Ouro Preto

I~m actually starting from before Christmas and moving forward. I~m breaking the blogs into smaller ones with a main topic instead of putting it all into one. Trying to be more methodic and neat, what is wrong with me.

I went to a famous town outside of Belo Horizonte called Ouro Preto which means black gold. Minas Gerais, the state of Belo Horizonte is famous for its mines. Minas Gerais actually means general mines.

Ouro is a cool town with cobble streets and has a university there too. There are lots of hills and I got a good workout. When I originally bought the tickets, I was going to leave at 9 and come back at 7 that night. After thinking about it along with the surprise look from my friends when I told them how long I was going to stay there, I decided to change the return bus ticket the day of the trip. I changed it to return at 3 instead of 7 and thought everything was okay, remember what happens when you assume. More about that later.

I get there and start walking and don~t see a map so I~m just wandering around and think, Is this all there is to it. I finally find a guy who volunteers to show me around. He~s got on some kind of vest which seems official to me. He shows me around some of the churches which has a ot of things made of gold. Pretty cool stuff. He also shows me a good place for lunch. It had cabbage, rice and gravy and something else that I really liked. I felt like I was at Mom~s house. It was soooo good.

I hustle to look at a couple more churches before my bus leaves. I probably should have given myself another hour but I wanted to avoid work traffic coming back. Oh well. So, I am walking back to the rodoviaria and notice that when the woman who changed my return ticket made it a ticket going from Belo Horizonte to Ouro Preto instead of making it from Ouro Preto to Belo Horizonte.

I got worried because now I have to try to explain what happened in my broken Portuguese. I get up to the window and I try to explain and show her the tickets. I have two tickets to the same place, why would I do that. The woman at the bus station made an error. The woman in Ouro Preto said I need to buy another ticket. I told her, I don~t want to buy another ticket. I already bought one. She doesn~t understand so I get out of line to look up some words (not curse words) to better explain my situation. I get back in line and use my new words and they still don~t help. She calls her manager and within 5 minutes he issues me a new ticket and I get on the bus just a few minutes before it left.