curitiba, here we come

Hey all you blog followers of mine (by the way, why dont yall ever leave me comments on my blog? i dont even know whos readin this stuff...)

i am writing to say that im leaving for curitba tomarrow and will be on the road and sleeping in settlements and stuff for 3 days...and then i dont know if my host family will have a computer. So...basically i dont know when ill be updating this next.

peace out.

It´s Carnaval!

Hey yall, so before I get to Carnaval, a little update on everything else. Spent the week doing case studies and Wednesday night everyone went to a soccer game (Sao Paulo vs Columbia) although I did not attend. Thursday night was family night at our house and Flavia had over her brother Leonardo and her mom. She made a huge middle eastern meal with falafel, pita, baba ganoush, and loveliness. Friday was evaluation day of the program and then people were ready to get out and do some carnaval!

So me and the others who were in the parade showed up at our meeting point and got our costumes which were RIDICULOUS. Unfortunately, at this point i have no pictures but when other people post them ill put some here. The theme of our samba school was "precious jewels" so for some reason our costumes were gladiators? i dont know. So we put them on and they were huuuge so we could only fit 3 people in each cab to go to the parade. We got there and it was just chaos. Theres people everywhere selling beer and water, chicks wearing barely anything, people in owl, bear, you name it costumes. So we walked forever to get to the place where they line us up (and meanwhile, these costumes were HOT). Then after being interviewed by all these tv stations who just love that americans are there, we had to walk forever to do the line up cuz we were in the first school. But the line up was really long because each school of samba takes one hour to parade through and there are 20 parts to each school...and we were number 7. Lined up and waited forever, then started moving and waited forever at the beginning of it. Schools have to start right on time (and finish at pretty much exactly one hour) because they get points for it and this is a competition. We started walking and singing the song for our school even though we didnt really know the words. WE couldnt even really see either cuz the helmets we were wearing were so heavy and covered our eyes! We were trying to spot the other IHPers in the crowd but turns out their bus took 2 hours getting lost and getting there so they didnt even see us in teh parade! Ergo, I have no pictures or proof that I was in this parade. But..whatevs. At the end of walking we chucked out costuems off (and some of us kinda just chucked em...they were really big and too much to send home) and went to go find our classmates. The rest of the parade we hugn out in the bleachers and just took photos. We actually ended up leaving early at 4 in the morning before all 6 samaba schools had gone. yikes.

dudes were everywhere selling beer

i think this schools theme was the nutcracker or somethin...each school has its own theme but they seem to be loosely interpreted

this is raphael. Hes one of our country coordinators and he tells us about all the cool stuff to do, like concerts, soccer games, hipster bars, etc. he bought this owl for a teacher of his who loves owls.



on each float there are crazy people dancing with only these 2 poles to hang onto. i was kinda hopin someone would fall off one.






this is how many girls in the parade looked....or they were wearing even less clothes. no full on nudity at sao paulo carnaval but definitely saw lots of boobies.

theyre worth thousands of words

this is me, my roommate gabi, and the lovely Flavia. She is such a busy 29 year old but she takes care of us anyway!

so this is me brinin the karoake house down with "Welcome to the Jungle" by Guns N Roses. Maybe not the most attractive picture, but who said Axl Rose was attractive?

Joanna busted in on my Welcome to the Jungle. Shes pretty good too.

Me and Joanna busted out "Doctor Jones" by Aqua, a good ol 5th grade favorite. Dave is pointing at us like were crazy cuz he cant even believe this shit.

This is the favela at Diadema, the one wayyy worse than the original ones we were taken to. All these houses are on stilts above this really dirty river and the houses look like theyre about to fall down.

Some guys bustin out hip hop at Casa de Hip Hop

This is a Carnaval Samba outfit (that we saw on display at Vai Vai). Also the costume Ill be wearing in the parade. Just kidding!

Oh yeah, not that it matters to anyone but my parents cuz theyre the only ones who call me...Brazil fell back an hour for daylight savings so...now Idaho is only 4 hours different.

