Training For The Appalachian Trail

Before we return to our regularly-scheduled programming, I'd like to remind you all that I am now three hours ahead of the East Coast. Over the past year, I've lost three hours, one at a time -- one in the U.S. last spring, one when I came to Brazil, and the last two weeks ago when Brazil switched to its summer time. When I fly home in December, I'll be regaining my three lost hours all at once. Weird, huh? I don't know how I feel about this. Time zones confuse me.

Anyway....

We arrived at the bus station with the goal of going south and a vague idea of some of the towns we wanted to visit along the coast. But when we mentioned some of these names to the guy selling us tickets, he didn’t seem to know any of them. “Do you have a map?” I asked. But of course not – why would he? He did, however, manage to pull out a list of towns that the bus does go through, and when we recognized Maragogi on the list and remembered the pictures of its crystal-clear water that we had seen on the internet, we decided to go there.

The bus ride was scenic but uneventful – perhaps too uneventful. The bus would randomly stop and pick people up or drop them off without anyone announcing where we were. There was next to no signage either, so when we got back to the coast and started seeing signs referencing Maragogi, we figured we must be there.

Except that the bus didn’t stop. When it seemed to turn away from the coast and we stopped seeing pousadas (small inns/ bed and breakfasts), we realized frantically that we had missed it. By now, however, there were no more seats left on the bus and people were crowding the aisle, and it took us a while to make it to the front. Sarah asked if we could be let off there, the bus driver practically screeched to a stop, and we got out. In what was pretty much the middle of nowhere, Brazil.

So we started walking. With all of our bags. In the hot sun. In order to cheer ourselves up, we pretended we were training for the Appalachian Trail. (Though if/when we ever do hike it, we’ll probably bring hiking backpacks and boots and leave the duffel bags and flip-flops at home.)

We finally made it to one pousada, faces red and sweaty and looking like the two biggest gringas Maragogi had ever seen. It was way out of our price range, though, so we kept walking, until finally we heard a honk behind us and found ourselves being passed by a old white VW bus. We waved it down and ran to catch up with it.

Vans are an integral part of the transportation system in Rio, so we had ridden them before. They’re often crowded during rush hour, and some people have to awkwardly stand in between the door and the seats. This van, however, was approximately 40 years old, maybe two-thirds the size of a normal van in Rio, and took “crowded” to an extreme. From my position squeezed amongst three large, hot (in terms of temperature and not attractiveness, unfortunately) Brazilian men in the back seat, I could count the van’s every occupant – and at one point there were 19 of us.

While I was marveling at the capacity of the little old van to keep put-putting down the road, dodging potholes and sliding over speed bumps, Sarah was near the front, grilling the guy who takes the money about cheap pousadas. We had originally told him we wanted to go to Maragogi, but he steered us toward São José da Coroa Grande – little did we know that this was because we were actually going in the complete opposite direction of Maragogi.

We were dropped off in the center of the town, a small but bustling fishing village that was probably the least touristy place we could have gone to. We walked around for a bit, still lugging our bags, looking for the mysterious pousadas the van-guy had told us about. People all around us were wearing swimsuits and cangas and walking to and from the beach, which was exactly what we wanted to be doing. So when we finally stumbled upon a colorful building called the “Hospedaria Shalon Mayim,” complete with a Star of David on its sign, I told Sarah that I was counting on her Jewish cred (her dad is Jewish), we practiced our “Baruch atah Adonais,” and we went in.

A young boy was manning the desk. And he had a room for us! Cheap, and complete with a fan! However, without windows. And one of the walls was actually a padlocked garage-door-like contraption that led outdoors. And the tiny TV had an antenna that had to be knocked every once in a while to clear out the fuzziness. But the biggest surprise was probably the “Exclusive Property of the Lord Jesus” sign in the open space outside the rooms. (In retrospect, this should not have been a surprise at all. Why would there be a need to lodge Jews in São José da Coroa Grande?)

