My Adventures in Brazil - Minhas Aventuras no Brasil

Friday, February 22, 2013

Football game!

A couple of us and a bunch of Brazilians went to a football game on Wednesday! My team, Fluminense, against Grêmio. It was super duper fun, and I had a blast...even though we lost 0-3 :(((.

There were little packets of baby powder to throw down into the field at the beginning, and everyone was covered it in!

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Carnaval just ended in Brasil! (And probably other places in the world, bus as we don't formally have it in New Mexico... I didn't even know other countries had it!) Carnaval is the Friday to Tuesday before lent, but in Rio at least... it basically lasts for the whole of February. It's an amazing time of the year when most of Rio is partying hard, and everyone else is either running away from it, or resenting every one of the tourists and all of the traffic the time of year brings. My host mom set up an amazing opportunity for the exchange students, where we got to walk in the first parade of Carnaval! (If you've watched Rio the movie... where they bring the stupid little chicken float to sneak the birds away! I'll have you know, that would never have worked... the whole just joining the parade.) We paraded with the escola da samba (samba school) Unidos do Jacarezinho, which is a small school, not very good, considering it was the first night of Carnaval. Basically though, this night sucked for me, because I was feeling nauseous during the parade and got pulled out almost immediately... so I didn't get to desfilar.

My host-mom and I!

Before and after this day, I attended many blocos, or block parties, which were amazing and a lot of fun! It's such an amazing thing to see so many people just go and congregate in a predetermined place in fantasias or costumes, to drink, dance and have fun with friends.

Friday, January 18, 2013

Escadaria Selaron

Downtown Rio is really cool and beautiful!

Really awesome architecture and stufffffff. :D

Tellie!

Central Rio

It's just... nice.

More niceness.

Famous arches in Lapa, the party place to go in Rio at night.

Can you tell what this is? Please tell me yes :)

The stairs

The four teams of Rio: Botafogo, Fluminense, Flamengo and Vasco.

Escadaria Selaron. If you want to read up on it, click here.

Year 2000 Welcome (fun fact- Bem-vindo means welcome, but literal translation is well coming)

Rio de Janeiro

Butterflies - borboletas

Tellie and I

This is so beautiful!

Stairs from high up, not the top though.

Brasil 2010

Yeah, I was there. :)

I went back to Petrópolis for the third time, for almost a full week this time! Petrópolis is a mountain city with 350,000 people, about an hour away from Rio (about 6 million people, I believe).

The house where the President of Brazil would stay, if she were ever to come and visit.

Eu fiz latkes! I made latkes... no I didn't eat any of off a plate, don't be ridiculous! I ate while I cooked, of course.

We had chocolate fondue... have we started a tradition of Petrópolis? The chocolate was "crocante," meaning it had little crunchy things in it, so it was quite a strange chocolate fondue experience.

Chocolate fondue with bananas, strawberries, apples and pineapple!

Matilde (Denmark) made a traditional Danish Christmas dessert, called Ris a la Monde (I think, don't hold me to that!)

In one of the bowls was hidden a full almond.. whoever found the almond got a present. Leandra, from Switzerland found it in her bowl.

I just want to comment now that Blogger HATES ME! It keeps putting my pictures in an obnoxious order or not letting me put them on at all. Thanks, Blogger.

We made the all American brownies, of course! They probably aren't even American, huh... Ah well.

Leandra went to a wedding... and came back looking like this!

Bombons do casamento! The sweets from the wedding.

While Leandra was at the wedding, Matilde, Kathryn and I went to a show at the Imperial Museum called Som & Luz (sound and light), which was really awesome! It was a history of the royal family of Brazil/Petrópolis... Would have been cooler if we could understand everything, because the sound quality was just not that great. This picture is of water being sprayed and a projection shone through it.