. It was night and all lit up so it was way cool.

When we left Rio I was kind of sad, but there was some cool stuff in Belo Horizonte, our next stop. Our hotel looked like it was made in the 70's. It was still way cool, just retro. In Minas Gerais we went to some old rococo style churches full of gold carvings and stuff, but the coolest parts were the mine and the cavern. We got to go down in a mine and ride a real mine car. We also went to a huge cavern with 7 chambers. When we got to the last chamber they shut off the lights and we got to be in real pitch black darkness for about two minutes. One of the girls started freaking out and turned on her cell phone for a little towards the end, which kind of bugged me, but what can you do?

After a long bus ride, we finally got back to São Paulo, then it rained all weekend so things have been kind of boring since then.

That's about all for now. This week we go to Foz de Iguaçu, the world's second largest waterfall, so I'll have a post on that sometime next weekend.

Tchau

-Kevin

Rio de Janeiro

Hey guys.

Not much time to write today (what else is new?) but I thought I'd talk a little about Rio de Janeiro. It's basically the prettiest place I've ever been to.

The highlight of the trip was probably Pão de Açucar, a big hill that overlooks the whole city, the beach, etc. We took a tram up at night and could see everything. It was pretty amazing. I'd post some pictures but I forgot the USB cable for my camera and the lanhouse here doesn't have a card reader. Once I get home I'll get things up to date. Anyways, apart from the regular sightseeing our hotel was right by the beach so we got to go swimming in perfect water at Copacabana. That was another highlight.

We spent three days in Rio then another three in Minas Gerais visiting historic gold mining cities. We got to go into a gold mine and a huge natural cavern. I even got to ride in an old school mine car. When I get more time I'll tell you about our awesome hotel in Belo Horizonte.

Anyways, gotta go now but I'll try to get a new post up soon.

-Kev