We finally made it to the beach and then to seek out some food. Yet somehow the town had none. We found some bread and what turned out to be the worst cake either of us had ever eaten. Our hunger was finally sated, however, when later that evening São José da Coroa Grande turned into a par-tay. We each had a delicious cachorro quente completo – a hot dog with ALL the toppings – and a “Swiss” crêpe (I have no idea how the Swiss really make their crêpes, but these are simply crêpe dough on a stick with a small candy bar melted in the center). We watched little children play in the center square and enjoyed the feeling of being the only gringos in the whole town.

After some unsuccessful searching for internet and a successful morning at the beach the next day, we decided it was time to move on. We found another van, told them we wanted to go to Maragogi, and were surprised to find that the actual town was significantly farther from where we had gotten off the bus the day before. Oops. But once in Maragogi proper (where we were actually happy to find other tourists), finding a pousada was a lot easier. We found a beach-front one with internet (!) and cable TV and a bountiful breakfast for about twice the price of the previous pousada – but it was definitely worth the splurge. I have taken very few more welcome showers than the one I took that night.

We decided that snorkeling was a must. After managing to talk down the price by using our sick bargaining skills on a young boy who soon became our new best friend (i.e. we shared a lot of thumbs-up after we kept good on our promise to tell NO ONE on the boat about the price he had given us), we shipped off to the reef that lines the coast in those parts.

Wow. Snorkeling was pretty awesome, and as I told my brother, I felt like I was living “Planet Earth: Shallow Seas.” The water was clear, the fish were cute and colorful, and it was cool to watch the waves crash against the reef, several kilometers out at sea.

After we returned after sundown and enjoyed several cups of much-needed hot coffee, we set out on a trek that would lead us to our second best friend in Maragogi. The waiter at the one open restaurant that looked like it was for the local folks and not tourists sat us down, mumbled the available dishes in the fastest Portuguese I have ever heard, and then chose for us when we stared at him blankly. We ended up being served carne de sol and some big hunks of mandioca, which is kind of the local equivalent of steak and potatoes. It was good, if a little lacking in excitement (or vegetables).

The next day, after a breakfast for which I have no words (it was that amazing), we decided to explore some of the other towns in the area. We took a van to Japaratinga, home of a beautiful and deserted beach, and asked around for the way to a couple of the other towns we had read about. We wanted to visit a lighthouse and see the manatees, but everyone we asked seemed to be borrowing the Maine saying, “You can’t get there from here.” We decided to set out by ourselves and prove them wrong.

With sunblock breaks every half-hour or so and plenty of water, we walked about six miles through paradise, only coming across a few fishermen and youngsters playing in the water. We thought several times of stealing one of the many fishing boats lying around, or perhaps one of the horses we passed, but we never went through with it. After all, we were still training for the Appalachian Trail.

After finding the mysterious balsa (small ferry) that we had heard about all morning, we arrived in Porto de Pedras and enjoyed the most refreshing coconut water I have ever had. We had made it, but we still needed to climb up the impossibly steep hill to the lighthouse that was had seen from several miles away and used as inspiration for our trek. We ignored the “entrance prohibited” sign though we were unsuccessful in our attempts to break into the lighthouse itself. The view from the hill it was on was beautiful enough for me, though.

The way back was about a million times as efficient: we took moto-taxis! It was the first time I had ever ridden a motorcycle and I was kind of scared to death as I had nothing to hold on to and my driver kept spinning around sandy curves and hugging the curb to avoid speed bumps (though going over the speed bumps when he couldn’t avoid them wasn’t actually any better). I gave up my dream to marry a moto-taxi driver and decided that it might be better if I were the driver myself, as I would have more control. Unfortunately I have no plans to move to the northeast of Brazil to do so, as the heat there almost killed me.

After another dinner at our friend’s restaurant (He chose our meal again for us: fish and salad, this time. And of course more mandioca, which, though unbelievably tasteless, was actually growing on me.) and of course some ice cream, we went to bed, absolutely exhausted but ready for more adventures the next day.

