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