Monday, February 2, 2009

paraty - parte uno

so the weekend was very intense. We had a trip to a very beautiful place called Paraty. It is located in the south part of the Rio de Janeiro State, almost in the state of São Paulo. the city was the end of the Gold Route - passage through which they extracted gold from Brazil, in Minas Gerais, and sent it to Portugal. We had a lot of things to do so i'll try to keep it short and show a lot of pictures. enjoy the following couple of entries.

location - PARATY, RIO DE JANEIRO
duration - FRIDAY TO SUNDAY
who - CIEE SAO PAULO GROUP+ CIEE STAFF

FRIDAY - stop at Ubatuba
we met at PUC at seven thirty am. sleepy, excited and half awake. some of us had eaten breakfast and others were eating there - jill macnaughton brought pizza for everyone. we started our trip, i tried to stay awake and see the scenery and movies but it was difficult and i ended up falling asleep. i had gone to canto da ema the night before and came back at 2 am to my place so that's why i was tired. canto da ema is a place where they dance forro which is a type of music, very similar to salsa but a little more sensual. the atmosphere was really good and the group of people that i went with was fun so i'd say it was a place worth coming back to. unfortunately, i won't be able to go with the same people because most of them are going to salvador soon. anyways, i got home at 2 and started packing so i didn't get much sleep and had to make up for it in the bus. i took a couple of pictures of the places we went through but it was very cloudy so it didn't look as beautiful as it could be on a sunny day.

on our way to paraty we had one stop scheduled at a beach called Ubatuba which is well known as a touristy place and a good surfing site. we got there, ate some food and proceeded to jump into the water. it was great. i stayed in the waves as much as i could because i rarely get to go to beaches that have big waves but are not steep on the bottom. also, different from guatemalan beaches, instead of being steep and black sand beaches, the sand was yellow/light brown and it had rocks on one of the sides. we walked a little on them as one group but then one group went back to go into the water and some people continued along the rocky coast.

also, because this was a more touristy place than normal, i didn't get a clear picture of the differences between swiming suits. brazilians are known for wearing very small bikinis for women and minuscule shorts for men called 'sunga'. as of now, i stand proudly as a tourist because i am not wearing a sunga.

FRIDAY - bemvindos a paraty
we got to paraty and to nobody's surprise, it was raining. the historic center of the city doesn't allow cars to go into the city so the bus left us as close as it could from the two hotels where we were staying. waiting outside the bus were staff members from the hotel with a bunch of umbrellas so we all received them and walked to the hotel with our luggage. the hotel was really nice but we wanted to go out and explore so four of us decided to walk together around the city before 7pm which was tour time. we didn't see much except for lots of flooded streets and very few people in the city. i believe we even got the occassional 'look at them, they are gringos' look but it's a city full of foreigners so they were used to seeing lost people like us.

we got back on time for the tour and we understood the history of the city a little better. as i mentioned earlier, it was the end point of the gold route towards portugal and it had different churches for whites and blacks and no official church for indigenous people -the few that were left. the city is also built so that during high tide the water from the ocean comes in and it walks through the city - therefore the flooding -, and during the low tide, the water slowly goes back where it belongs. the houses are made so that it doesn't come in which is kind of cool but it sometime happens that water does come in - not good. we saw the port, the central plaza and some of the iconic streets and buildings. apparently the city had a lot of mason influence because throughout the city it had different symbols and details in the architecture of the buildings that indicated who was part of the masons. this was specifically important to brazilian history because the masons started the independence movement.

after the tour everyone went to have dinner and we went to this thai place which had a good reputation - let me tell you, this reputation could not have been for its prices, because man, was it expensive... the food was indeed, very good. we all ordered different dishes and shared. at the end, all of the guys decided to do something which was not too smart but it showed how much of a man each one of us was... since each plate had a green or red pepper on the side, we all decided to give it a try. TALK ABOUT HOT SPICES!! water, rice, vegetables, oxygen and an occassional napkin bite were not enough to calm the wildfire inside our throats. the worse part was that it walked slowly down our throats and to our stomachs... ah well, at least we all had a good laugh looking at each others' red faces and urgent need for water hehe.

p.s. of course, the picture i'm showing you is not going to be me with my very red face, it has to be one of our very own Dominican morenazas exhibing the lovely display of thai food.

in the next entry...
SATURDAY - mergulhando nas praias
SATURDAY - jantar e parque
SUNDAY - cachoeira e peptobismol...

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