To be continued! One more episode left!

In Which My Weaknesses For Sugar and Small Children Are Tested

So, my trip. I’ve been promising this post for almost a week, and I’ve been writing it for three days, so I figure I owe you guys something by now. However, I’ve decided to split the trip up into three parts. This first one is over a thousand words so if you’d prefer to just look at the pictures, go ahead! (But obviously you would be missing out on my sparkling wit and unparalleled wisdom, so choose carefully.)

(Also – is this title too creepy? Probably, but I'm also not planning on running for public office so I'll let it stand. I just want a Brazilian child to speak Portuguese with!)

Like I wrote earlier, we set off without knowing anything but our flight times (and even those we were a little iffy, as you’ll see later). Our plan was to fly to Recife Friday night, go to the hostel where we had first tried to make reservations, and then go to the hostel where they were going to send us because the first hostel was full (obviously we couldn’t go directly to the second hostel – this is Brazil, and I’ve learned the most efficient possibility is always automatically out of the question).

So, Friday afternoon I headed off in the pouring rain to Sarah’s apartment, bags in hand. We had originally planned to go bathing-suit shopping before leaving, but neither of us wanted to venture back outside – you can see why we were desperate to leave Rio! We settled for watching the latest episode of The Office while finishing up some leftover food that needed to get eaten: ice cream, a mango, and some orange glaze.

By the time we made it back outside and down the block to the beach, where the airport bus runs, the rain had mostly stopped. We were still shivering in our sweatshirts, though. And we shivered for almost an hour before the bus finally came. (The thing about buses in Rio: they don’t have schedules. And even if they did, it would be useless to try to follow them.) Once on the bus we shivered some more, as the air conditioning was quite unnecessarily on full blast.

We were a little taken aback by the amount of people who got on the bus at Rio’s smaller airport, Santos Dumont, where many domestic flights arrive. Why were they taking the bus to another airport? Also – we thought as we finally arrived at the airport about 30 minutes before our flight was supposed to leave – why are there so many people traveling at 9:30 on a Friday night?

Well, it turned out that almost every flight was delayed. We later learned that Santos Dumont had been closed, which answered the rest of our questions. However, we still didn’t know when our flight was going to leave, or, perhaps more importantly, which gate it was going to leave from.

After three different gates, three more hours, and almost an accidental trip to Belém, we handed our ticket to the gate agent. Wow, I thought – if they do this quickly, we might be able to leave just three hours after our original take-off time! Alas, when we got to the end of the tunnel we didn’t find the vehicle I was expecting. Instead of an airplane we got onto a bus!

So by the time we finally took off it was past 1:30 in the morning and I was half-asleep. Apparently when I am half-asleep, I think that every bout of turbulence is a sign that my death is imminent, so it wasn’t the most pleasant flight. I did manage to get myself fully conscious when the flight attendants came around with sandwiches and juice, however.

4:30 in the morning and we are standing at baggage claim in the Recife airport, mulling our options. Do we try to get a taxi and do the whole hostel charade in the dark in a city we’ve never been to? Or do we just lie down right here next to the baggage carts and take a little nap. We decided on the latter, obviously. For about five minutes until a security guard came to tell us that sleeping there is prohibited. BUT! he said, there’s better sleeping up in the food court anyway. And what do you know, up in the food court there was a whole colony of people sleeping on benches! We joined them and took a nice three-hour nap.

We finally made it to hostel number 1, where they were a little confused about our situation, and as they had told us earlier, had no space. It was cute and colorful, though, and the people were nice (and the breakfast they were eating looked delicious) so when they offered to clean out the laundry room for us and put down some mattresses there we accepted. And then we were finally off to explore Recife.

Recife is known for two things: for having lots of bridges and canals (it’s known as the Brazilian Venice) and for having lots of sharks. So we decided we’d skip the beach while in Recife and take advantage of the rest that it had to offer.