It´s Bigger Than Hip Hop

Alright, so remember that talent show i wasnt going to be able to sing at? Well, my tear-jerking rendition of "Sweet Child o Mine" by Guns N Roses brought the house down enough that i won!...and also my name was 1 of 6 put into a winners cup and I happened to be drawn. But sick! My prize is that a Samba school is giving me one of their outfits and I will also be on their float (the first in line) in the parade! Guess Ill have to work on my samba moves.

Unfortunately, my singing karoake and g n r resulted in me losing my voice for all of Sunday and only talking in whispers. Ergo, I did pretty much nothing all day.

On Monday (yesterday) we visited Diadema, a city just outside Sao Paulo. We first visited some governmental place where the mayor of Diadema talked to us. As part of a new security measure, they have 42 cameras installed throughout the city in order to spot crime and they took us to the room with all the videos. Creepy...big brother is watching. Then we visited a favela which was NOTHING like the ones we saw before. These are the ones for real, made of random pieces of wood put together and on stilts since they sit above a brown, trash filled river. These things seriously look like they could fall at any moment. But we looked inside some peoples houses and they actually are better than i thought-flat screen tv, play station 2? People who live in favelas arent necessarily poor, the housing market just sucks so much theyre forced to live there.

We then went to this place called Restaurant Popular which charges only 1 Real (about 40 cents) for lunch there so that people can come eat who cant usually afford to. We all ate lunch there and learned about how the government subsidizes the restaurant and who eats there.

Next we visited a health care center. Brazil has public, free health care...unlike the U.S., what a surprise. They have a very systematic approach to it too. All 39 municipalities of Diadema are divided into a certain amount of areas which then have 6 zones within them and each zone has a health care center that one can go to (for free). Nobody goes without health care here if they need it.

The last place we visited was siiick. Its called Casa de Hip Hop (House of Hip Hop). Its an organization that provides kids with a place to go and do/learn hip hop as well as learn about African culture and do graffiti. We watched kids do graffiti while we were there as well as some hip hop/break dancing they did especially for us. Good times! Sorry i have no pictures... i didnt bring my camera. But theres some other kids with blogs that you could check out who do a better job of that than me. This is aarons blog, this is daves blog (he doesnt update that often, but hes concise and funny), this is yeseuls blog (shes actually just doing a blog describing each person on the trip in detail, funny no?), and this is kiras blog...which is actually only about food. So feel free to check those out.

Last night after my long day, Flavia took me and Gabi to a vegetarian restaurant and this cranky vegan got some much needed protein.

Rainy days

This week in Sao Paulo has actually for once not been ungodly hot, but "cold" (for Brazilian standards) and rainy. At the beginning of the week we all visited downtown in three seperate groups and saw a homeless social center created by the homeless under an underpass, a recycling program created by the homeless, also under an underpass, and a condemned building full of people about to illegally get evicted so that the building can be torn down which happens a lot in Sao Paulo.

A few days later we had a field trip to a gated community. This place was hella swank, like, people buy apartments in the buildings that take up the whole floor. And the swimming pools had peacocks next to them and there was everything anyone might ever need right in this place that looked like a fancy resort.

The next day, for a comparison, we went to a favela. Favelas are slums and are illegal but in actuality are where the majority of Sao Paulo residents live. They became pretty well known after seeing the movie City of God if any of you have seen that....we werent in bad places though. There are actually "nicer" looking ones that they kind of take tourists to so thats where we were. Mine was called Heliopolis and we saw a bunch of things this organization UNAS has brought to the area like a library, a sports center, a radio station (we were on the radio for a minute!), a day care center, and a school for adolescents. UNAS is made up of locals who took it into their own hands to make the favelas a better place. In actuality, favelas arent that dangerous because drug traffickers run everything and they wont let anything happen cuz they dont want the cops to come.

Thursday night there was a party for all of Mackenzie, the college were studying at here. So of course all of us IHPers went and there were sooo many people! It was held at a club that had a normal bar upstairs and then downstairs was this dark, dance party room. Oddly enough, no one in Sao Paulo dances? We were the only ones dancing in this dance party room and people thought we were crazy. A kid even came up to one of the girls on the program the next day and asked if she was one of "the americans who was crazy last night!" yikes.

