Florianopolis

I just got back from my journey to south of Brazil and didn~t have much time while traveling to update and put pictures up.

My first stop was Florianopolis. This is one of the places that I really wanted to visit because they have 42 beaches there. I have to say this was my favorite place of all that I visited. I think it was more because of the people that I met in my hostel.

To top it off the bus ride was 18 hours from Rio, yes...18 hours. When I saw the schedule at the station it said around 9 hours. I left around 2 or 3 pm on a Thursday and arrived around 9 am the next morning. I was so tired of being on that bus. Even though the seats recline, still it was 18 hours on a bus. It stopped every 3 or 4 hours to eat so at least it gave me a break.

This whole travel down South was a new experience for me. I wanted to try out hostels because a lot of people I have met in Brazil from other countries have used hostels for cheap stays. For those of you that don~t know like I never knew before, a hostel is a house with several rooms that someone rents out. Usually they~ll put 2 or 4 beds in a room and you share with strangers. I thought it would be an interesting experience and it really was.

The hostel in Floripa (nickname for Florianopolis) had a ton of great reviews so I booked it online. The guys in my room were really nice. One guy was kind of arrogant but he was a nice guy. The hostel was beside a lake so there was a place to take windsurfing classes. Man, it was exhausting falling down and getting back up. It was a lot of fun though. By the end of the class I was doing decent. It was only $R20 for the class which wasn~t bad but if you wanted another class it was going to be $R80. Nah, that~s okay. I liked it but not that much.

The next day I went with some friends to a beach and took surf lessons for about an hour and a half. It was a lot of fun, I enjoyed this much more than the windsurfing. By the end of class I felt like a pro.

After surfing, we went to these sand dunes and did sandboarding because it was right beside where we parked the car. I had heard about it and wanted to try it. You basically have a snowboard with straps for your feet and you climb up these sand dunes and strap on the board and do down. I wiped out a few times but made it all the way down several times as well. Climbing back up was the worst part. You rent the boards for an hour, they won~t let you rent for less than that. After 30 minutes, I was ready to go. We stayed close to an hour but my trips up the dune were fewer the last 30 minutes.

We went to some place one night where a band was playing songs from the US. They played Achey Breakey Heart by Billy Ray Cyrus. I thought, you have to be joking with me. I~m in Brazil and listening to this, something is wrong with this picture.

We also went to a place another night where they were playing samba music and it was a lot of fun. I made some good friends there, it was really sad to leave. Some people you just make a good connection with. One girl said that it felt like we were a family. One of my roommates was a guy named Chris from France. He was funny because he didn~t like other people from France, especially from the bigger cities.