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We continued our journey to a small town North of Florianopolis called Porto Belo (like the song in bedknobs and broomsticks, Portobello road, which I did continue to sing the whole time we were there...). We were staying with a really lovely woman Rosana and her husband and dog! It was slightly difficult to find her house though, as the houses were just randomly numbered, 57, 287, 113... and there didn't seem to exist a number 12!
Anyway we found the house eventually and then got a glimpse of small town carnaval celebrations! They had a stage up in the town square with bands playing Brazilian music, and everyone from the town seemed to be there, dancing and singing and drinking beer! We spent one day in Porto Belo beach hopping with Rosana, and the next day we spent scuba diving...
The visibility wasn't great, but we saw quite a lot of fish and jellyfish and lobsters. The main benefit though was to show that we both still knew how to dive! (I hadn't for 18 months and Ben hadn't for 5 years!) Although we didn't exactly feel overly safe that everything was explained in Portuguese, and that we were going first as we were the only guests on the boat who were already qualified, after my initial internal fight after descending (Oh my god I can't breathe, I can't breathe, my mask's filled up with water, I can't remember how to get rid of it, I'm going to die! Shall I just give up and swim back up to the surface? NO I'm not going to let the diving beat me!) we had a really good day!
After Porto Belo we arrived in a new state, Parana, and a new city, Curitiba! We only stayed in Curitiba for a day, but let me tell you something, that city is rainy! I have since been told that the day we were there had an unprecedented amount of rain, but I think he may be an unreliable source as he is from Curitiba and was therefore probably just trying to make his city sound better! The city is supposedly famous for being very ecological, with pedestrian friendly streets, and lots of recylcing and tree planting and green spaces. As it was torrential rain however, we didn't really get a chance to walk around that much and the little we did see didn't greatly impress us! We did manage to go to the Oscar Niemeyer museum, (Oscar Niemeyer is a famous architect in Brazil) and go out for food with some Brazilian guys in which we sampled rabbit, crocodile and shark all in one meal! (Rabbit was fatty and gross, crocodile was suprisingly similar to chicken but with ten thousand million bones and shark was wierdly unpleasant, and I'm also pretty sure it's a protected species and your not supposed to eat it!
Bye bye rainy Curitiba, hello even MORE rainy Sao Paulo! I didn't know it was possible for a city to be so rainy, everyday,, all the time, and I'm from Manchester! The drainage is REALLY bad, so when it rains, the roads and pavements literally turn into rivers, and there's water pouring out of the walls and everywhere! However, despite its bad rep for being dangerous (we've learnt to take that with a pinch of salt as everywhere we go now is being described as 'really dangerous') we really liked Sao Paulo!
We stayed with my friend Leticia who I met in Santiago, and ended up staying there for 9 days (thanks Leticia!). There isn't a huge amount to do there for tourists during the day, some museums, shopping, parks, the old historic centre and the japanese area, but it has a really good nightlife. We went out a lot of nights to what would have been quite expensive clubs had it not been for Leticia's friends who got us in for free! We also went to see bands on two of the nights, Howler and the Sabonetes, which were cool. Brazil seems to have a bit of a fondness for indie and britpop music, so it was a bit of a taste of home! And of course I had other friends I met in Santiago, Nadia, Guilherme and Gabriel to see and lots of Leticia's friends that we met, so although we didn't do so much stuff, it was nice to just spend a bit of time chilling and hanging out with friends!
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