Ola minha gente!
So I know it has been a while since I've written here... probably 4 months? I think I must have just gotten too busy living the exchange experience to write about it... although I always meant to, but now I'm back, I intend to continue the blog nevertheless. Never mind even how many readers I actually still have ;)
I won't write about everything from where I left off, of course, I'd be writing non-stop for two weeks. As I told many of my good friends already, spending five months in Brazil was a huge experience for me, and I've honestly lived the best months of my life till now there :) But I'm positive I will keep coming back to Brazil for many years to come. I've dreamed of South America for years, but it can be hard to imagine yourself actually doing that. And now I feel like I've found a (second... third?) home - which is a big deal for me. So, here goes!
So, a bit about the travelling: when I wrote last, I had still only been on one trip in my first six weeks - Rio de Janeiro. Soon after that though, in the beginning of May, I went on a trip to a city called Nova Friburgo, in Rio state, with a few friends from AIESEC in Juiz de Fora. Nova Friburgo is a nice place to visit, with beautiful hills around, and even higher and colder than JF. And my friend's family we visited was so lovely, especially the mother was so welcoming! And she taught me how to make Brazilian-style lasagna! (Which everyone else enjoyed, yay).
Towards the end of May, the weekend before I moved to my new host family's house in JF, I had gone on two short trips - to a small, but beautiful town Tiradentes, and the natural park Ibitipoca, both in the same state of Minas Gerais, not too far from JF. These trips were right after each other, and I had to roll out of bed for both at 5am, two days in a row. I remember getting out of bed at this deadly hour to go to Tiradentes, thinking, "maybe this was a bad idea". And then I had to do the same thing right the next day. Can't say it wasn't a bit challenging, but at least it paid off, as both places are really worth the effort.
I went to Tiradentes with the school trip from Saci, where I was working. This meant my company was a few of the teachers - all of whom only spoke Portuguese, but are all lovely, and the Portuguese was no longer a problem anyway - and a bunch of 9-years olds. Starting at 6 in the morning. Then again, there is nothing that a stop-over with coffee and a pao de queijo (literally 'bread of cheese') can't cure ;) Tiradentes is a very small, but lovely town from the Portuguese colonial era. The best thing though was probably the train ride from Tiradentes to its close-by bigger and more modernized neighbour, Sao Joao del Rei. The antic train called the Maria Fumaca is practically famous all over the country, and I can tell you half an hour goes by really fast, because it's just so fun to ride the train along the green Brazilian landscape, hanging out of the window now and then, in a carriage filled with children :D You should try it (though the kids aren't strictly necessary for you to have fun, no worries. You will soon feel like a child yourself).
On Saturday morning I rolled out of bed at 5am again to go to the natural park Ibitipoca with my friends, the other trainees. It's about 3 hours to the park and you take two buses - one decent one like the kind that runs between the cities in Brazil (the buses between the cities are actually better there than in Europe), and one that rumbles up at a random bus stop in the tiny town called Lima Duarte, and resembles a shack of a city bus rather than anything else. As you sit there, you finally feel like a real traveller (in our case, in South America), sitting in a crappy bus, on a seat that makes your butt sore =)
Ibitipoca is a huge national park, with a few trails you can follow, but we took the short one as we only had the one day, and trust me, it is a workout already. The scenery is amazing, and, not being spectacularly sporty myself, at the end of the day I felt quite proud of myself having made it all the way there and back alive :D In the evening, we also hung out in one of the local bars in the Ibitipoca "town", if you can call it that, as it is very small. What I also remember with a smile is walking back to our pousada, the four of us with arms around each other, in complete and utter darkness, apart from the light from Julio's cellphone, braring out a loud dance song :D
The next time I went travelling after this, with the exception of the tiny place called Rio Novo near JF where AIESEC had invited us for an evening and day to discuss our exchange experiences and party, was to Belo Horizonte at the end of June, the capital of Minas Gerais. Probably Juiz de Fora's main city competitor inside Minas, BH is a city of a few million people, quite new but by now huge, with beautiful, wide avenues in the center of the city. It is not a touristy city, even less so than I thought, but it's very beautiful and I think would be a nice place to live in for a while ;) I went there with a few trainees, too, but this time they were all different people who had arrived more recently. In BH we stayed with a friend of one of them from AIESEC BH, who was a great host, and a really fun guy to hang out with. He took us to an AIESEC BH party at someone's enormous house the night we arrived, showed us around town in BH during the weekend and was the life of the house party he effectively put together on Saturday night, at his own apartment.
Although it is not touristy, BH does have some very nice highlights to see. As I said, the center is beautiful, and very green. If you venture a trip to BH - Praca da Savassi, Praca da Liberdade, Parque Municipal, Parque das Mangabeiras, and Pampulha are a few things you should try to see. The city center has a few nice squares and parks, and there is a great viewing point of the city near the Parque das Mangabeiras, called (no surprise for Portuguese speakers) Mirante, from which it's amazing to see BH: first bathed in sunlight, then at sunset, and then as the lights begin to twinkle around this enormous, modern city. Pampulha, meanwhile, is one of the creations of the famous Brazilian arquitect Oscar Nieyemer, who also built Brasilia, his most well known work. It is basically an artificial lake, with a very modern, museum-like church alongside it, which has, from what I had heard, sparked many criticisms. The lake is about 16 km all around, and artificial though it is, very beautiful. Pampulha is nowadays a rich residential area, which is not particulaly surprising.
Well, there is much still to write about my travelling in Brazil, but I'm going to stop here now and continue in my next entry. But I promise this time that I will continue, you can be sure of it ;)
I miss Brazil much, so I'm sorry, but... Eu espero que voces gostaram dessa historia, e vao continuar ler o meu blog! Eu vou tentar escrever muito mais aqui sobre a minha experiencia no Brasil, porque foi legal demais, e eu quero share this experience with you! ;)
Muitos beijos!
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