Yup, that night felt like 2 hours of sleep. I slowly slumped out of bed and made my way down these stairs for the very last time. I brought my enormous blue bag down with me and we loaded it into their car. I wrote my family a letter of thanks for them to keep, and not long after a 4:30am bite of breakfast, I had to say goodbye to my host brother and one of my host sisters. I really wished that i could stay with them longer - the only thing hard about meeting new friends out here is the goodbyes. And with all the amazing people i've met on this trip, there were a fair few goodbyes - from Peru to Manaus to Paulinia! Before long, we were on the road to the church to meet up with everyone else. This road had gotten so familiar in such little time. We arrived at the church to find out bus waiting for us. We took one more group photo and made our final goodbye hugs. It was sad, but I'm sure i'll return some day. Half asleep, we all rode to Campinas bus terminal. Here, we got our real tickets and took a long bus to Aperecida. Some of the trip involved silly jokes, brought on by an extreme lack of sleep, however most of this ride involved sleeping. We arrived at Aperecida, which is a town, surrounding an enormous church! It was like a castle, you could see it from way back at the bus terminal we stopped at. To get there though, we had to walk through a sea of tents, selling everything and anything you could imagine. It was crowded, and we didn't have much time, so we walked around the edge of tent city. Luckily, there was a baggage storage service at the bus terminal so i didn't have to carry my 50lb beast through there. When we arrived in front of the church, our priest along with us wanted to see if he could do mass for us in one of the many chapels here. I learned something interesting today - every catholic priest must do an official mass at least once a day, even if it is only him. So this wasn't just for an experience, it was required by the church. With some persistence, we got a chapel and he said the first english mass I had heard the whole trip. He was a really great speaker, so I'm glad it was him this sunday. Afterwards, we had some lunch here and went back to the bus. It was time to make our next long bus trip - to our final destination, Rio! On this bus, we actually met some nice Malaysians that were heading to World Youth Day too. And as it turned out by some crazy chance, they were heading to the exact same church we were - so we formed an alliance to get ourselves there. By the time we arrived, it was just about dark. We got out and tried to figure out how we would make the final leg to the church. We assumed taxi but needed the details. This is when one of the girls (the one I was sitting next to) realized that she left her camera on the bus. I went with her since we all agreed to never go off alone here. But when we ran back to the area where our bus was, it was gone. We looked around and asked some people for help. Eventually, we were directed to the booth of the bus company. The guy spoke no english, but he understood me when i told him what happened in portuguese. We were told to wait while they looked. It was a tight spot where we couldn't really leave to tell the group what was happening, but we assumed that we were taking taxis so there wasn't any real rush. Unfortunately, when we finally got an answer, it was that they couldn't find it. And when we returned, our whole group was gone except for the team leader. Turned out, there was an express bus to where we were going. Our group had taken our bags with them and left on the 8:00 bus. We were set to go on the 8:20. It was too bad that we couldn't get any news during all this, but at least things were sorted. We reunited at the first bus stop and jumped on the next bus to our final stop. It was quite late by now, but we were supposedly in a really good area of town. We needed to walk four blocks to the church, and luckily, we ran into somebody from the church that directed us there. When we arrived, we were in for a huge surprise. Turned out, we were assigned to families here too, an not sleeping on the floor of a church like we first thought. It was great news, but not soon after, I was told that there weren't enough families for myself and one other guy from our group (Robbie). Way to get our hopes up! But no worries in the end. When one of the volunteers heard what had happened, he decided to take us into his own home last minute. It was such a nice deed. We were driven to his apartment where we met his family and had some snacks and beer. We decided at the end of the night to sleep on their deck, since it was quite warm. This city is beautiful, so it should be amazing when i see it during the day!
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