Good afternoon,

At this moment I am unable to access the bulletin board inside the Playhouse because I'm in an internet cafe type of place in South America. It does not seem prudent to log onto an adult site in a public room here, particularly when there's a picture of my big head on top of my scantily-clad body on the very front page. Fortunately I can access my Blogger account through a seemingly innocuous webpage and no one will guess that I am a scandalous woman who is transmitting her words to a site with "mature" content :)

Funny..there are two American businessmen sitting right across from me. They were speaking in English about an off-color topic and must have assumed that I could not understand. Well into their conversation I spoke to the attendant here in English and these two men just shut right up in embarrassment. Perhaps I look Brazilian. Or Argentinian. Women in Brazil and Argentina are notorious for getting massive amounts of cosmetic surgery. My surgery has been confined to my breasts, but that and the long, blonde hair are perhaps enough to give me the native look.

Actually, it's not really the native look since upwards of 90% of the country lives either a very rural existence or in poverty, but the women frequenting the hotels and airports here are some of the few with money and from all appearances cosmetic surgery is quite the rage.

I arrived here in the Amazon at about 4AM and was photographed and fingerprinted by the immigration officers. My two travelling companions were not. We had quite a trip getting out here. In Los Angeles we were not allowed to board our flight. It was a domestic flight to Florida where we were to switch airlines and then fly to South America. They told us that they could not check bags for domestic flights less than 45 minutes prior to departure. Huh? Were they kidding? No, evidently they weren't, because they did not let us or our luggage on the plane. One of my friends was later pulled aside for "special screening"and we were much later permitted to board a different flight that got us to Florida via Washington DC. How convenient ;)

It occurred to me after the fact that perhaps we looked suspicious since my two friends had one-way tickets (they had found a cheaper return flight on a different airline) and one of them was travelling with a Belarusian passport. Come to think of it he does kind of look like a terrorist anyways- hehe.....

In any case, we made it here and it is beautiful.

Chairman, I'm happy to report that I made the whole journey wearing my Everton jersey. I was even proudly sporting it in my immigration photo. And Evgulick, there is a trampoline here at the hotel. I kid you not. They probably don't expect anyone over 12 years of age to use it, but I'll surprise them.

Hope everyone is doing well. I will try to figure out how to get on the bulletin board while I'm here.

Many kisses,

Tanya
(I'm an Evertonian in the jungle!)