I started out my trip in Minneapolis International Airport on July 14th at 4:00 in the afternoon... I wanted to make sure I didn't have any problems catching my flight.... well... I didn't and I wouldn't have even if I had come at 7:45 (an hour after my flight was supposed to take off). That was a flight to Chicago and a bunch of people had connecting flights afterwords so people were kind of pissy on that plane... We got to Chicago at 9:10 in plenty of time to run over to the 767 that was taking us to Sao Paulo... We only had to sit on that plane for about 20 minutes before it started taxiing down the runway. By this time We had found out that my flight from Sao Paulo to Porto Alegre the next day had been canceled and we would have to spend 12 hours in the Sao Paulo Airport with ALL our luggage (and Pastor Tom's Luggage) which weighed about 200 lbs all together per person. We got to Sou Paulo around 10 am  and our flight boards at 11:00 pm... (this is where I am right now... waiting for the plane to board). I we tried calling Tom to tell him that we wouldn't be at Porto Alegre at 4pm like we had planned but at 2am..  after figuring out how to use the phone booths and finding out where not to get hung out to dry buying phone cards we didn't get through to him until he was about to leave to pick us up.... that was close. We are going to get picked up by Edwardo and Elene from the Brazilian Church in Minneapolis... they moved back down to Porto Alegre around 8-10 months ago.... I think we will go to their church tomorrow and Tom will pick us up in the after noon. Since it is REALLY FRIGGIN hard to sleep on the plane I think I got about 2 hours of real sleep and the rest of the time I was just closing my eyes laying there or looking out the window... (I did get to see the Amazon river)... So anyway... we got a internet pass so we could email Tom since we hadn't been able to get ahold of him on the phone at that point... and I checked my email... let Cedric check his and I started surfing just to waste time... Cedric fell asleep and some girls selling bikinis in the airport mall started laughing at him... so I went over and took his picture and started talking with them... they were cool and I got to add another friend to my orkut and another friend to my MSN.... they were really fun to try to talk with.... We actually had some meaningful conversations even before Cedric woke up... he woke up right as one of them asked me to take her with me back to America... I wasn't quite sure what she was saying so I'm glad Cedric was there for that part... ( :-P )


  anyway... that's my exciting life so far on this trip... I'll try to keep you posted...  I think it would be really cool to keep a journal of this.... I have never been good at journaling tho so we'll have to wait and see what develops.

Peace...
Jonathan (7-15-2006 11:15 local time, Sao Paulo International Airport)