National Night

It seems like everything here in Brazil has been late. We arrived at Carol's apartment building 2.5 hours late to start planning for the USA national night. And that was only the boys-the girls and Bruce arrived almost 45 minutes after that. Before the girls arrived, the boys began preparing the dessert-toffee. Blake had brought his favorite recipe so we got started on that. We had some difficulty getting all of the measurements correct because here in Brazil they don't use cups, so we had to do some conversions. The ovens here don't have specific temperature markings, just a temperature dial for hotter or cooler. The first batch didn't turn out very well-we didn't have any Pam cooking spray and the oven was way too hot, but the next batch turned out delicious!

Once everybody else arrived we split up into one group for cooking and another for decorating. I was assigned to decorating, so I went upstairs and Bruce busted out the decorations and games. I set my sights on finding how to hang a 100 foot plastic banner with red white and blue streamers coming off of it. At first we tried to put it around the edge of the room, but there was already another group putting up another one that looked the same there. And suddenly, I had an idea. We duct-taped the end of the streamer to a full water bottle and threw it out the window. After navigating it away from people under us's balconies and TV dishes, we tied it to the window frame and went to see how close it was. It was probably only about 10 feet too short from reaching the ground, and that makes sense seeing as that we were on the 11th floor and the streamer was 100 feet long.

All was well until the wind picked up. Because of the sudden high winds and the large amount of surface area for the wind to catch on, the banner went around the corner of the building. It managed to get itself caught in some cables and hooks on the side of the building and then break. Bruce said that before we were allowed to leave the building, it had to come down, so Michael and I headed down the elevator looking for a solution. We went to where the bottom of it was and glanced over to some private storage units where we spotted the bottom of a ladder. We ran over to the ladder and took it off its hook and placed it on the side of the building. Michael held the bottom while I climbed up the ladder, barely reaching the bottom of the water bottle. I grabbed it, and luckily it came loose very easily. As I was climbing down from the ladder, we glanced over and saw the security guard walking in our direction, so we quickly put the ladder away, grabbed the streamer and ran to the elevator. We made it back upstairs just in time to finish up setting up all of the games and decorations.

After finishing up some last minute things, everybody arrived. We had some games and appetizers for people to entertain themselves as we were waiting for everybody to arrive. Once everybody arrived, we all got into our costumes. We explained what they were and what they represented in the United States and then gave a preview of what we would be doing. We all did the Cha Cha Slide in our costumes and then had everybody enjoy some macaroni and cheese that Nikki and Gen had prepared from scratch. Everybody loved it, and then we hit the games. Everybody loved all of them! We played them for a couple of hours and hung out until about 10:30 when we all started to get tired and thought that it was about time that we were heading home. We cleaned up the mess that we had made in the kitchen, took down all of the decorations, and headed out. We all wanted to get our sleep because we would have to get up early for Rio tomorrow...