Uniform consists of 3 band aids and 3 foot of dental floss.i’m not sure if she sets, digs, or spikes. I just know she’s on the team!

This young man just may have made the Super Bowl Snack of the year. He pops a fresh load of corn, then fries 1 inch pieces of bacon real crisp and throws the whole mess together, YUM MEE! I smell bacon! Pork Fat Rules!

OK, so our plane from Atlanta to Rio finally landed at 8:30 in the morning here in the beautiful land of Brasil!  We go through customs without a glitch and are met by a guy named Daniel who is holding up a little sign with our name on it there as we come out.  We get all our luggage into his car, (no small feat) and head for our hotel which we booked on line from our house in Waxahachie. (Aren’t we just the hi-tech globe trotters!)

When we give Daniel the name and address of the hotel, he looks at it and gives the typical Brasilian understatement.  He says, “I don’t think this is a very good area of town and I have not heard of this hotel before.”  What he’s really saying is “What the heck did you guys do!  This is going to be ugly!”  But his Brasilian manners will not let him be so….so……. so like me and just say it!  Instead he says he can take us there and we can decide if we want to stay.  We agree and we’re off through the roughest traffic in Rio.  There are stripes painted on the street for lane markers but they just wasted paint and labor to put them there because they mean absolutely nothing to the people behind the wheel.  You have actually about five to six lanes of traffic on a street marked with four lane stripes.  But just to keep things interesting, you have motorcycles traveling on both sides of the cars in every lane!  I can’t believe I used to actually drive down here!

Well, to get on with the story, we finally get to the hotel we had booked on line.  The name of the hotel was, are you ready?  It was Hotel Snob!  I figured a name like that would be blog material for a long time!  Well, this time I got bit!  In Brazil, you have hotels and then you have motels.  Now for us backward gringos, I always thought of hotels as being in the center of the city and motels being more on the outskirts of town or on the highway.  The Brasilian culture, however, has an entirely different take on this.  Hotels are for actual travelers and business people.  Motels, on the other hand, are where all the men take their “nooners” for their “afternoon delight”!  There is a reason the Brasilians take a two hour lunch and it’s not because they are lazy and want to sleep or hungry and just eat for two hour!

Anyway, as we pull up, I get the drift pretty quick and tell our friend I think they misled us in the advertisement on line.  We ask the guy if this is a hotel or a motel and he says they are making the transition from motel to hotel but at the time, they have both services.

Well, it was embarrassing for us to say the least!  I wonder what our final bill would have been if we would have stayed there for six days!  The rooms go by the hour!  We were able to get into a nice hotel here in the city center of Copacabana.  Not bad for a west Texas Wicketeer!

I would like to call today’s blog: Observations I Made Today About Brazil.

First:  I made the observation that with 18 band aides and a roll of dental floss, I could dress out an entire girl’s beach volleyball team! (See attached photo) And if Edge is counting, that’s for a team of 6!

Second: I have found a young man running a popcorn stand on the street in front of our hotel who just may have come up with this year’s best Super Bowl snack!  To heck with pouring butter over your popcorn!  This guy fries up bacon in about one inch pieces and then throws it all onto a fresh popped batch.  Yum mee!  I smell bacon!!  (See attached photo)

Third:  We did a trial run from our hotel to the studio where Charlotte will be taking classes starting tomorrow.  We didn’t want to go the sissy route and just call a cab.  We wanted some adventure!  We started off on the Rio Metro Subway for about half of the 30 kilometer distance then we transferred to a big new style of air conditioned bus that they fondly call “Frescao”, (translates as Big Cold One).  We got on and sat right behind the driver.  The windshield is about 6 feet high and 10 feet wide.  It is just like watching a big screen or IMAX.  I can honestly say I have NEVER been on a ride like this!  It was better than anything at Six Flags or Disney World!  That driver made it look like the distance Nascar drivers draft on each other look like a city block!  His bumper had to be touching the car in front as we winded through hairpin turns, through tunnels, merging through God knows how many lanes of traffic while pedestrians leap for safety!  It was absolutely horrifyingly WONDERFUL!  If you ever get to Rio, whatever it takes, buy a ticket on the Frescao and go to Barra de Tijuca!  You will never ever forget it!