Recife was colonized soon after the Portuguese arrived in Brazil in the 1500s, and quickly became an important city in the sugar trade (a fact I definitely took advantage of – I have become quite addicted to sugar over the past three months or so). There are a lot of colorful colonial buildings, especially in the neighborhood known as Recife Antigo, which is actually an island connected to the rest of Recife by bridges.

We spent Saturday and Sunday checking out the sites and trying to figure out how the bus system worked (being in a new city made me realize exactly how well I know Rio now). On our second failed attempt to get to the Museum of the Man of the Northeast, we instead stumbled upon a children’s festival and small zoo and enjoyed some amazingly cheap food (one real for a hot dog, or a stick of meat, or a cup of ice cream, etc.). There was also a monkey eating a heart-shaped lollipop, which was pretty cute. (Not to mention the hundreds of adorable Portuguese-speaking Brazilian kids – it was a tempting place for a potential Brazilian child-stealer like me.)

We went to a market in Recife Antigo and had even more to eat (a common theme of this trip), this time some tapioca. While I had had tapioca in Rio before, they are especially obsessed with it in the Northeast. They pretty much make a tortilla-like thing by cooking little tapioca balls and often coconut, and then fill it with either something sweet like doce de leite, or something savory like meat and cheese. While I wasn’t a huge fan at first, since the tapioca itself has pretty much no taste, it is definitely growing on me.

We had signed up for two nights on the laundry-room floor at the hostel, so by Sunday night we were planning to get out of Recife the next morning. We had with us about six printed-out pages from a Brazil travel guide (budget travelers we are), but fortunately the hostel had a 1998 version of the same book, so we could fill in some of the information we were lacking. After much confusion over the names of towns and distances between them, we decided on one thing: we would go south.

To be continued…

Spring Break Recife

This can't be a long post, since I have a plane to catch in just a few hours, but I figured I owed it to my readers to tell you why I won't be updating (or answering emails, facebook messages, etc.) for the next week or so: I'm going on Spring Break.

I'm pretty much the only person who's calling it that, but considering I was in cold cold Maine for my spring break last March, suffering through one of my many dental procedures, I'm going to make this one count. It's not even technically a whole week of vacation; we just have Monday and Thursday and Friday off, but I'm doing the Brazilian thing and skipping some classes (just two, as it turns out -- other professors cancelled theirs).

(Monday is Dia das Crianças, Children's Day. When I used to ask my parents why we had Mother's Day and Father's Day but no Children's Day, they would tell me that every day was children's day. Now that twenty years of keeping me in the dark about this holiday is up, I only hope it's not too late for me to celebrate.)

After a long and arduous decision making process, I ended up choosing to go to Recife with my friend Sarah. We have absolutely no plans besides a flight there and back, and a night in a hostel tonight. We're working on finding some Couchsurfers, as I did that with success this summer, but right now everything is up in the air. It will be an adventure!

My host mother has told me that I need to make sure to obey her this time. Last time she told me to wear sunscreen I got horribly burned (but let me point out how proud of myself I am that it took three months in a tropical country for it to happen) and now she thinks I'm some kind of rebel. She didn't really understand that lobster-red is not necessarily an unknown color to my skin. But I'm bringing a full bottle of sunscreen to Recife because if I come back burnt she might just kick me out of the house.

Right now it's 66 degrees and pouring rain in Rio. It's 82 and sunny in Recife. According to my weather widget, every day next week in Recife is a sun with a high of 86 and a low of 77. I could not be more excited.

É a vez do Rio!

Breaking news isn't exactly my forte, so I'm assuming everybody who's reading this already knows that Rio de Janeiro beat out Chicago, Tokyo, and Madrid to be the host city for the 2016 Olympic Games. You might also have seen pictures of the tens of thousands of Cariocas dressed in yellow and green, cheering on their city on Copacabana beach last Friday. Well guess what? I live on Copacabana beach, and I was there rooting for Rio along with them.

