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So we made it to Brazil and the capital city of Brasilia where we catch our connecting flight to our destination/hotel city Joao Pessoa.
The airport was pretty big, quite modern and lots of airflow - yup airflow - that's what I remember - lots of fresh breezes and lots of huge air conditioning towers that looked like Darleks from Dr. Who.
In any case Welcome to Brasil!!!
No time for celebrations we need to collect our tickets for the games. FIFA has put game ticket collection booths in all major airports and we had to find this one. The entire trip hinged on the next 20 minutes. If we forgot something if we did not have proper ID, if we didn't understand the process we could risk not getting our tickets and the whole trip would be for nothing. I'm happy to say We found the booth and ticket collection was quite painless. Things are looking up!
Now it's time to get our bearings, find our next boarding gate and then look around. Not sure if there is such a thing as "5 o'clock somewhere" here bit at 8:30 AM we had our first round of beers to celebrate arrival in. Brazil and collection of our tickets.
The airport was buzzing with crowds of soccer fans draped in their country's colours walking around checking each other out - the mood in the airport was cheerful.
Sitting down to charge our phones and wait for our boarding call I met Viktor who offered is the use of his charging cords and adapters due to ours not being the right type. "They changed the power plugs around here about three years ago which f***ed us all" he explained. Turns out Viktor was a local who was just returning from a local flight where he was citing friends. His English was far better than my Portuguese and I think he was enjoying the opportunity to practice so we stuck to English. After a few minutes he started digging into his bag. He wanted to show me his local clubs jersey. He even apologized that he didn't have a spare one as he would have liked to give me one. I'm starting to really like this country. Probing him a bit more about the places we were going he shared with us that many Brazilians refer to the city of Recife as "Hell-cife" due to the increased violence that city is experiencing over the last few years. One more national saying "stay out of Recife".
It's decided Recife will not be a city we spend any time in. We have 2 games there and the stadium is 12 miles outside of the town so we are hoping we can drive to the stadium, see the game and then leave the area right after without spending any time in the actual city. We are all agreed. We are also going to do our best to look into hiring a driver and car if possible once we get to Joao Pessoa instead of doing the driving ourselves. Won't know until we get to JP.
As this flight is to JP which is not a host city there are less tourists but still we find an American in his 20s who is travelling to see the USA vs Ghana game that we will be at in Natal tomorrow. It will be hard not to find spectators everywhere we go.
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