My Fav Day

Greetings from Rio Branco, the capital of the über-remote state of Acre, Brazil. The sole reason we are here is because Maggie served as a missionary here and she wanted to revisit the area and all the people she loves. At first I accompanied her on a few visits, but it just wasn´t all that fun for me because I was talking to people I didn´t know about other people that I´ve never met. So yesterday and today I cut her loose to go do as many visits as she wants. She left the house at around 6:00 this morning to get a head start on her visits - there was no way I was going to get up that early. Visiting Rio Branco is a little bit like visiting Boise: it´s a nice enough town and there´s nothing really wrong with it, but unless you have friends to see there´s not a whole lot to do. However, Rio Branco has a palace and Boise, to my knowledge, doesn´t.

Fortunately, I´ve been able to use a lot of my spare time here to work on my Mozart role, because I´ll only have a few days after I get back from Brazil to work on it before I head out to New York for rehearsals. We´re staying with a member of the bishopric who has loaned me the key to the chapel to use for all my rehearsing needs.

I thought I would also use this time to walk you through what has probably been my favorite day of the trip so far. It was while we were in Salvador, which has unquestionably been my favorite destination so far (besides my fantastic week back in Campinas). In the morning we took a 2-hour bus ride from Salvador up the coast, passing innumerable resorts that looked just like those postcard-perfect Corona commercials. We arrived a little town called Praia do Forte, a town that pretty much exists for tourism, with a fun main street filled with fun little boutiques and great places to eat. It felt like a tropical version of Park City, Utah, with beaches instead of ski resorts and a sea turtle sanctuary instead of a film festival. It was too cold to swimming at the beaches in Rio, so I was really glad that I had a chance to get into the ocean.

Afterwards, we went to the aforementioned sea turtle sanctuary, the Projeto Tamar. It started in the 80´s as a grass-roots movement to protect five species of endangered sea turtles from poachers and environmentally unfriendly developers, and now they hire thousands of scientists up and down practically the whole coast of Brazil to help protect the turtles. They have all kinds of tanks full of the gigantic turtles and other amazing sea creatures. Loved it.

We then took a bus back to Salvador and it started to rain and became quite cold, so we went to the "Shopping" (the borrowed word they use to mean a mall) and saw Wall·E, which I loved (though not nearly to the extent that I loved Ratatouille). It was a great thing to do when it was rainy and cold outside, but even if it hadn´t been raining my love for Pixar films is so strong that I would carve out a few hours to see anything they put out even on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to a tropical paradise/amazing cultural center.

So if any of you have a day off coming up and are looking for something to do, I would recommend the following formula:

Impossibly beautiful beaches + Adorable sea turtles + New Pixar film = Perfect day