What a day!

Futile.  Like trying to communicate with someone and just getting a lot of confused looks and head nodding.

Wild goose chase.  Like visiting twenty different hotels and explaining we need to use an oven.  "Do you have rooms with an oven?  Is there an oven we can use?  Do you speak English?"

Searching for a needle in a haystack.  Like trying to track down a package that was supposed to arrive to the airport with only an "I think it might be coming in at 4:11...terminal 2, maybe?"

The result?

After 2 and a half hours of driving all over Brasilia we found a hotel willing to let us use their kitchen oven.  Of course, the kitchen staff didn't speak any English so a daunting challenge would be explaining that the oven had to remain at precisely 70 degrees Celsius so as not to fry the electronics of the piece of equipment we were baking in their commercial oven for 2 hours.  Hmm, we'll see how that goes.

Off to terminal 2.  Stuck in rush hour traffic in downtown Brasilia.  More fruitless conversations.  No luck.  Finally somebody points us in the direction of terminal 1.  On the way we spot the cargo terminal.  Must be there.  Around the crazy loop-de-loop that is Brasilia International Airport.  We arrive at Gol airlines cargo.  (We ascertained that our shipment must be on Gol since it was the only airline with a flight arriving from Sao Paulo at 4:11pm.  Thank you google.)

No shipment.  No cargo arrived on that flight.

At least, I think that's what he said in his broken English.

So, I guess we don't need the oven.

Oh, wait, the packages will arrive at 10:00pm.  (yeah, right, you've been saying that since March)  But we close at eight, so you'll have to pick it up in the morning.

See you then.  We're calling it a day!

Maybe instead of a sojourning, we should call it a wandering...

Did I mention we only brought one change of clothes with us on the 5 hour drive?  It was only supposed to be one night, and we needed room in the car for the boxes arriving in the shipment.  Here's to another day in this pair of underwear!

Counting down the days till our Friday flight back to civilization, a.k.a. California.