Christmas in Sao Paulo

I went to hang out with fellow teacher that I met in Rio. She moved to Sao Paulo and her birthday is actually on Christmas. She~s from London and since both of us were away from home for Christmas for the first time we made a pact to hang out for Christmas.

She had a friend that invited her to spend Christmas with him and his family. The bus ride from Belo to Sao Paulo was supposed to be about 8 hours but it ended up being about 9 or 9 and a half. The bus broke down and we had to get a new bus. I heard these guys talking in the back and I thought they were arguing. Next thing I notice the bus is going really slow and parks on the side of the road. Another bus pulls around us and stops too. People start getting off and I~m waiting for the driver to say something, like I would understand anyway.

Finally he comes on and I basically understand that the bus that pulled over is going to Sao Paulo too and has room for 4 or 5 more people. Another bus would be coming shortly. I decide to wait a little bit and let the others have the other bus. The other bus comes in about 15 or 20 minutes and I have a lot more room. The bus isn~t near as packed as the one I was on.

I meet my friend at the bus station and we use the metro to go back to the apartment. The metro is so huge and complicated, I~m glad I don~t live there. I think they have 23 lines of metro and train where Rio has 2. 2 is better and simpler for me.

We meet her friend on the way to the apt and he is ready to drive us to his family which is about an hour and a half from where we are and is still Sao Paulo. We get there and his family is super nice. He speaks English but no one else in his family does. Well, his wife speaks a little bit but not much.

The tradition is to wait to eat dinner until midnight, officially on Christmas day. I eat a lot, I mean alot. They were glad to feed to me and I was glad to eat. Kids opened presents, there were no presents for the adults. Then we went to sleep. I had a mattress on the floor which was comfortable. I found out the guy and his family are Christians. His dad is an Assembly of God pastor. Pretty cool.

The next day we eat breakfast and then go to the wife~s family and eat lunch, which I~m still full but as I feel it is my duty I go ahead and eat anyway. The wife~s dad has some Christian music which I listen to and I recognize one guy and then he says he loves Jimmy Swaggart~s music. Haven~t heard that name in a long time. He has a ton of songs from Jimmy Swaggart. So interesting to hear Jimmy Swaggart on Christmas in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Just not something I would have expected.

I get back to the apt Christmas night and am really tired and full. My London friend and I kept joking, Did you know today was Christmas. Because we really didn~t feel like it was Christmas at all being away from family. It was really good but really different.

While in Sao Paulo I went to some museums: soccer, art and the Portuguese language. I~m all cultured I guess now. They still had some Christmas lights up which were pretty cool. We met another friend of my friend and she brought along a friend. We ended up eating at a pizza buffet the next night. I think I ate around 20-25 pieces of pizza, including dessert pieces. Needless to say, everyone in attendance was impressed with my eating skills. I didn~t feel so well afterward though.

My next post will be about New Year and another long bus ride.

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.

Missing some Thanksgiving

As I sit here I'm thinking about all the food I normally would have woofed down by now: turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing and sweet potato casserole and many other things I can't remember. Man, I really miss it along with the good family time. It's weird thinking about Thanksgiving at home because here it is just another day. It's about 86 degrees too.

I probably walked at least 4 hours today, no joke. I have lost probably 5-10 pounds since I've moved to Belo. I had already lost 10 or so in Rio but I'm walking much more here. My pants look like Bozo the clown pants on me.

I went to drop off my resume to two more schools and it turned out much different than I thought. Both schools had several locations but each had a place on a main street that I know. I usually take the metro and can get there no problem. I didn't pay attention to the building number because I had no idea where the numbers start close to the metro.

When I got downtown, I noticed the street numbers started in the 700s and the buildings I was looking for was in the 4000s. Each block isn't an even 100, sometimes each block is like 733-786 so I don't know how many blocks it was but it took me well over an hour to get there. When I get there, one of the schools didn't accept resumes in person, only on the internet. The other school closed that location but it was still showing on the internet.

