Buenos Aires – Day Two (Day of Rain)

Well, I guess all good things had to come to an end. After 6 great days of weather, I finally had a day of rain. This made it difficult to actually get out and run around and see the sights. Even with this rain, I was able to see some things around the city. Most disappointing though was I was unable to get out to Palermo and see the Japanese Garden, Zoo and Botanical Gardens. I guess I will just have to get back to BA in the future!

What I did spend a lot of time doing was walking around the Cementario de la Recoleta. This cemetary is famous for all of the political leaders and military leaders that are buried here. Of course, the most famous is Evita Peron.

Evita Peron

There was a tremendous amount of architecture within the cemetary. I do not know how to really describe everything that I saw. Here are a couple pictures, but I recommend you click here and check out the gallery of all of the pics.

Cementerio de la Recoleta

Cementerio de la Recoleta

In between the storms, I was able to get a couple other things visited. I paid a trip back to Plaza de Congreso in order to see Rodin’s Thinker.

Rodin's Thinker

I also took a closer look at the Obelisco since I limited my movement due to the weather.

Obelisco

One last thing that I saw was this cool bus that was completely covered in graffiti. Cool sight.

Graffiti Bus

Well, that was Buenos Aires in 1.5 days. It definitely makes me want to come back and stay for a week or so. There is so much to see and do. I look forward to my next real vacation down here. Tomorrow it is back to Sao Paulo – bright and early!

Buenos Aires – Day One

So today was the day we went on our weekend trips. We started VERY early this morning. It was about 4:30a.m. when we started working ourselves out of bed. We had to leave for the airport at about 5:30 so we could make early flights. A large group left Thursday night with the rest leaving some time on Friday.

I decided a month or so ago that I was going to Buenos Aires this weekend.I did this because I am staying after the classes are done and heading to Rio. Rio is where everyone else in the group headed for this weekend.

Welcome to Argentina

I arrived in Buenos Aires after a three hour flight on TAM airlines. If you ever get the chance, fly TAM. I have to say it was one of the most interesting flights I have flown on – in a good way. Before the flight, they provided us with lip balm, ear plugs and eye covers so that we could sleep. Then everyone on the plane got a hot towel. We were served drinks and dinner as well. It is amazing what we have lost in the United States with the airlines trying to scrap every dime.

I have to make a quick recommendation for travelers. I used Lonely Planet’s Buenos Aires Encounter book to plan my trip. It is a smaller book that provides the main things to see in each of Buenos Aires’ neighborhoods. It has been great and I have seen so much already on my first day of the trip.

One thing I found out after setting out on my journey of the neighborhoods was how easy and quick it was to walk around the city. I know I am missing a large part of the city and only seeing the tourist areas, but I have been amazed at the amount of distance I covered today in such a short time.

My first stop was the Plaza de Congresso. Here I saw the Palacio de Congresso. It was modeled on the US Congress building as you can see by the pictures.

Palacio de Congresso

I then proceeded to cross the Ave de 9 of Julio. This street has at least 16 lanes across. At the mid-point of the street is a huge Obelisco.

Obelisco on the Ave 9 of Julio

After this, I headed toward the Plaza de Mayo.

Plaze de Mayo

The Plaza is famous for its protests. In fact, there were protesters hanging out in the plaza today.

Protesters

But another famous thing about this Plaza was the Casa Rosada. This is the Presidential home of Buenos Aires that is just like the White House.

Casa Rosada

I then headed down Defensa which is known as a student trendy area. This is also known for its little markets selling second hand and retro items. These were really cool to look back into the past. One thing that was interesting was they were re-working the road. In fact, they are manually placing every brick into the ground for the road. A time consuming but awesome way of keeping the city the way it is.

Street Work

Next I walked up Defensa which turned into Reconquista north of the Plaza de Mayo. This road is very trendy and upscale. A lot of high end shopping and banking is done here. The street is very up to date in comparison to the South side of Plaza de Mayo.

Reconquista

My final stop for pictures was at Plaza San Martin in the neighborhood of Retiro. In this Plaza there is a 76m tower called the Monumental Torre (Torre de los Ingleses). It was a donation but the city’s British community in 1916. Apparently it was then a bombing target during the Falklands War in 1982 against Britain.

Monumental Torre

Like I just mentioned, there was the Falklands War against Britain. Also here, there is a monument to those who died in this war. It was guarded by two guards standing there. It was very interesting.