I'm not sure I knew that Rio was in the running for the 2016 games before I came to Brazil, but the news was hard to miss once I got here. "Eu quero!" signs were all over the city, and on the morning of the decision, several planes flew above the beach, trailing banners which read, "Vamos Torcer! É a vez do Rio!"

The planes urging people to cheer because it was finally Rio's turn weren't the only signs that something big was happening that morning. As I walked down Copacabana, several helicopters -- though no uncommon sight in Rio -- hovered overhead. It seemed like everyone was taking advantage of the excitement, including the guy walking around the beachside bar with a sign that read "Olympics 2016 Rice beans beef with french fries." That's probably the most common meal that exists in Rio, but on Friday it was something special. 

Long balloons in yellow, green, blue, and white were being handed out by the dozen, and I snagged a few to play with while I waited. This little boy had the same idea:

There was a live concert in front of the Copacabana Palace hotel, and I stood in the crowd as the Brazilians danced and sang along. When the first news came, no one was expecting it, and a collective gasp quickly turned into cheers. The two big TV screens read "Chicago has just been eliminated." The music continued, and I waved my balloons with the screaming crowd. Just a few minutes later the next message came: "Tokyo has also just been eliminated." The woman next to me turned in excitement. "Eliminated! They've been eliminated!" she yelled to me, as if she couldn't quite believe it and wanted to confirm that I had seen the same news.

Though the news about Chicago left the next hour or so slightly anti-climatic, the Brazilians in the crowd weren't losing any of their energy. I moved farther into the crowd, trying to find my friends, and found myself centered in front of the stage, packed in too tight to move any farther. But don't worry, I made some new friends.

When the IOC chairman flipped over the card and read out "Rio de Janeiro," I neither saw it nor heard it. But suddenly the screaming was several times as loud and a blizzard of shiny pieces of confetti -- that I was still pulling off of me that night -- fell from the sky. I felt myself being lifted by one of the Brazilians next to me as I tried to capture the moment on film.

That was the best I got. It was chaos. A woman next to me asked me if I won. I figured the best answer was that I had, and she told me that she had too, and then gave me a big hug. I told her congratulations. Another guy found out I was American and asked me how long I would be here for. I'll be staying until December, I said, and he replied, "Well then, you must have my flag." He handed me the Brazilian flag he had been waving; it's now hanging on my wall. I told him congratulations as well.

Judging by how the Brazilians have welcomed me to their country, I know they'll be good hosts for the rest of the world. There are certainly huge problems in this city -- poverty, homelessness, transportation, crime -- that need to be remedied before then, and I don't think they'll find the most perfect and efficient solutions for them, but somehow they'll pull it together. Somehow things just work out in Brazil.

Even so, it will be no easy task. But when I saw the pictures of President Lula crying in Copenhagen, I remembered why I had supported Rio all along. Even though Chicago is his hometown, I can't see Obama reacting with the same outburst of emotion had Chicago been picked instead. The pure pride and joy that Lula and most Brazilians felt upon hearing the news is reason enough to have chosen Rio, and to bring the Olympics to South America for the first time. It really does mean a lot.

The crowd sings "Sou Carioca" (I'm Carioca) not long after the news was announced

P.S. Check out more photos from Friday here.

Provas, Provas, Provas

This past week was week one of two weeks of midterms (or, as they are called here, provas de G1). I managed to survive a week of presentations, written tests, and papers -- and, surprisingly enough, for a brief moment it felt kind of like I was back at Brown. I actually had to use my free time to study and do work! (Though I was doing reading on the beach last Sunday, so I don't know if that counts.)

Tuesday morning at 7am I had my first written test here, this one for my class on the health of the worker. I was slightly worried about it because the assigned book never showed up in the library and the professor never responded to my email asking for her Powerpoint slides. When I complained about this to my dad, he reminded me that everyone in my class was "in the same boat." Not exactly, considering everyone else in my class was Brazilian and not only spoke fluent Portuguese but had actually written essays for tests in that language before.

