Rio de Janeiro Day One: Getting There

To the Airport

The alarm went off. I sprang out of bed and as my feet hit the floor I wondered why it had gone off. Then, as the fog of sleep cleared I realized that it was time to head to Rio de Janeiro. It was raining hard (even for Teresina). I wondered how wet we would get in the process of loading the car with our suitcases.

Nádya and I got around, then had breakfast while Kylie slept. While I got our bags downstairs and out to the car Nádya got Kylie. She must have realized this was very odd behavior for us, as she completely woke up, and remained awake until we were on the plane.

It is only about five minutes to the airport from our house by car. Maybe less. The rain had subsided by the time we got there, which made unpacking the bags from the car a little easier.

After checking in and waiting for a bit the screens at the airport started telling us that our flight was delayed. Not by much, but it was enough that they decided that we needed to get boarding passes for the next flight moved back to the following flight. Unfortunately they only decided this after we had passed the security checkpoint. So we had to go back to the desk, get our boarding passes, then go back through security.

To Fortaleza

While I have taken so many flights that I gave up keeping track years ago, for Nádya and Kylie this was flight number one. Nádya was a bit nervous, but after a few jitters she grew accustomed to it and even liked it. Kylie was going about the business of getting some more sleep.

We landed in Fortaleza and had to wait for a bit for our next plane. In the mean time a family visiting from Portugal came over and started visiting with us—well, to be honest, the came over to visit with Kylie. We just delude ourselves into thinking that people want to talk to us when all they want is to talk with Kylie.

Kylie had the time of her life (she loves to see other children, and actually has taken to jumping and kicking when she sees them). There are some more pictures in our album from the day.

To Rio de Janeiro

From Fortaleza we were headed to Rio de Janeiro. But somehow we had either missed the note that we were stopping in Salvador, or we were not told. Sitting on the ground in Salvador, our flights were all running late, and we were tired and bored. Ripe time for a distraction or two.

Next thing we know we saw Patrícia Werneck coming down the asile of our plane. She is an actress who recently played a rather large part in a novela (soap opera). I had watched bits and pieces of the novela, so I immediately recognized her.

I, however, had forgotten about the Kylie factor. I figured she was headed toward the back of the plane where we were seated for any host of reasons except to talk with us. I was wrong. She had heard Kylie laughing and screaming (not crying, the happy screams), and wanted to meet her.

She said that Kylie "Looks like a Johnson's baby!" Gerber is not as big in Brazil as Johnson & Johnson, so it is like someone saying that she looks like a Gerber baby.

Patrícia Werneck seemed like a delightful person, and even though Kylie was not to excited about interacting with her (it was nap time again) she obliged our request to get a photo of her.

She left, and after a few minutes we saw another person we recognized from the novelas:

Caio Blat ended up in the chair right behind us. He too was interested in Kylie, but by this time she was pretty grumpy. I overheard him telling the flight attendant that he was very tired and just wanted to sleep. That he did. The entire flight he was sacked out in the chairs behind us.

I guess the two actors had been in a presentation of the Passion of Christ in Floriano (?) where Caio Blat had played Pontius Pilate, and Patrícia Werneck had played Mary Magdalene.

Arrival in Rio de Janeiro

One of the things we did not know about our trip is where we would stay. We knew that trying to afford a hotel was out of the budget range (buying the plane tickets there was about two-month's worth of income while on sale for half-price).

We had a promise, though, from one of the leaders of the Baptist Convention that goes to our church that we would be able to find a place if we went to the same seminary where Patrick and Nyna stayed. "If not at the seminary, then someone will find you a place. I promise."

Of course, it was 11 o'clock Easter Sunday morning when we arrived at the seminary, and nobody who knew anything about our situation was around. There was a group there who were cooking lunch, though, and they helped us contact someone who would know what to do. They even fed us, and gave us water (the last real meal we had had was at home in Teresina).

Stay tuned to find out where we ended up staying.

This entry is part of "Rio de Janeiro: A Series." All the published entries are linked from that entry. Don't want to miss out on the coming entries? Try the RSS feed, or getting updates via email.