Falklands War Memorial

After all of this sight seeing, I ended up walking for quite a while looking at the various shopping malls around the different neighborhoods that were on my way back to my hotel. It was great to see the kinds of items they were selling. Most of these little malls were just selling retro and vintage clothing – second hand clothes. Mixed in were the regular retail establishments that we could expect to see.

I ended my journey shortly after sunset here. The weather was great as it warmed up in the day. I also ran across my first protest. This was about two blocks from my hotel. It was students out in the street blocking half of the road. It seemed that the police did not care too much and were redirecting traffic around them. Several things I have read indicated that many protests just start up and happen at random times.

Tomorrow’s conclusion to Buenos Aires: Rodin’s Thinker, Cemetario de la Recolata, some shopping and maybe journey into the Palermo neighborhood to the Japanese gardens at Jardin Japonese, zoo and botanical gardens. If I accomplish all of that, it will be a good trip.

There are lots of pictures from today. I recommend looking at them by clicking here.

Sao Paulo – Day Four

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Today was sort of a short day for information and pictures. We had three main things going on during the day:

• Tour of Brasilata
• Class on Social issues in Brazil
• Dinner at a local eatery

Brasilata is a can manufacturer. They are headquarted in Sao Paulo with a couple other facilities in the country. Doesn’t really sound exciting, but it isn’t that bad. It was cool to have a discussion with a real company in Brazil and how they are doing business. They are really into having employees feel that they are part of the company.

Brasilata makes cans....lots of them

Following this, we had our lunch break which was followed by our class that dealt with society in Brazil. It was interesting to learn about the educational system and how it is free to those that can get in, however to get in you have to take a test to determine if you make it in or not.

For dinner, we went to a new neighborhood that we hadn’t been in before. This one had us confused since we were use to going a certain way on the Metro. So when we got on after the first transfer to a new line, we eneded up going in the wrong direction. This was noticed right away and so it only cost us one stop.

Once we got off the train, we weren’t excactly sure where we were at. We had an address to the restaurant we were going , but didn’t exactly know where it was. We ended up asking this lady right outside of the Metro station. She was very nice and polite and even spoke English. She pointed us in the direction and told us where to go. The instructions she gave us actually were not correct. What was amazing was that she ended up finding us down the street to correct herself and show us where the restaurant was. I have to say I was very impressed. I would have NEVER expected that from anyone, and know that would not happen in Chicago.

We all had a great dinner, although it seemed that Michael ended up eating the same thing he had for lunch.

It was a short night. We were all getting ready for our weekend trips. Everyone except for me was heading to Rio for the weekend. I am heading to Buenos Aires for the weekend instead.

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Sao Paulo – Day Three

This was my relaxing day – sort of. We started of with the basic breakfast – so I won’t go into that again. Class started at about 8:30 in the morning. We had a political, social and economic discussion on Brazil. Here we learned the many sides of Brazilian social life, politics and how the economics of Brazil are felt throughout the society.

Getting ready to head out for drinks and futbol

A group of us watched the Champions League finals futbol game between Barcelona and Manchester United at a local little bar/eatery near our hotel. We had tons of beer and some interesting food. I had some pizza that was made with corn, ham and eggs in it. It did not have any tomato sauce or any other ingredients that you would expect.

Pizza at the local store

Also, one person decided to order the national dish of Brazil: Feijoada. This is simply beans, rice and meat. In this case, we asked the boy that was our server which parts of the pig were in the dish. He said it was the ears, nose, feet and ass. It was quite humorous. It was cooked very deeply so that it really didn’t have a bad taste and was very tender.

pig parts - Feijoada

After the nine of us drank nine beers, we decided to go get some street corn. This is simply corn on the cob that is boiled on the street. The vendor then strips the kernels off the cob and provides it to you in a dish. He then adds salt and butter. It is very good and at only R$2, it was a good and quick purchase.

We then broke up into smaller groups and decided to head into a couple of different shopping malls. Some people were looking for sandals, getting massages, or like myself – searching for a small English – Portuguese dictionary. We ended up finding a huge bookstore and after searching through the entire store located the travel language section. It was odd to purchase a translation dictionary for English in Brazil. However, it was perfect. It will help me out tremendously over the next week and a half.

At this point, I ended up heading back to the hotel. I started to read over the dictionary just getting myself familiar with the book and trying to learn some words. I found myself falling asleep and getting a nice little power nap on the couch in the hotel room. After I woke up an hour or so later, I started to plan my weekend excursion.