While we did have to write short papers in my Portuguese classes at Brown, they were always assigned for homework, so I could use a dictionary and spell check and stop to think about what exactly it was I was trying to say. That's added to the fact that they were on subjects like "describe your ideal family" or "describe your plan for a vacation in Brazil" -- which didn't inspire the most complex analysis, I must say. But now not only did I have to answer three essay questions in two hours without any outside help, I actually had to answer the questions in a way that would show my professor that I wasn't a complete idiot (a common misperception in this country).

I have always taken my ability to write for granted. In fact, out of the four language skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking), I think I'm best at writing, not only in English but probably also in French. It's not that I'm illiterate in Portuguese -- though it certainly sometimes feels that way as I do the readings for my Portuguese literature class -- but oral and aural skills played a bigger role in my learning the language than written ones.

This is something I have always been grateful for -- it's more helpful to my life in Brazil to be able to understand what the people I live with are saying than to be able to read 19th-century Portuguese literature. But it is also something that worried me a bit coming into this week.

Luckily, my fears were mostly unfounded. I pulled off the essay questions on Tuesday morning with plenty of time to spare. And for the paper on Brazilian literature that I had to write for Wednesday, I used a hint that my Portuguese professor gave us Tuesday afternoon. It all boiled down to looking like I could write in Portuguese. Adriana, my Portuguese professor, was explaining to us the use of the word cujo/a(s), which pretty much means "whose", and which is completely avoided in spoken Portuguese. But, she said, if you can use it correctly in writing, we send you straight to level five. Since I somehow fooled the Portuguese department into putting me in level five, I figured I might as well throw a few cujos into my Brazilian literature paper to see if I could fool that professor as well into thinking I could write Portuguese. I haven't gotten my grade back yet, but hopefully it worked!

I still have a couple more tests next week, but I'm not too worried right now. It's a beautiful day out, it's been declared an optional holiday for public workers, and I'm skipping surfing class to party on Copacabana beach with 100,000 Brazilians from 10am until whenever the party ends (perhaps all night, depending on the news from Copenhagen). But I'll write more about the Olympics later!

Happy Spring!

Since surfing class was cancelled today (I don't know why the instructors thought someone of my talent and ability couldn't handle the crazy waves after several huge rainstorms, but that's another story), I have devoted my day to reading Amor de perdição. I'm supposed to have read it by Monday, and I'm on chapter 2 (out of 20), and I have to give a presentation to my class on chapter 18 on Wednesday. And since I read the chapter and a half that I have read on the bus, I didn't look up any words and thus have only a vague idea of what's going on (it's kind of a Portuguese version of Romeo and Juliet, though written in prose -- and I feel like a Shakespeare reader who only two years ago didn't know a single word of English). So obviously that's going well.

Hence today's post. I've been promising it for a few days, and you all know there's nothing I like better than a little procrastination.

The last day of winter came this week, while I was busy recovering from an unfortunate attempt at an obstacle course (more on that later). I have officially spent, what, six months in winter in the year 2009? And since I'm planning on leaving Brazil on December 16, I'll be out of here before summer even technically arrives. So in all of 2009, I'll have spent approximately two weeks in summer (and less than one in autumn -- and can you really count December in Maine as autumn?). What a year!

The first week of spring started off with a bang: a presentation in front of my Brazilian Literature class. And since, for reasons impossible to understand, no Brazilians wanted us in their group, five of us Americans in the class made our own group. And guess what? We owned them (besides the speaking correct, grammatical Portuguese part of course).

