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I need to tell you about the bus services in Brazil. As we have travellled in Brazil, starting in Rio, and everywhere further north, we have discovered that the local bus services are a kind of crazy final destination-esc death defiance! Sort of a mixture between the knight bus in harry potter, and the playstation game burnout (sorry for the geeky references there!) the buses go at the speed of light, dodging between traffic and causing the passengers to fly off their seats at regular intervals! God forbid if there's no seats and you have to stand! I like it. I think it adds a bit of danger to your everyday journeys!
Anyway, the next two places we went to, Ouro Preto and Belo Horizonte, were both inland in the state of MInas Gerais. We arrived in Ouro Preto from Rio on the WORST overnight bus journey we've had so far, at 6am, not 7:30 like we were supposed to, which led to a few problems... We couldn't get in touch with the couchsurfer we were supposed to be staying with, so we tagged along with an Irish guy Chris, who had also been on our bus, to the hostel he was planning on staying in, picking up a Spanish girl along the way. Trouble was the hostel didn't open til 7:30 either, so we had to spend an hour and a half sitting in a small shop/cafe just down the road until it did open, and then when it did, we could leave our stuff there, but not check in until after 12 so we couldnt actually go back to bed and sleep!
We instead went out to see the sights of Ouro Preto, which can be summarised as a lot of churches, hills and musuems! The town is very old school pretty, and the churches have a lot of gold inside them, as Ouro Preto was once Brazil's largest producer of gold! We also had a trip into one of the old gold mines. Int he evening we suffered a power cut for about 3 hours, which apparently happens all the time there now since a storm a few months ago messed up all the power lines! But when the power finally came back on again, the guy who worked in our hostel took all of the guests out to one of the only two bars in the town! Ouro Preto has a massive university there too, but I don't think I'd fancy being a student there!
Belo Horizonte is a much bigger city, the capital of the state, and has a good atmosphere, but is not touristy at all, and there isn't that much to do there! The market, however, is a pretty interesting place. It sells all kinds of random stuff, but the most interesting/worst part of the market is the animal section. They have all kinds of birds, rabbits, dogs and cats, but all in really small cages, with LOADS of animals in each one, especially the birds! The worst was probably the cages with chickens, and geese and swans. I wasn't even aware you could keep swans in cages! And the sad little puppies faces when you walked past even made ME want to buy one, and I don't even like dogs! The saddest was a little huskie puppy running around and around his cage! Having said that though, at least they actually had space to move around, when I went to the market in Istanbul the animals were actually piled on top of each other in the cages!
We stayed at the sister hostel of the one we were staying in in Ouro Preto. One night the girl Simone who worked at this one took me and Chris and an Israeli guy Ishai to a Forro night. Forro is a type of Brazilian dance, a DIFFICULT type of Brazilian dance, and unlike in English clubs, people go to them specifically to dance, not to drink! Me and Chris andyway not knowing how to do this dance, decided we would just buy drinks and watch from the side, and its pretty impressive to watch when people do it well! The way it works is that guys just come up to a random girl, grab their hand, and they start dancing together, sort of improvising when to add complicated turns and stuff depending on how good they are. Turns out Simone was pretty good at this! I refused quite a few people asking me to dance until Simone forced me to dance with one guy, who was trying to teach me how (in Portuguese) and after that I danced with a few other people, badly, but I am sort of getting the hang of it now and it actually turned out to be quite fun!
One last fact about Brazil.. they eat cake for breakfast, chocolate cake, carrot cake, all kinds of cake, how cool is that?!
- comments
Kate OMG hun this sounds amazing! V Jel of your trip...but mainly of the cake and the brazilian dancing! xxx
Cissa Hello. I'm from Belo Horizonte. I found quite funny and true to her vision of my city. Surrounded by mountains, Belo Horizonte (Beautiful Horizons in English), the capital of the state of Minas Gerais is a big city with a small town characteristics. The bus drivers are really inconsequential, but buses are comfortable. No more dangerous compared to Chilean bus, for example. The forró is a common dance in the north and northeast of the country, but the cities of Minas Gerais and São Paulo usually have good 'forrós' too. Minas Gerais is known for simple people, they like cheese biscuits, coffee and homemade cakes! With coffee, the cakes are excellent combinations. For you must have been as strange as me when I lived in the US and Americans ate bacon and sausage in the morning! It is to wrap the stomach. Her time was little to see what the city can offer, but I hope you enjoyed and come back soon! :)
Cissa Ops, my blog is 'Traveling and Learning'. Thanks, Cissa.