I am heading to Buenos Aires this weekend. All others in the group are heading to Rio de Janeiro. I am heading to Rio at the end of the two weeks in Sao Paulo and so decided to do something different. I had purchased a Lonely Planet book on Buenos Aires prior to leaving Chicago. It has a lot to do and see. It also has a great day trip and three day trip itinerary that you can use as a guide to seeing the big sites. I looked through this and mapped out my journey for the 2 days I am there.

At about midnight, the others ended up returning to the hotel and we chatted for about an hour prior to heading to bed. It was another busy day but also a bit relaxing at the end. I will catch up on the craziness this weekend when I am trying to see everything in Buenos Aires that I can.

Sao Paulo – Day Two

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The second full day of our trip started bright and early, at least it seemed. This was to be an interesting day as we were to take a trip to BM&FBovesap (the Mercantile exchange of Brazil) and learn some Portuguese. The day began with a simple trip to the breakfast at the hotel. Again, the breakfast was the same as the day before and just as filling as then. We then met Claudia for our trip to Bovespa.

Brazilian Mercantile Exchange

Claudia is our contact for the trip. She hangs with us as we go to class and take our field trips as our sort of guide. She has been a great help in everything that we need to get taken care of. She coordinates things between the school and us.

We met Claudia at the hotel and began our journey for the day. We took the Metro again in the morning so that we could head to the city center (Centro) for our arrival at Bovespa. We got off at the Sao Bento stop on the Blue line of the Metro. She walked us from the Metro to the Bovespa buildings. We had a brief movie about the exchange and what it does for Brazil. We also got to see the old trading floors for the exchange. At this time, only 8% of all trading is still done by hand. In July, all trading will be done electronically. We were taken to a private VIP room so that we could watch the trading on the floor. We also got to walk on the old trading floor since it was no longer used after Bovespa’s merger with BM&F.

Last trading floor in Brazil

Following this tour, we ended up going to the top of the old Bank of Sao Paulo building. This was at one time the official bank of the state of Sao Paulo, but was now a private bank. From here, you were able to go to the top and look out over the entire city. It was amazing how vast the city was. There was no other way to explain it. I ended up creating about a two minute movie of the city walking around the top of the building. This video does not really show off how big the city is though.

View from the city center

We were only given five minutes to take in the view. We then went down and ate lunch at a local restaurant neaby. This place was called Salvo Jorge. Here they also offered the plate lunches with a meat, salad, rice, beans and French fries. It was again great food. We got to eat with Claudia and get to know her better. The location had some interesting art work, ceiling fans and lemons, limes and oranges in the urinal filled with ice. This was a very unique set up.

Cool artwork in the restaurant

The afternoon session for the day involved learning or “Surviving” Portuguese. This class had high hopes for me. I was very interesting in becoming a little less reliant on Michael to do all of our translating. We went over vowels, gender of words and then some common terminology to help us get through our day. I have found pronunciation of Portuguese is very simple and reading it isn’t that bad as well. However, as with any foreign language, hearing and translating on the fly are very difficult. I do think that I would like to learn Portuguese more fluently in the future after I get back. It seems like a cool language as well as being in Brazil and able to come back and speak it.

Anyway, back to the class. This class for me was a little bit of a disappointment. It was more about pronunciation than about actually learning conversational Portuguese. We did learn some phrases, but these were no different than what my Fodor’s guide had in it. I was hoping to learn more and be able to use it more. I will get better through the week, and we had some cases to try it out which will be talked about later.

Following class, four of us decided to take a trip to the local Wal-mart equivalent. We were told it was right down a street. They were supposed to have blue smiley faces instead of the yellow ones. They also were to have the full range of products from TVs, computers, food and beer. As we walk down the street that the store is on, we keep going further and further. Also, we end up passing two other little markets on our way – but still no Wal-Mart. We eventually found it. We purchased our items and then started to make our trek back. We really didn’t realize it at the time we headed there, but the trip was all down hill. So we then had to go back uphill. This was not fun. We also realized we could have bought all of the items we purchased at one of the other two markets without a huge difference in price, but a lot closer and further up the hill. We referred to this trip as our Boondoggle. Of course, Kyle (the person who told us about this) couldn’t believe we didn’t take a taxi back. Neither could we after we were done. However, we got a great workout.