My part of the presentation involved talking about how different authors reacted to the modernization (most French-ization) of Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the century. Since being French was very chic and à la mode at the time, the government decided to build several institutions, like the Municipal Theater and the National Library, based on French architecture. Even the Avenida Rio Branco, a main avenue through centro, was styled after the Champs-Élysées (the names link to a cool comparison of old postcards). The authors I discussed pointed out that there were bigger problems to deal with in Rio, and that most of its citizens couldn't even  afford to benefit from things like theater. The title of our presentation, a quote from Orestes Barbosa, was "Há, sem dúvida, duas cidades no Rio." There are, without a doubt, two cities in Rio.

Things aren't much different today. There's the city I live in -- tall apartment buildings, some quite beautiful, many on the beach; chic hotels; cars with tinted windows -- and there's the other city -- the favelas. Rio is known for being quite distinctly divided between the two. The poorer people live on the hills, os morros, while those with more money live "on the pavement," o asfalto. The visibility of the favelas was startling to me when I first came to Rio, but after a few months here it's easier to see why most middle-class Brazilians seem to pretend they don't exist (except when complaining about crime) -- they have become part of the natural landscape of the city.

(I don't know who took this picture; I found it when googling "morro asfalto Rio")

It's harder, however, to ignore the young boys sleeping alone on the sidewalks with plastic bags stuffed in their t-shirts to keep warm, or those who chase after you shouting "Tô com fome, tô com fome." I'm hungry, I'm hungry. And then on the other side there are my classmates at my private university, the guys in polo shirts and the girls with long, straight, light hair, who play on their iPhones during class. So yeah, I'm with Orestes on this one: Há, sem dúvida, duas cidades no Rio.

But I'm getting too deep. Let's rewind to last Saturday, when I went with a group led by the international office at PUC to a eco-tourism farm. Though I can't say I really had it together the whole day (I just hope I didn't represent the U.S. too badly), it was tons of fun.

It started off at the delicious and bountiful breakfast with which we were welcomed to the fazenda after a two-hour bus ride. As the line wound around a large table of food in a tiny room, someone backed into me -- while I held a cup of hot coffee. I didn't burn myself, but I returned to the table with a huge stain down the front of my t-shirt. I went to go wash it off (leaving my t-shirt completely wet but not actually completely clean) and came back only to have a friend tell me that I also had coffee on the back of my shorts. Not sure how that got there.

So I was already soaked when we went off on our trek through the Mata Atlântica, the Atlantic rainforest. While we were protected from the sun for most of the hike, it was incredibly humid, and let's just say there was some sweat involved. The views were beautiful though, and the hike ended at a pond where a donkey was tied up next to a cooler of water. 

As we sipped our water, we were given an option: we could walk back, or wait for the raft to arrive and go back on it. There were quite a few of us there, and we wondered if we would all be able to fit on the raft. It's big, we were told, and we voted for the water route.

When I imagined a balsa in my head, the raft that we soon saw another group of students paddling around the corner towards us was not exactly what I had in mind. I'm not sure I can even use the word "paddling." When someone pointed out to Linda, the international coordinator at PUC who was with us, that those were in fact not oars but simply bamboo sticks, she cried out (in English), "Of course they're bamboo sticks, you're in the jungle!"

After the hike came a delicious and filling lunch, but not before I made the ultimately tragic decision not to put on my bathing suit before eating. We ate right next to a pool, but after I finished I found that the room where we were keeping all of our stuff was locked. So I went to play soccer with a couple of friends instead.

I returned sweaty and gross to the pool area, and saw more friends waiting in line at the obstacle course. "Come over and do it with us!" they shouted. "Do I need my bathing suit?" I yelled back. "No!"

This obstacle course was over a pond, and there were two different routes. We made fun of some Brazilians struggling over the easy route, and decided to go for the hard one. When it was my turn, I set out barefoot and without a helmet or gloves (which the Brazilian group had been given). I bet you can guess what happened next.

I fell into the water after making it maybe a quarter of the way through the course. Fully-clothed, of course. My arms and legs were exhausted and my feet were cramping and I decided the pain was stronger than my pride, so I let myself fall off the metal triangle section of the course (and no, I was not the only one to fall off). So I'm going to delay my plans to audition for the next season of Road Rules or Fear Factor or Wipeout or any of those shows that are actually a lot harder than they look, ok?