Last night, Friday, a bunch of us went to a karaoke place that has private rooms for large parties, such as ours. There were about 20 of us just beltin it out. Good good times. Today is a dinner for all of the families and students....and a talent competition I guess. I was going to rock out on guitar but unfortuantely I seem to have lost my voice from the karoake last night. No prize for me!

Beaches and Buses

So this weekend was amazing and amazingly jam packed. On Friday after class everyone was kind of panicing about what beach they wanted to go to because some plans had been made to go to Ilhabela but some people were backing out because it´s so far away. Some other kids, namely Jacob, David and Raf were going to go to this other beach, Guaruja, that is only about an hour away so I went with them and booked it to the bus terminal. Some other girls, Logan, Tiye and Joanna wanted to come too but we couldnt find them at the bus station and after waiting around a while, we just left. We got to the bus station at Guaruja and found the girls! Can you believe it? Its the magic of IHP, I tell ya. Seriously, there have been some beyond hopeful situations in which the magic of IHP united us-it exists. Anyway, they had met a surfer guy on the bus who had said not to go to the beach at Guaruja we were originally planning on going to...cuz its really sketchy I guess. And he also said some of us kids could stay at his place (which turned out to be a 7 bedroom bachelor pad). Four of the kids went to stay at his place and me, Raf and Jacob stayed at a hotel.

We got to the beach and even though it was around 6, jumped right in! This is us just after...sharing some drinks on the beach and appreciating that we were not in class and that we were instead on a beach in freakin Brazil. It was so beautiful and nice! We grabbed some dinner and then spent the night walking the beach/going into the ocean. The next morning we hit the beach again and it was CROWDED. Aside from the beach-goers, there were hundreds of people selling drinks, food, hats, dresses, DVDs, pool toys, anything. Logan joked that we could have put our umbrellas on their sides and built a house out of the stuff people were selling. That is probably true. We all spent the day in the water and under the umbrella...but unfortunately we all pretty much got burned, me the worst (cuz im the palest!) We headed home and passed outttt.

The next day, Sunday, all of us went to Anne´s house cuz shes from Brazil and lives about an hour away. This is it although she has much more land with a lake, ponies, fishing, a pool, and just lots of grass and trees!

Her parents made us an ungodly amount of food. It was a BBQ which means that they had their cooks continuely making every type of meat imaginable for the entire time we were there (like...7 hours?) Thats a lot of food. And they had fruit, fried yucca, vegetables, rice, a bowl of candy, peanuts, other nuts, palm hearts and tomato, potato chips, and various alcoholic drinks passed around that were yum yum good.

They had also rented an inflatable soccer field that you put soap and water on to make it slippery. That shit was hard! My brain felt like it got a little knocked around after playing Elana and Gabi (my roommate...gotta get that aggression toward her out!). We also played some ultimate frisbee (Michael playing with one hand while the other held a beer and cigarette-such a team player!), visited the lake, ponies and baby cows and generally lounged around. It was a much needed break.

This is the pool which the majority of time was spent in. More sunburns! Even kids who have never gotten sunburned in their lives are getting burned here. The sun in Sao Paulo is so strong.

This is Nik´hit, our trustees fellow. He did IHP a few years ago and is now serving as the go-between for students and faculty/teachers. We basically come to Nikhit with our problems and he is like, the coolest guy in the world so...it works out.

And this is one of Anne´s ponies. Tis all!

Carnaval and Samba!