The only school I dropped off my resume to was one that was handing out fliers as advertisements for students. I got a call from a school that I had dropped off my resume a couple of weeks ago for an interview tomorrow. I got an email from a school and have another interview next week with them. I also got a call from a guy whose mother I met at church. He's an English teacher here and gave me the name of a school I haven't heard of and he said he may give me a couple of private students that he didn't have time for. It was a productive day but not in the way I had imagined.

While I was way up in the 4000 range of blocks, I saw some signs of places to view the city. One is called Praca do Papai which is a little park that was built when the Pope came in the 80s. It's a neat place with a great view. I asked someone where Praca do Popeye was because that is how I thought it was pronounced. She said, do you mean Praca do Papa. Yeah, that's the one.

While I was way up there and had already walked an hour and a half, I see a sign for another place with an even higher view of the city. I thought, why the heck not. So I walked another 20 or 30 minutes to get up there. Really cool to see.

I walked back and finally got home not long ago. On the day when I normally eat so much I can hardly see straight, I walked so much I feel like I've lost another pound or two. Oh, the irony.

I would love to call my family and hear about all the wonderful things they've eaten but my modem won't pick up wireless internet so I'm having to plug directly into the router in the main room where everyone is and have no privacy. My brother is looking for a cheap laptop for me so he can mail to me. This one has other issues as well.

Oh yeah, the English pastor talked to me Tuesday night after service and said the Pastor wants to do a simultaneous translation of the services on Sunday and she was checking to see if I wanted to try and help out. I really need to work on my Portuguese but I'll give it a good Falkville try, for sure.

Well, Happy Thanksgiving to my peeps and family!

New Adventures In Getting Lost in Belo

Finally got settled in. I'm renting a room from a lady and her husband. They have 4 other guys who live here but I've rarely seen them. It's a good ways outside the central part of the city, at least without my own transportation. If I had my own vehicle, it would be very easy to get to the central part of town.

I have my own bathroom and it's very airy. It doesn't have air conditioning but I really don't need it. I thought I would but it feels really good in my room. It's in a house that has a front porch and a place in the back, not a back yard because it has all bricks. They have a clothes line out there where I can hang my laundry. It reminds me of Mom having a clothes line when I was a kid. The lady was excited to know that I'm a Christian. She is also and so is her family. She took me by her family's house which isn't too far on Sunday and introduced me to them. They were extremely nice as well.

The only negative is that it's so far away from the two churches that I visited. A friend that I met through a friend of mine in Rio skyped me Sunday to tell me he would pick me up and take me to church if I wanted. Sure nuff. It was really good praise and worship and the people were so friendly. Afterward, he invited me over to his family's house and they had some leftovers for us and it was so good.

Yesterday the lady I'm renting from took me downtown to get a phone. For some reason, the phone I had in Rio won't work here. The electronics in general are very expensive in Brazil and I didn't want to pay a lot. She told me about a place where they have a lot of cheap things. My kind of place. It was huge! It didn't look big from the outside but it seemed like it kept going on the inside. I got a phone that looked like a blackberry with fm radio, mp3 player, tv, camera and 2gb of memory for $R55 which is less than $40 in the US. I love that place, I'll be going back for sho.

Today my mission was to drop off my resume to some schools and get some business cards made. I wanted to take the metro because that's what I was used to in Rio. It doesn't go to as many places as it does in Rio but I wanted to try it out. I definitely got my walking in. I got lost so many times I think I set a record. I was able to find the place where a friend told me I could get some cards made, which are pretty awesome. A little old lady walked with me to the place because I had asked her for directions. Very nice! I got lost another time and I was asking for directions and a lady overheard me asking and told the lady that she would show me because she was going that way. They are so friendly here, it's great.

A guy at the place where I had my cards made took one of my cards and said he was interested in class along with a couple of others. The one school I finally found said she isn't hiring but said she would pass my resume on to other schools she knew and if she had students who wanted classes at work or in their house she would send to me. She was very helpful.

