Living Above the News

The day before Easter, we went to the grocery store. There was a beautiful display in the front—one that included large Easter bunny-type-mannequins. In a moment of craziness, I went up to the Easter Bunny and “shook his hand”. A nice, fun gesture, right? To my horror and surprise, his arm fell off. Oh my goodness! What does one do when he shakes the Easter Bunny’s hand and it falls off—especially when another family sees it?! Well, one promptly puts the arm by his side, turns real red, and laughs uncontrollably for about 30 minutes. And still laughs every time one thinks about it. So, remember this boys and girls—don’t shake hands with the Easter Bunny!

We saw a news story about soccer players’ mothers being kidnapped. This has happened to several of the players already. The rest are sending their mothers out of the country. I guess criminals use any means available to try and get money. If only they would use that mind power for good. And listen to this: as if the kidnappings weren’t bad enough, they had one criminal on the news story who had kidnapped one of the players’ mothers. He was kind of bragging because he has AIDS and he had to be released from prison. Apparently any person who has AIDS in Brazil cannot be incarcerated. Is this not the craziest thing you’ve ever heard?! They’re afraid the AIDS will spread throughout all the prisoners. So, anyone who wants to be a hardened criminal and continue in his illegal ways—he just has to contract AIDS. Bizarre.

The soccer game was great! We got to the stadium almost 2 hours early so we could make sure we got good seats. And that we did, but the sun was so hot. The game started at 4 pm. The sun was very bright and there was little wind. The atmosphere before the game was incredible! We were doing the wave, chanting cheers, singing songs about being a proud Brasilian, and eating and drinking. It was a lot of fun, even though it was about 85 degrees. I thought to myself—this is going to be a wild game, with all this activity. But then, as soon as the game started everybody sat down. If you stood up or got up after that, believe me, people told you to sit down. If you didn’t, people would throw things at you. I thought it quite comical that these people who seemingly don’t like any rules or laws (more on this in another blog), or quiet for that matter—suddenly become so orderly. I learned the basics of the game pretty quickly and became verbose. However, I was quiet compared to the Brasilians whe...