Sept 29: Today was a day of contrasts. First was the Miller Lite Chili Cookoff at Stone Mountain park, and then a visit to the recently constructed Hindu Temple in Lilburn. The chili cookoff was a lot of fun. There were tons and tons of booths, each with a different theme. There was even a pirate ship! (And an old style diner, red necks, cowboys, firemen... you get the idea.) Even if you weren't a big chili person, there was also a secondary Brunswick stew and cornbread competition. It was a lot of fun wandering through the different areas and getting shot glass sized helpings of all the interpretations of what real chili/Brunswick stew should taste like! Outside of the competition booths were also sponsors. One radio station had a scavenger hunt with one of the ... read more

Not too far away from Ouro Preto is a town of only a few homes near a waterfall. It's around a mile walk, up and down hills. It was a pleasant walk and worth the effort of driving down the red dirt roads, for many miles, to get to. We'd hoped to grab a quick snack in the town, but no one seemed to be at the one little cafe! ... read more

After catching a flight from Brasilia to Rio at 7:20am, catching a 9am bus into Belo Horizonte, and arriving to Mark's apartment around 10 - it was time to prepare to head to Ouro Preto. Ouro Preto is a thriving, colonial style city that began as a gold mining villiage. It is very hilly - and beautiful. I was pretty shocked to see cars zipping around on the VERY steep hills, but it's just a daily thing here. My visit to Ouro Preto actually had significant spiritual overtones. Hundreds of pounds of gold are plated on the walls of the churches, something so awe-inspiring that even had they allowed pictures, wouldn't do any of it justice. What stood out to me the most was a single little girl. I was sitting on a pew in one ... read more

My 1 1/2 short days in Rio has been fun. Yesterday I saw Copacabana Beach and the Live Earth concert. There are people everywhere! Most of the crowd is for the upcoming PanAmerican games in the city. I have been staying at an apartment just a few blocks from the beach that belongs to a friend of Mark´s mom. (Mark is my host/friend here.) It´s a simple apartment, but is more than sufficient for this trip - and it´s free! Interestingly enough, the elevators are different here. There is a door you pull open once the elevator has arrived, in addition to the normal sliding door that elevators in the states have. There was also a hot water heater contraption that Mark couldn´t get to work/turn on until after we´d both had ice cold showers.. eep! ... read more

Thanks to a tourism ad for North Carolina in my Budget Travel magazine, I decided I'd set out to see the waterfalls of the Southwest region. I dug around a little on the internet and found THIS LINK. Waking up at 6am the next day, I was off to spend a day seeing the area's natural beauty. The original idea was to start with Whitewater falls since it's the tallest East of the Smokey Mountains at 411 feet tall. On the way there, we (Myself and Chris) passed Glen/Glenn falls. We decided we might as well stop there while we knew where they were. We should have just spent the entire day here. (I'll explain more later.) I'm still a bit confused about the proper spelling of the falls, signage listed it both ways. Glen/Glenn ... read more