Outside Bar Brahma

The night’s food and beverages ended up being at Bar Brahma. This is a popular after work spot. It was also a recommended must see by Fodor’s guide. The music was light jazz and the atmosphere was mid 20^th century. Here we ended up having 10 of us to start. This was different from our typical posse of 8 that travelled around together. In the end, another 5 or so people joined us to make for a huge group of people. We arrived at Bar Brahma after taking the Metro to the Republica stop. This stop was actually the first time we felt that we were not 100% safe. I would say it was typical of any other place where homeless sleep and congregate. We walked about two blocks and found Bar Brahma on the corner.

Jazz Singer

One group of five ordered two pizzas: a margarita and a four cheese pizza. These were delicious. Again here, the bar used the numbering system to figure out what you would pay and order. It seemed in theory this would work well, however it did not. We had four different servers who could not really communicate with each other. One girl kept telling me I ordered a Black Brahma, when I know I did not. She was quite insistent. Finally we were able to tell another server this and he took care of the problem. I finally received my Brahma long neck. Brahma is a very good beer. I ended up tasting the Black Brahma and it was quite good, so my next beer was one of these. I am sure the little girl was upset when she finally brought it to me after she had already taken one back. Oh well.

Three of the Four Musketeers

This was a fun night of drinking, talking and just having fun. We learned a lot about each other and about Brazilian nightlife.

Drinking at bar Brahma

The words of the day: Cougar, boondoggle

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Sao Paulo – Day One

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Today was our first full day in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We woke up early so that we could go have breakfast at the hotel restaurant. It was a basic continental breakfast with meats, cheeses and breads. There was also some juices and cereals as well. Nothing spectacular but it is free and hits the spot every morning.

great morning sunrise

We went to our first class in the morning. This class had two parts. The first part was a simple 20 minute introduction to the program that we will be participating in. We have 15 people in the program. 14 are from UIC and 1 is from UNC (Duke sucks apparently).

We then went on a quick tour of the school. This was actually quite funny because the professor that walked us around was so quiet when speaking. We would walk around the hallways and by the time we all met up with the rest of the group he would have finished talking about where we were at.

After this tour of the buildings of the university, we were given a three hour course on Brazilian culture. This class was taught by a younger professor who was quite entertaining. It appeared that he lived in England or Australia at one time in his life because he was calling everyone “mate” and used some other British terminology. In this class we learned about the business and social structure of Brazil and about the inequalities of the country. It was quite fascinating. Some interesting facts: Brazil is the 3^rd most inequal country in the world when it comes to social classes.

Following the class, we were given about two hours for lunch. A group of us walked around and located a little sidewalk café. Here they have basic “plates” of food that are on special. It comes with a meat, potato of some sort, rice, maybe some beans, and also some salad. The cost of the meal was about R$16 which was about $8USD. It was very good and very filling. Also, this was our first experience with the numbering system. We were each given numbers and our orders were assigned to them. We went to pay with our number and they had our bill for each individual with everything we had ordered, from food and drinks.

In the afternoon, we took a bus tour around the city. This tour was very fast in speed but not in time. It seemed like we were speeding around everywhere and only stopped at one real place: the First Church. This was a huge Catholic Church in the city Centre area. There are pictures from above in Day 2 picture album that will be posted in tomorrow’s blog. Here we walked around inside the church and then walked for a few blocks. We also saw the location where the Pope would stay when he was in Sao Paulo. A couple of other highlights: The Queen’s house when Brazil had a Queen & King, also the first school established in Brazil. I am not really sure what else there was. This was a quick walk around the area.

For the evening, we had decided that we wanted to go to Japan Town and get some sushi. In the Fodor’s book for Sao Paulo and Rio, one location that came up was a restaurant called Gombe. This at least gave us a place to start and go from there. We were in a group of 8 people. We decided to take the Metro again as it is a great form of transportation. When we got off the Metro at the Liberdade stop, we unfortunately had no idea where we were going to be heading. We knew the street was on Gonzaga. We asked a couple people if they knew where Gonzaga street was, but they had no idea. So in place of this, we decided to just head down the brightest street in JapanTown from the Metro. As we walked down, Michael in our group asked a man on the street where some good sushi was. He told us to go a couple more blocks down and turn right. We did this. As we looked up on the street sign, it said Thomas. However, it was Thomas Gonzaga. The Gonzaga was in tiny letters. Amazingly, we had arrived at the very street we were looking for. We then located Gombe on the street and decided to eat there.

