Here we go

After saying goodbye to our families, Jared and I set off on our adventure to Brazil. Our trip started off well, and the flight to Atlanta was uneventful. We had left Salt Lake late, however , and our flight to Manaus was already boarded and ready to leave when we arrived after sprinting through the airport.

Like most redeye flights, our overnight flight to Manaus was hard. I slept fitfully for about and hour and gave up. I ended up watching two movies and trying to finish the new Dan Brown novel The Lost Symbol. Incidentally, if anyone is interested, the novel is pretty good, but I felt like he didn't put as much effort into this one as he did into Angels and Demons or The DaVinci Code.

We arrived in Manaus around 4:30am. The airport there is pretty ghetto, and there were only two customs agents to handle an entire plane full of people, but once we had filled out the necessary forms declaring we were not bringing in H1N1 or fleeing prosecution in another land, we were ushered into the baggage claim area and on into the main part of the airport, which was not much bigger than the food court at University Mall.

We found a place to exchange Jared's money and the guy behind the counter turned out to be a member of the church. Who knew at 5am in the middle of the Amazon we would encounter a member of the church so excited to see "os elderes americanos." At first, we thought Jared was getting a screaming deal on his exchange, but it turned out to be a misunderstanding, and he ended up with about the same rate as I had gotten from Travelex.

Our flight from Manaus into Sao Paulo wasn't too bad, and I just listened to the two Paulistanos next to me talking about politics and cooking and everything in between. It was also during my eavesdropping that I found out that Saturday night was the end of daylight savings for most of Brazil. Apparently they didn't get the memo when the US pushed the time change back.

During this flight, Jared was dead to the world. He was running on about ten hours sleep the entire week due to his workload, and was trying to catch up. Unbeknownst to Jared, a few rows up some guy was blowing chunks all over the place. Even though it was pretty nasty, I was extremely impressed with the flight crew and how they handled it. They were very professional, yet treated the obviously sick gentleman with as much compassion as any mother would have treated her sick child. They even got his bag for him and helped him to the back of the plane to change.

Once we finally landed in Sao Paulo, we washed up and changed into our white shirts and ties in order to be ready to go to the temple. We wandered the airport and asked about getting flights up to Palmas for later in the week. We got some information and pricing, but decided to wait and check internet pricing later. We picked up our rental car and the guys there were kind enough to input the way to the temple into the navigation for us. We figured out later that they had made a mistake after we were driving in circles in downtown Sao Paulo. We put the correct address in and finally pulled up to the gates of the temple around 4:30pm that afternoon, which was too late for us to attend and still make it down to Curitiba that night.

We ended up going inside for a few minutes and taking pictures outside. We grabbed some dinner at the Walmart Supercenter before heading out toward Curitiba. And if anyone is wondering, yes, there are "people of Walmart" here, too.

We drove through pouring rain, fog, and winding roads through Sao Paulo and Parana for 6 hours and finally made it to the home of Rosangela (Sister Alves) who served with me in Araraquara during mission. She and her husband were kind enough to offer their home to us while we were in Curitiba. They had stayed up and were awake to greet us when we rolled in at midnight.

She showed us our rooms and we quickly changed our clothes and headed to bed. Between the flights with nary a wink and the time change losing an hour, we were ready to sleep!