Since my bathing suit was actually my dry change of clothes by this point, I decided I might as well go down the water slide completely clothed as well. And then I put on my bathing suit and wrapped myself in my canga, completely exhausted for the bus ride home.

O Último Capítulo

Today was a special day in the country of Brazil. The last episode of Caminho das Índias, the novela that has entranced all of Brazil (or so it seems) for the last nine months, was finally aired, and I watched it.

How could I not? The novela das oito, the prime-time soap opera that doesn't actually start at 8, despite its name, is a cultural phenomenon here. Not even Survivor or American Idol at its height could have ever competed with the novela. At least three of my professors, if not all of them, have mentioned Caminho das Índias in class. And not just as in, "Hey, did you see the episode last night?" (it's on every night but Sunday). More like, "blah blah blah characteristics of psychopaths are as follows: blah blah blah. You know Yvone from Caminho das Índias? She's a perfect example of a psychopath because blah blah blah." It's a teaching technique -- and one that works, because everyone knows who Yvone is.

Apparently this novela has increased Brazilian interest in India, where approximately half of the action takes place (the other half takes place here in Rio). Though I had seen some episodes previous to tonight's, it was never quite clear to me what the link was. Why are these Indians (well, Brazilians dressed up as Indians) all speaking Portuguese and what is their relation with these Brazilians? At least one Brazilian was married to an Indian, but that's as far as I got. The ridiculous thing was, the Indians didn't even look Indian -- because they were Brazilian. The women were usually dressed in saris, but when the men wore suits, it was impossible to tell who was supposed to be from which country. I don't think that would fly as well in the U.S.: a TV show about India whose actors aren't actually of Indian descent. 

The Brazilian with whom I was watching was crying within the first fifteen minutes, as were most of the characters. I didn't cry, but at least I didn't burst out laughing, as I had felt like doing in most of the other episodes I watched. If I had cried, it would have been during the epic scene when Raj came into the house with Maya, who had just avoided getting her hair cut off (???) and said, "As you can see, I didn't die," and everybody started crying. The father (I don't exactly understand whose father) kept sputtering, "Explain this; what is all of this" (he was as confused as I was). But since Raj and Maya's baby had just come home as well, and someone's sister or brother had also just announced that the baby would soon have twin cousins, and the father-figure joyously cried, "My whole family has returned" (some from the dead, apparently), it was a nice moment.

I don't really know what else happened, besides that Raj and Maya realized that they had "built a love" (in a scene set to Frank Sinatra's "I'm in the Mood for Love") and that the final scene had them say "I love you" at the same time, and that Maria Bethânia (a very famous Brazilian singer, and the sister of Caetano Veloso) randomly showed up to the red-head's wedding reception (I seemed to be the only one surprised by this), and that it was revealed that this random old guy was actually the father or grandfather of pretty much everyone on the show (instead of the dead old guy whose portrait everyone was always bowing to). Some of this, however, I actually already knew because it was on the front page of the paper a few days ago. No kidding.

Luckily I can leave all that confusion behind in just a few days. The new novela das oito starts Monday! It's called Viver a Vida and it looks promising. It seems to take place in Paris and Jordan and perhaps some other random locales (do they pull them out of a hat?). Since I'm starting this one from the beginning, hopefully I will be slightly less confused. I will finally feel like I can fit into society since I will understand more of the references. And maybe it will even help me with my schoolwork as well!

If you happened to miss any of the 203 episodes of Caminho das Índias, don't worry: you can check them out on YouTube here.

UPDATE: Of every 100 TVs turned on in Brazil during the last episode, 81 were tuned to Caminho das Índias. According to Wikpedia, the American program that comes closest to this in terms of market share is the Academy Awards of 1970, with 78% (the finale of M*A*S*H is next, with 77%).