I went to a mall close to where I live with the purpose of asking some of the stores if I could leave my business cards on the counter. I was nervous about this because I really don't like going up to people and asking for something. I had to do this even if I got shot down to prove to myself that I could. God is so good! Every person I asked was very nice and allowed me to do it. One guy who worked at a restaurant lived in Connecticut for 12 years and said his boss was wanting someone to teach the employees English and was wanting this guy to do it. He said he would pass my card along to his boss. It was a very positive experience today except for getting lost and walking around for about 6 hours but it's part of the learning curve.

Every day is a new adventure now. I like the new challenge. I feel like I'm in the right place.

P.S. One thing I forgot to mention about sleeping in the bus station was when I was walking around, probably after Barney Fife woke me up, I was charging my phone. As I was standing there, I heard some whistling. It was a familiar tune but I couldn't place it. Finally it dawned on me, it was an old hymn I heard growing up "Are You Washed In The Blood of The Lamb?". I kept listening because I thought that it couldn't possibly be but even when it got to the chorus it followed the same tune. I looked around but I couldn't see anyone whistling. There weren't that many people there so it shouldn't have been hard to see somebody whistling. Besides, how many times do you hear an old hymn being whistled at 3 am in a bus station in Rio de Janeiro. I'm not sure because it was my first time. Just thought it was an interesting thing to share.

Sleeping in the Bus Terminal

I`m sitting in a bus terminal as I write this. I bought a ticket to move to Belo Horizonte this past week and told the guy I wanted to leave 12:30 am Nov. 5 because I wanted to get there in the morning and have all day to get adjusted to my new surroundings and go to the English service tonight at the church I am interested in.

A friend of mine came with me to the terminal and I go through the gates early and the bus that is in the slot that mine is supposed to be in just left. I showed a guy by the buses my ticket and he said, your ticket is for 12:30 pm instead of 12:30 am. I was pretty ticked because I thought I confirmed with the guy at the ticket office.

My option is to either go back home at 1 am and pay $R60 round trip for a cab ride home and back on Saturday or sleep in the terminal. Lately I`ve been looking for new adventure so I opted for sleeping in the bus terminal. Not sure if it was the wise decision.

The chairs are a slab of metal with legs and a bar in between each seat so you can`t spread out. I laid down on the cold concrete floor and this birdhead security guard hits my leg and tells me go get up. I didn`t know lying on the floor was a security issue.

I maybe slept two hours on and off throughout the night. I found a bench in another part of the terminal that was made of wood, a little more comfortable than cold steel and it didn`t have a divider so I could stretch out. Wouldn`t you know it that birdhead security guard comes over again and bumps me and tells me to get up. It`s a good thing he couldn`t understand what I said. I`m like, come on dude. There is hardly anyone here and no one is exactly fighting for a place on the bench. Oh well, here`s to my option for a new adventure.

It`s at least close to time to leave now. It feels like I`ve been here since April. On to my new home.

Hang Gliding in Rio de Janeiro

Well, I finally did it. The Wednesday before I leave Rio I went hang gliding which I've been wanting to do for a long time. I've attached a few pics but I have a couple of videos and more pics on facebook.

The weather hasn't been good for the past few weeks when my friends from church could go. I had been praying for good weather. We were planning on going Sunday but when I called to confirm the guy said they weren't doing flights because the winds weren't good. I was disappointed but glad that they didn't want to just make some quick money and were taking precautions.

I started praying and put it down on my prayer list for good weather today because it's a holiday here and people from church could go. This morning was a little cloudy but I believed it would be a great day and the clouds starting breaking up the closer we got to the time to go.

The owner of this company has been doing this for 29 years and took Curt Cobain from Nirvana years ago. He was a very relaxed and reassuring guy. My instructions lasted less than a minute - bite your lip and run like heck. Not really but not too far off. He said to have one hand in this rope attached to my jacket and the other on his back. He said to just look at the horizon and run when he said run, that's it.

When it got to be my turn I tried not to look down, only at the horizon. It actually worked. I just started running and when we left the ramp it was just smooth. I felt like Superman. My brother John would love this. At one point as we were making a turn you could see Sugarloaf mountain an I could also see Christ the Redeemer in the distance. It was pretty awesome!

