Well, here I am in Brazil. I left Dunedin, Wednesday the 1st of October on the Knightrider bus to Christchurch and arrived there at about 3:30 in the morning. after trying to get a bit of sleep on the floor I sat round for a while just generally feeling nervous about what I was about to do. I'm the last Frank to have left NZ since we came here from Germany. Then after locating the Qantas terminal I took a deep breath and walked up to that desk and hey! everything went pretty smoothly, the lady had a new computer program and she got a bit confused at first but we worked through it and I was ready to go. I got my boarding pass quite early so I had to wait around for a bit and so i watched planes coming in and out until I saw the plane that I was going on pull in. NZ seems so small from the air. When we flew over the south island you can see the whole width of the south island. I had a really long stopover up in Auckland so I I made the most of the sun and sat outside and listened to my mp3 player. Auckland International airport has at least 2 McDonalds and I counted 4 Witcoulls! Then it was off in a great big plane, where they spoke everything in both spanish and english. I sat next to an asian Brazilian, and she gave me a few tips on pronouciation in portugese. I should probably have used the situation better because my portugese is still very bad. Cruised on through to Sao Paulo where things got a bit more difficult. Firstly because there aren't as many English speakers but then I couldn't find my luggage on the luggage belt thing I was just about to get really worried when I spotted it standing a bit further off. Obviously someone had taken it off the belt and then just left it there, so I was very relived. But then the gate written on my boarding pass was different then the ones up on the depature screensbut I managed to get on the right flight (uh, and there was a lady who fainted just a bit behind me in the que. that got the airport staff running around). Then it was on to Curitiba (yes, Sao Paulo is very big as I found out flying over it) where Patrik (my brother, for those who are not in the know) picked me up. The next couple of days I spent recoving from the flight as well as playing "rough and tumble" and other games with my two nephews, Kilian and Esra. On Sunday we all (Patrik, Marit, Kilian, and Esra went to the Zoo (which is free entry). The highlight had to be seeing the bears playing a little bit of "rough and tumble" as well. In the evening I went to church with Patrik. At the moment he is looking around at the different churches around here just to try and understand the culture a bit more. We went to a Lutheran church. there were a few people there who spoke german so at least I had a few conversations but other than that i didn't understand too much. still i joined in the songs as best i could. we sang "seek ye first the kingdom of God" except in portugese so at least i didn't have to worry about how the melody went and the "allelulia" part of the song isn't any different.
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