Coming to you Live from Brasil…

Boa Noite! 
We’re here!!!  More on that later—here’s the essentials though-
•    We’re here!  (yes, I know I just said that, sometimes I just can’t believe it!)  We were on all 4 of our flights :)
•    We have all of our luggage!  A little scraped up and missing a lock, but it’s all present and accounted for.
•    Customs didn’t cost ANYTHING!  Here’s basic summary of customs without all the fine print. 
You fill out some paperwork—if you have something that’s actually worth a bunch of money that you could potentially sell, you pretty much have to declare it and hence, stand in the “something to declare” line.  If you’re not bringing anything of extreme value in (like us), then you have “nothing to declare” and go stand in that line.  Which we did (stand in the line that is).  We did though, have a couple of brand new hard-drives, various and sundry electronic/computer stuff and $1800 worth of formula.  All of which are rather suspicious (potentially sellable items), but exempt from declaring (with explanations).  So anyway.  Walking thru the “nothing to declare line”, somebody looks at your paper, gives your bags the “once-over” and decides if you seem suspicious or not.  If you seem rather innocent and your luggage looks normal, the customs guy will wave you on thru, and you’re done.  If you’re like us, 2 American gringos and you have 4 matching blue hard case trunks with tape and locks all over them, you might get sent into the “get inspected” line.  Which we did.  From there, you stand in line some more and watch people paying taxes on things (they have customs people whose job is to google things on the internet to estimate the cost so they can charge a customs tax (plus up to 50% more for failing to declare) accordingly.  Anyway.  Our turn comes, our trunks run thru the big x-ray machine, and a screening person asks about all the cans of formula.  In Portuguese.  I think we left her thinking that it was baby formula (instead of PKU formula).  Try and explain that one in a second language that you don’t know!  And we were out of there!  Didn’t even have to use my official letter about why I need formula!
•    And we had a 4 hour nap this morning!  Our plane touched down at 2:30 am, had a 3 hour drive, ate breakfast, a WONDERFUL shower and then slept until lunch!  Now it’s 10:30 pm, and I can barely keep my eyes open.  So yah.  That’s where we’re going.
Thanks so much for praying for us…we’re here, we’re safe and we’re adjusting.  Keep on praying for us—that when we make our first huge cultural blunder (which I’m sure is coming soon), that it won’t be too embarrassing to share with you all, and to just be good learners.  I was telling Brian that right now we’re like babies—we eat, we sleep, we eat again and we are terrible at communicating ‘cause we don’t know the language hardly.  Anyway.
Abracos!
Jocelyn<><