We walked in and were given a table on the second floor. There was no one else on the second floor. It was completely empty except for us. We also had a little old lady who was our server. She must have thought we were crazy by the end of the night. Four in the group ordered beers and four ordered Sake. She poured the sake into these square cups for everyone to drink out of. She poured them so fast and full they overflowed all over the saucers they were in. The group drank the sake out of the square boxes. Keisha spilled the sake all over her, while Jesse decided to drink from the saucer as well as the square cup. We found out later you weren’t supposed to do that because of evil spirits or something.

Sake bottles, containers, square and round drinking items

We ordered two huge platters of sushi. When we ordered them, the lady seemed like that would not be enough for all eight of us. Well, it was. There were about 21 pieces of sushi, a couple of different maki rolls, octopus and many other interesting pieces for us to try out. It was plenty and it was delicious. We had a great time here. There was lots of drinking, eating and great conversation.

empty sushi platter

Following this we decided to head back towards the Metro. We then stopped at a little street bar/food place for a couple more beers. Here we drank Antarctica beer. One thing to note about the beer: they keep it cooled to -4 degrees celcius. This is very cold. All of the beer goes down very smooth because of this. The Antarctica beer had an interesting label of two penguins. Because of this label, we learned from Deanna that she was given a penguin from her Aunt. This penguin lives at the Brookfield Zoo and is named Azul and has a mate called Guapo. So if you ever visit there, ask the zoo to see Azul and that you know who is responsible for them.

penguin beer - Azul

As we drank, we noticed that part of the group was sitting almost in the street. Their chairs were on the group leaning but if they took any kind of backwards motion they would then be ending up in the street on their backs. We would have hated to use our international health insurance this early in the trip. However, no one ended up falling over drunk – at least here anyway.

At the end of the night, we headed back on the Metro and made it back to our hotel. This was a fun full day in Sao Paulo. We had good company, good food and a good introduction to Sao Paulo and Brazil. We ended the night with a group coming to our room and enjoying a couple more beers and more great conversation. This was a great way to end the night. We were all tired from the day but felt like we had been in Sao Paulo for about a week at this point.

The word of the day: Azul

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Sao Paulo – Day Zero

Sunday was the day that I arrived into Brazil. I had a 10 hour non-stop flight from Chicago to Sao Paulo on United Airlines. The flight left Saturday night at 9:30 and arrived at 10:00am local time in Sao Paulo. The flight was actually very uneventful. I decided to wake up early on Saturday morning so that I would be tired on the flight. I also have a prescription for Ambien in case I needed help sleeping. I took one of those pills to help me get a good nights sleep, and it worked.  One small note, I watched Mall Cop for a portion of the flight. It was one of the movies available to watch. It was ok, but not great.

The flight arrived in Sao Paulo and we went through customs. Again, this was another very uneventful aspect of the trip itself. No questions were asked and I went right through. One good thing was that two other members of my class were on the flight. This meant we had three far a taxi from the airport to the hotel. We could have taken a bus, but the price would have been about the same. It cost us R$90 for the taxi, which was about $30 each. Right now the exchange rate is about R$2 to $1USD. Pretty good I have to say, it makes for easy calculations.

drive into town

After arriving at the hotel, we met up with a few other people from our class. Some interesting things that happened during the check-in process: we did not have a reservation in our names. This was quite a shock because we were expecting to have a reservation. Luckily the hotel had rooms so this was not a problem. We also had 3 people sharing one room. The room is a suite of sorts. It has a separate bedroom with two single beds. We had a third bed requested arrive after several attempts to get one. I am sleeping on the extra bed. It is actually not that bad all things considered. I have slept on worse. The bed didn’t actually arrive until about 9pm at night.

After some getting acclimated to the room, we decided to head out and get some food. We also thought it would be interesting to head out to one of the soccer fields afterwards. We had learned from the cab driver that there was a 4pm soccer match for the Palmeiras. This is one of the soccer teams in Sao Paulo. I looked up in my Fodor’s Sao Paulo & Rio book and located a place called Sujinho. This was an interesting restaurant mainly for the fact that it covered two corners of the intersection it was at. You could eat at either location. We also had learned that at a lot of restaurants, you order dishes for two. This was very helpful. There were six of us at this time. We ordered three plates of food, and we still thought this was too much. We ordered a filet mignon dish, a filet cubano dish and a chicken dish. I am not sure what kind of chicken dish it was. The dishes also came with tons of rice, fried broccoli, fried pineapple, fried banana and french fries. The food was delicious. It ended up costing about R$30 a piece for our first meal. That also included some beer. One thing we didn’t realize was that we some of the beer we ordered was actually non-alcoholic. Lesson learned number one.

