Hooray!

Yesterday Russ and I hopped a bus after class to go to the mall. There's a great mall in our part of town but sometimes a change is nice. And Shopping Barra (shopping means mall) is near the hotel we stayed at for our first month here so we miss it occasionally. It's only a 20 minute ride via the nice bus, which costs twice as much at the regular bus (yet is still under US$ 2) and is air-conditioned, has comfortable seats and barely stops.

The bus drops us off on the other side of the street, so we had to walk over the road on the passarela (pedestrian overpass), which weaves its way over to the mall. As we started our decent toward the mall, we saw a large banner that brought tears to my eyes. On the side of Shopping Barra, in full color, was the huge announcement, "Coming Soon: Burger King". Actually, I'm paraphrasing. I don't really remember what the banner said but I got the message loud and clear! Sure enough, in the food court there was an area under construction with promises of Whoppers to come.

Yes, I'm admitting that made me cry. The closest fast food restaurant to my house growing up was Burger King, making it easy to swing through the drive thru on our way home from church. In junior high my friends and I would go almost every week after shops class. For a while my grandparents were in love with BK, and we had many a Sunday lunch of Whoppers. I like McDonalds, but Burger King holds a special place in my heart.

I guess we're going to be going to Shopping Barra a little more often once it opens; which is fine because it is a great mall with some stores that our mall, Shopping Iguatemi, doesn't have. But I am holding my breath. A couple blocks away from Iguatemi, a huge construction project is going on. Shopping Salvador promises to be bigger and better than all the other malls in town. If that's really true, they'll have a Burger King.