Brazil: a day of bureaucracy

So last night, James realized that he was missing his passport. *sigh* Our best guess is that it must have fallen out of (or been actively removed from) his pocket between the airport and arriving at our apartment.  So, after going through our luggage at least half a dozen times, we opted to go down to the USA Consulate this morning and get a replacement passport.  I apologize to any of you interested in pictures of the USA consulate or tourist police office, but the former confiscated our camera and held it until we left, and the latter was so scary that I wasn't about to do anything stupid like start taking pictures (one man came in wearing street clothes, casually toting an M-16).

This also happened to be the day James was meeting up with his old mission buddy, Felippe Forte.  James explained the situation to Felippe and he insisted that James get it resolved today and he would come with us.  What a trooper!

So, while James negotiated with security guards, passport officials, the tourist police, Felippe and I had halting conversations of mostly broken English and a little of my (extremely) limited Portuguese.  We spoke of our families, James's and Felippe's mission, our hopes for the future, and how (as Felippe puts it) "girls are complicated."  Unfortunately, our trans-language communication wasn't good enough to smooth out the complications.  Felippe is a smashingly handsome Brazilian boy with trendy glasses and a heart of gold.  When we said farewell after a day of adventures, I gave him a big hug and he said to me, "You are my sister" in beautifully Latin-accented English, simultaneously winning my heart forever and squelching the huge girl-crush I'd been fostering all day.

In between visits to the consulate (we went around 11 am because there weren't any hours posted on the web or voice mail, but the American citizen office didn't open until 1 pm . . . actually, it wasn't open at all that day but they made an exception due to the urgent need, but only after 1 pm, when it would have been open if it was open that day), we three visited the Brazil Naval Museum, which chronicles the history of sea travel in South America from the Portuguese colonization to modern day.  James took many pictures of ships, only one of which I will include in this blog:

We also rode a taxi (from the consulate to the tourist police station), which was fun (second taxi ride of my life).  After James finished his sentence in the tourist police station (about two hours of explaining himself to a skeptical female clerk), we went to a mall in the fashionable Ipanema district (where the crowd leans more strongly to the white side of the ethnic spectrum) and didn't buy anything, then we took a bus back to good ol' Copacabana and took Felippe out to dinner (amidst many protestations, but we insisted - he'd been an oasis for me amidst the boredom of Brazilian bureaucracy).  Here's a picture of my two handsome boys: