Hello everyone!
It has been a while since I posted but you already know that I have more juicy stories to tell. For this trip, I went to Brazil! I went to a city called Florianopolis which is in the State of Santa Catarina (Yes Brazil has States just like the USA). So for this trip, the flight path I took was:
Baltimore (BWI) to New York (JFK)
JFK to Sao Paulo (GRU)
GRU to Florianopolis
This city is beautiful! So it is a medium-sized city with a population of 500,000 people. The city has an island side with many beaches; and a continental side that is separated by a cable suspension bridge (Similar to San Francisco and Oakland).
In Centro, there are a lot of historic buildings from when the Portugues had their colony in Brazil. Their national language is Portuguese and you really need to know some to survive in Brazil! Luckily I knew Spanish which has a lot of similarities and people in Brazil understand somewhat spanish because of the tourist that visits from Argentina. I went to the Cathedral which sits in the center of the city. The streets in the city are made of cobblestone it’s a unique way the Portuguese lay the stones in their road. There was this very large tree that sat in the park next to the church which I believe had a rumor about the tree will help bring luck into getting married.
I had a local friend show me around some parts of the city and I was told about the infamous Favelas. Favelas are unofficial settlements that form usually they are on the side of hills and mountains. They have extreme poverty and mostly do not have basic services like roads, water, sewage, and sanitation. I find it interesting because in the US houses built on hills and mountains typically have the wealthiest people living in them. I learned that the term Favelas came from a mountain in Rio and over time, it became the term used for all unofficial settlements in Brazil. What surprises me about Favelas is their sheer sizes. They can have populations from 10,000-100,000 people. I always pondered on why the city would not annex the land and provide the basic services that are needed, but from the legal view people are illegally settled on the land but in reality, there is no way the city can just evict that many people these are straight up cities at that point when the populations reaches in the thousands.
On my first night, I decided to check out the nightlife in the Centro district. The way the bars are here is interesting. Most of the time the bars just stand where you get your drink and everyone stands outside on the public road drinking while cars occasionally muscle their way through a crowd of drunk people, it reminded me of the image of Moses parting the Red Sea. I drank a cachaça which is Brazil’s national drink and it came in this 32 Oz cup and its really sweet kind of like jungle juice but because of it being sweet I drank it and before I know it I was really drunk which I was confused like how am I drunk on one drink? My local friend told me that those drinks were known for getting people really drunk easily. I stumbled back into my hotel and tried to sleep but I woke up shortly and had my face in the toilet for some time. That was the worse feeling and my intention was to get a buzz.
Next, My friend took me to São José which is the neighboring city in the continental side of Brazil. Brazil has many food trucks stands which are equivalent to fast-food restaurants in the US but way better tasting food! I tried the infamous Brazillian hotdog which I tried to eat like I would a hotdog in the USA but that did not work out well. So a Brazillian hot dog has a lot of toppings on it. I would say 7-10 different toppings can be found in it while a USA hotdog typically has mustard and ketchup mainly. There were so many toppings in my Brazillian hotdog I do not even remember all of the toppings. I remember there were fried potatoes/Hashbrown in one of the layers, sour cream, and mozzarella cheese. Also, their Coke drink is very good there because they use pure sugarcane while the US uses Corn Syrup as a sweetener. Brazilian food in reality is not that different from the food African Americans eat. I had collard greens, yams, dirty rice, and macaroni and cheese it is just prepared differently.
The weather was crazy there it rained every day that I was there and it got so bad on some days we fell into a State of Emergency there. My hotel room flooded and I was stuffing towels all into the balcony door to keep the water out. One of the days there was a few hour windows of no rain so I decided to go to Mole beach which was a nice beach but the only people that were in the water were the surfers because of how dangerous the riptides are there. It was pretty there was hiking trails that you could take to connect to other beaches however it was pretty rocky. I remember seeing a yellow-striped black snake on the path and I ran through that trail. I also saw a hairy spider the size of my foot which made me paranoid going through that foresty trail.
While I spent my 2 weeks in Brazil it was during the World Cup in Qatar and I was blessed to witness 3 Brazillian games. Man, when Brazil plays soccer the country shuts down. In one of the games when they played Cameroon I was with some local friends and everyone is just hanging outside drinking and watching the game on these tiny televisions. I had the time of my life in Brazil even though the weather was torrential. On my way back to the US I had a 12-hour layover in Sao Paulo which I took advantage of and explored the city. Brazil had their game against Korea and I witnessed the whole city shutting down. I had issues trying to call an Uber to get to the airport because people kept canceling the rides. Sao Paulo has some of the world’s worst traffic it is one of the top 5 most populated cities in the world. Originally I was going to take the train to the airport but something happened and the local Rail Authority shut the line down for the day. When I finally got an Uber to go back to the airport it took like 2 hours and it was downpouring rain with so much traffic. People drive aggressively in Brazil and on top of that another football game was happening. I was so scared in that car the driver had a mini tv on his display and was watching the game while driving in the heavy rain storm. It rained so heavily that you could not see in front of you and his windows were completely fogged up since his Air conditioning didn’t work, I had to pray to make sure I got to that airport safely. Then the driver had the nerve to pull off the highway to a gas station and fill up his gas tank. I was glad I choose to go to the airport 4 hours early because I would have missed my flight fooling around with the taxi drivers, but I loved Brazil and I would definitely like to explore more of the country.
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