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Saturday, August 6, 2011

Meu primer dia no Brasil

20 hours. That is the amount of time I spent flying today. No window. No aisle. Simply stuck in between two brazilian women that found bird watching and kung fu panda very fascinating. The saying, "It's not the destination, it's the journey," seems completely unreasonable after my experience; yet the true hero of my journey was Advil p.m. that made me pass out for more than 7 hours.
The great thing about being in a foreign country for the first time on your own is how completely unaware you are about what you are getting yourself into until you are there, in the point of no return and trying to communicate with very fast-paced speaking locals about how to get to your connection flight (Brazilian airports are not very organized.) But the good news is that I am here and it is beautiful. There is no place I would rather be studying abroad in. The streets are filled with old people playing chess, weird men attempting to jump through a circle surrounded by knifes just for the opportunity to sell two dollar creams that supposedly help you loose weight and absolutely no traffic lights or stop signs anywhere, which made my walks a whole lot more chaotic and entertaining.
The first person I met was Will, a student from Boston from Brazilian ethnicity that was adopted by americans; here for the first time in hopes of finding his biological mother with nothing but two clues: first name and owner of a milk farm. With no portuguese knowledge or expectations of Brazil, we spent the entire afternoon together strolling around downtown getting completely lost to the point that not even the locals knew where our hotel was. But it didn't matter because we encountered our best discovery yet: pao de queijo. The most exquisite thing a vegetarian can eat and bad news for people that may care about my weight, because it looks like this is all I am eating here since Brazilians seem to have ham and cheese sandwiches only everywhere we go.
Other than that, just a normal night in Florianopolis drinking dollar beers with very friendly people and the funniest drunk old people I've seen in my life. Other than that, it's just me passing out in my hotel room getting some rest before I wake up to breakfast on the roof with the most beautiful view eating pao de queijo.