It's Friday at the Sheraton

Hey everyone,

We got back from the island this morning, and took a 3 hour bus ride from the port to Rio, more specifically the Sheraton. Now, while I'm one to never turn down a nice hotel I was more than a little peeved that I'm having to pay for this right now. They charge for their so-called 'high-speed' internet connection. It's pathetically slow, and for $20US per 24-hour period I'm rather disgusted.

Otherwise, the hotel is great. The view from our room is insane. Let's just say that, as you can see, the view is really nice.

We did have some sun on the island, and I'm paying for that too but not with money. We went to the beach and I got a little too much. Ouch!

We did have a good time swimming in some of the lagoons and taking some photo ops with the starfish. Don't worry sea-creature lovers - we didn't just drop them randomly, we carefully placed them back on the bottom (about 15 feet down) before leaving. Starfish have a hard time flipping over, and we didn't want them to be easy turtle bait.

The island experience was awesome. About 120 square miles of tropical paradise to explore in a day. Yeah, we were a little short changed on exploration time, but what time we did have was awesome. The beach was beautiful (I have pictures). We found some dead stingrays - one of the guys managed to free the 8" long barb from it's tail. We figured it would be better to do that rather than have someone potentially get hurt by it.

The end of our second night we put together a concert right on the beach in the town square. Approximately 600-700 people were around us most of the time, sometimes I would guess hitting 1,000 just milling about. It was a great response, but the setup was hell.

We had just 1 40-amp circuit to work off of, which had to be held in just a certain way to allow the power to flow continuously - our sound guy has pictures, but maybe you can imagine bare wire put directly into a loose breaker hanging in the open on the side of a light post. Yeah, that's right. Don't forget the rain... Also, the sound system we had from the local church ran only on the Brazilian round 2-post plugs. Oooh boy this is where it get's good. We built a couple hand wired connectors to connect them to our American power strips - thankfully we didn't have to use these because we sent someone back to our hotel and the hooked us up with some adapters and extension cords, but it was looking pretty rough for a while.

It was a mess of wires, cables, electricity, and some good old crazy willingness to do something absolutely retarded to make it work. However, we (with God's help) pulled it out and made it happen. Overall, the island was an awesome experience and I can't wait to show everybody the pictures.

Well, it's time to go get dinner and my paid internet connection is soon to expire (only bought 3 hours), so I'll sign off for now. Hopefully I'll get one more post in tomorrow. I'm going to try and hit Sugarloaf and the Christ the Redeemer statue, but we'll see how it goes...

Love ya! Bye.