"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