My First Week In Brazil

I was expecting Brazil to be a very poor country.  I don't know why I was expecting it to be poor, like big grass planes and dense jungle and not a lot of cities, but that was the picture in my head.  I was only half way right, there are some poor people, more than in the US, but people live in houses and appartments surrounded by big fences. 

We took a Taxi to my moms friends appartment when we first arrived in Sao Paulo.  We passed through a lot of slums on our way there.  The slums really looked like run down buildings, many of them had graffitti on them and were made of cardboard.  Very ugly paint colors, like green puke or maybe electric mucus, I don't know.  The trafic ride was hectic, the motorcycle riders weaving through the trafic are very stupid.  They could get themselves hurt by getting cut off by a huge semi, or wide load.

The houses are really nice, but no one has carpet.  Can you guess why?   They spray water to clean the tiles.  All of the houses are surrouned by big walls and fences.  Everyone has a dog, the dog that lives in this house is named Barney, after can you guess who?   You guessed it....."I love you...You love me".  But not to be mean, Alexandre named him when he was little.  

We sleep at night with the windows open, but there are no screens, they do not have bugs here like we do in the US.  There is a car that keeps comeing around with a speaker on its roof.  It blasts loud voices Portuguese that I do not understand.   It is very annoying, I just want to take  arock and chuck it over the wall and hope to god I hit his windshield, of course I would never do this, my mom would go nuts.  Besides, the walls here are really tall, my rock would never make it.

We took a bus from Sao Paulo to Maringa, but sorry if you wanted to know more about it, I slept but did not really catch anything.  The bus was like riding in air plane, very nice, but we never took off, or at least I don't think so because I was sleeping.   

We stayed for a day in Maringa and then we went to the beach in Camburiu.  The traffic was horrible.  Some car wrecked, I bet it was caused by a motorcycle weaving through.  It was borring and horrible.  We stayed in an appartment which is owned by Sandras mom and dad.  Her mom is sick and living in Maringa.  The appartment was very nice, I am happy we stayed there.  There were only 4 chanels on the tele, and all of them were in Portuguese.    We were staying on the 4th floor of 14 floors.  There was a pool and a hot tub and barbque and game room.  We swam in the pool a lot. 

We went to a party, it was a Bar-Be-Que.  It took a really long time to cook, but it was really really good.  We also ate cake at the party, it was very good, kind of had a caramel tast, mmmmm.  Then we went upstairs and played video games, soccer on the ps3.  Soccer is a big sport here, everyone likes it and everyone playes it.  You know we like football, well times that by 3 and that is how much Brazillians like soccer.  A brand new video game is like $200 here.  That is an outrage!!  I am glad I live where I can buy a vidoe games with my money because it is cheap compared to this. 

In the US we all use 110volts I think, but every state here is differnt.  In Maringa, they use 110V and their outlets can take our plugs.  Their plugs are flat with two round rods sticking out.  At the appartment in Camburiu, they had the same outlets and plugs but 220V so we had to use addapters to charge our games and phones.  Addapters are like silencers for power, the addapters muffle the voltage allowing us to charge our stuff.  

We went to the beach and got really sun burned.  It made me not want to go back to the beach until the sun went down.  When the sun goes down, the waves get really big, I mean surfing big, yaaaahhhoooo!!  It was awesome.  We did not surf but we jumped in them.  If you stand infront of the wave, and take a curl to the face, it hurts.  It is like the wave is pulling you, molecule by molecule in every directions.  It was the best.