This was more than just hang gliding for me. I don't know if I told many or any about this story but I was reading a book that had inspired me to take action for this journey in the first place. I had been looking at language schools in different countries and for some reason Rio kept coming back to me. I was reading the 4 Hour Work Week on the way back from my wonderful Aunts in Mississippi when I read a chapter and it started with a guy going hang gliding in Rio. The whole premise of the story was that risks aren't as scary once you take them.

When I read that, I felt like Rio was the place that I needed to go. I still remember the moment riding in the car when I read this. So for me to do this was a big deal to come to the place where someone's story had inspired me to launch out and do what I wanted but was scared to do. Just like the hang gliding, the risk of coming to Rio hasn't been as scary since I've taken the step.

I'm moving to another city for the rest of my time here, called Belo Horizonte. It's the same city I've visited a couple of times. The scenery isn't as nice but the people are great. I think I've said before how they remind me of Southerners.

Lots of Stuff

All my classes were canceled today so I thought I would catch you up on stuff. It's been a while since I've updated anything. Let's start back at the earliest thing, my birthday. I went to Belo Horizonte with a buddy from church to visit his friends and my friends now. I met them the last time I went there and they really liked me and so did their dog, or my leg anyway. Just good people, they remind me of southern folk.

We got there Saturday and went to a different church that my buddy wanted to visit. It's a different church than they attend. It's much smaller, only 30,000 members. They had a young adult service that was really cool. It was long like all services but it really held my attention. A preacher would come up and read a scripture and talk a bit and then people would come up and act out the verse he had talked about. It was really, really cool. They also had some street dancers do a couple of numbers. I felt like getting up there with them and doing the worm, my only break dance move, but I refrained myself.

We ate a meal when we got back with cheese fondu, meat and bread. Really good! The next day the wife woke up really early and blew up red and white balloons because they know I'm a big Alabama fan. She also printed off the Alabama logo off the internet and gave me a CD of my favorite Brazilian Christian artist, Fernandinho. (Side note: He used to be a truck driver and not a good person. His wife started going to church and one night he got angry at her and got a gun and was going to shoot her and she cried out to God to help her and the gun wouldn't fire. He ran out and got in his truck and kept thinking about what happened and came to a church that was still in service and surrendered his life to God.)

Before we had lunch on my birthday the wife wanted to say a few things and my buddy interpreted and she said that when they first met me that they invited me into their house because it was the Christian thing to do but now they invited me because they feel that God put me in their life and many nice things like that. Then the husband prayed and thanked God for me and asked God to bless me with a great wife and for his blessing on my life. I'm not an emotional person but I told them after the prayer the only thing I could say was "Thank You" because words couldn't say how much I appreciated it but the real reason was I didn't know if a tear of two might sneak out, of course I could have blamed it on allergies.

I actually got a couple of birthday cards which was a great surprise. A lady from my office at Blue Cross bought a card and had people sign it and another friend from Blue Cross mailed me one. It really did my heart good. I really miss the people that I worked with. When you're somewhere for almost 11 years you build a lot of good relationships.

I also got another care package from home last week. It had some Christmas presents in it which I've been told not to open, but what they don't know won't hurt them. I actually haven't eaten all the oatmeal cream pies yet nor the swiss cake rolls. I think it's some sort of record for me. I've been feasting for the past few days.

Oh yeah, weirdest thing so far. A week or two ago on Sunday night I hear this really loud music outside and I think,"Oh, it's some sort of street party." So I decide to go outside and see what's going on. I go outside and the first thing I see is a guy with his arm around another guy. The first thought in my mind was,"I think the guy is hurt and his friend his holding him up." Not so much. It was a gay parade in Copacabana. I start looking around and seeing all kinds of crazy things, things you don't see in Falkville. It doesn't take me long to figure out what I've stumbled into and go back to my room. My buddy from church calls me and said he and his brother are going to get some ice cream so I said sure because it would be good to get away from the area for a little bit. I go to the Metro and the line is all the way out to the street. I've never seen it like that before. I then decide it's better to stay home. I wanted to go back and take a shower. The paper the next day said 1.5 million people were in Copacabana for it. Craziness!