fried foods: broccoli, pineapple, banana and meat

After we ate we set out on our journey to find the soccer stadium. This became the big walking adventure of the day. We asked the host at the restaurant where it was. He pointed in a direction and we went that way. We also had a map to help guide us. The host seemed a little surprised that we were actually going to walk. He kept saying taxi taxi. But, being from Chicago, it was only about 3km so we figured we would walk it. So we headed out and started walking. And walking. And walking. At one point we decided to stop and grab a drink.  We went to a little spot on one of the streets and grabbed a drink. Some had water, some had beer and some Gatorade. It was a nice break.

taking a break at a local little shop

As we were walking, we kept asking a few people if we were going on the right track and how long. Each time, they said about 15 minuets and they couldn’t believe we were walking. We thought this was odd that each person was saying 15 minutes, even though they were about 15-20 minutes apart. They also acted like we were on the right track. As we were walking, we came upon a bus terminal and a Metro station. I looked at the map and realized that the Metro station was not the one we were looking for. In fact, it was west and south of where we wanted to go. Instead of walking north, we had been walking west. At this point, we had to make a choice of whether to take a taxi or the Metro since it was right there. Not having taken the Metro yet, we decided to take it and experience Sao Paulo’s subway system.

I wish Chicago’s CTA was as good as the Metro. The Metro is clean, on time, clean, spacious, clean. And, did I mention clean? For a city of almost 15 million people, I was amazed at how well kept the Metro is. People were actually hanging out in the stations, sitting on the stairs. The stations are spacious and flowing. You line up in queues to get on board the train. It is organized. But at the same time, it was fast and like clockwork. We had to make two transfers between the first station and the station with the soccer stadium. We would get off one train, walk to the platform for the next one and it would arrive like it was planned. Almost every 2-3 minutes a new train would show up. It was a great experience. Also, it was R$2.55 a trip, which is about $1.25. how they do it, I will never know.

We arrive at the Barra Funda Metro stop in a short period of time. This stop was huge as it was a transfer point for several rail and subway lines. The soccer stadium was somewhere near this point. By this time, it was already night time as well and so we were now walking in the dark in a new city. Luckily there were six of us walking together. We walked down a couple of streets and were basically lost. We noticed some police and proceeded to ask them for information and directions. They pointed us in the direction of the stadium and said it was a 5-10 minute walk (again with the times) but commented that the game was about to be over and why would we want to go there at this point. One easy answer to this: Loco Americanos!

We started walking and noticed the large stream of people with soccer jerseys on. We knew we were close. Eventually we started to see the lights of the stadium and it was just up around the corner. Large crowds were leaving the area. We found the main entrance to the stadium which at this point was cleared out. Across the street was a huge block party of sorts. Tons of people hanging out drinking beer and eating. Also, there were the street vendors selling shirts and goods. Several of us bought shirts. I bought one as a souvenir. It was very cheap – R$28.

green is their color

While we were standing there, we noticed a large group of younger adults all start running down the street. We thought this was odd, and really didn’t comment on it. We decided it was about time to head to the Metro and make our journey back to the hotel. As we walk back to down this street in front of the soccer stadium, we see the large group of people standing in the street. All of a sudden, they run back through us. Then we see the large group of military police in riot gear following them. We then hear shots, tear gas canisters going off and we almost get into panic mode. Instead of running, we simply push ourselves to the nearest wall and stop. The kids run down the street being chased by the police. The police run by as well, holding more tear gas canisters ready to pull them. Luckily, when they looked at us just standing there, they realized we were not a threat and kept walking by us. We then decided to walk as quickly as possible to get out of this area. My first riot! Yeah!

The only other interesting thing that happened on the way back to the hotel on the Metro was this one kid that we saw. It looked like he had a huge gash on his forehead. Blood was splattered all over his face. We couldn’t tell if it was real or not. It looked real, it looked fake. I saw a blood tear come down from the scar and so believe that it was real. No one seemed to really pay attention or care. He was stopped by a couple police to ask him something. We did not stay and find out. He seemed to be ok and didn’t seem like he needed help. It will always be a mystery.

That was day Zero. It was not our first full day in Sao Paulo, which was Monday.

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