Oi! To begin, these arent even my pictures, these are courtesy of Aaron...who will never read this blog most likely. But thanks, Aaron! Anyway, yesterday we had a speaker on the history of Brazil then P and D class (urban politics and development) with Eve. Had a quick lunch and then went to city hall where a representative from the PT (Workers Party) talked to us for a while about the history of the party. Then we were "lucky" enough to watch a city council meeting for an hour....I gotta say that I could have done without watching a bunch of people speaking portugueuse run around on the floor of the meeting room. We were up in bleachers watching them and it must have been the first time pretty much anyone has ever wanted to watch so the film crew (the film it like C-span in the U.S.) kept filming us cuz theres 35 of us and then they interviewed Jacob (who speaks portuguese) about...politics? I dont really know. We were supposed to be done at 3 but the day ended up going til like, 5. This is a definite reoccurance on IHP, no day EVER ends when they say it will. But thats IHP. So we didnt have class today til 2 so everyone decided to go out last night, which kind of ended up pretty chaotic. Everyone had decided to go to one neighborhood, but then Raphael who is one of our country coordinators and also a cool, hip, young Brazilian was going to a cool, hip, brazilian bar in a different neighborhood so everyone was all split up and some people have phones and some dont....bleh! I ended up going to the bar Raphal suggested and it was so fun! It was totally packed and a total hipster bar like some place I would hang out in the U.S. And its so funny cuz everyone can tell were american just by looking at us so all these people were talking to us in their broken english. Its weird that foreigners want to talk to us! It has to be Obama cuz everyone here LOVES Obama and thus, vicariously loves us. Unfortunately two kids jackets were stolen from the coat cubbies at the club but...hey, this is Sao Paulo. Of course your coat got stolen. (Sao Paulo is kind of a sketchy city if you havent gathered from my previous posts). I...dont really know what this is, but it represents SP pretty well.

Beautiful!

I think this must be capoeria but Im not sure since I didnt take the picture. Capoeria is like...street dance fighting.

Today we had a girl talk to us about Carnaval which we are all so psyched for. We learned the history and then she showed us how to samba. Were all pretty bad. We were given a scavenger hunt list for Carnaval that we have to have completed by the time we get to Curitiba. Some things we can bring and some things we just have to have proof we saw....like the most feathery outfit or getting on one of the carnival parade floats. We took a bus to the most well known School of Samba in the city, Vai Vai, and learned their history, saw a bunch of crazy carnaval outfits and then got to watch their rehearsal in the street which is like a party. Theyre so good that people come to watch their rehearsals and the streets closed off and theres food booths with sausages and beer and its just a crazy party. Theyre rehearsing cuz Carnaval is in 2 weeks and if you dont know, Carnaval has evolved into a competition of various samba schools and theres a prize for the winners. Originally, Carnaval came from Europe when the elite would have a big feast and wear masks so the costumes people wear reflect the kinds of costumes the europeans wore.

Thats all for now, bom noite!

ive been workin...like a dog.

So IHP days are so jam packed that it is amazing i even get on this blog sometimes. So on Monday, our first day of school here in Sao Paulo we had neighborhood day. My neighborhood happened to be Berrini, which isnt even on the map they all gave us. By the way, Sao Paulo is the biggest city you could possibly ever imagine. Maps do no justice and they have no idea how many people live here but estimates are about 11 million. And public transportation is very poorly set up so to get to my off-the-map neighborhood, we had to take about 3 buses and a metro...which took about 2 hours. The neighborhood is the new financial district so we walked along the main road which is all tall, modern buildings housing corporations like Nestle and At&t. But behind these buildings are the fevelas that used to occupy the area (fevelas are slums, shantytowns) but those were mostly destroyed to make room for the corporations and the ones that are left are "hidden" by the buildings. Public transportation in this particular neighborhood is almost nonexistent since business people either use cars or helicopters (no joke, helicopter is a legit way to get around the city). We walked for miles in the hot sun taking pictures for our presentation and at the other end of the road (maybe...5 miles?) we took a train, then a bus, and then about 4 metro lines to get home. Geez!

Today we had to do our neighborhood presentations and watch other peoples´. Then we had two guest speakers who talked about transportation in Sao Paulo. Everyone drives here which is a problem since the roads arent getting bigger but people are buying no cars. Hours are wasted driving to work and such and the metro/buses are illogical and almost impractical since they barely even cover the main part of Sao Paulo. Then we were divided into groups and given random addresses on Paulista Avenue to go to and report on what we saw there. We were also required to talk to 5 people about what they were doing on Paulista at that time, where they live, etc. So my group went out and we first ended up at a cultural center that has a theater and a gallery and on top is corporate offices. Then we ended up at MAST, a renowned musuem. Well actually, half the group went inside and half of us talked to the people hanging out outide the museum since that seems to be where artists and general vagabonds hang out. We talked to a guy selling his poetry and then we talked to some crazy hippie traveling across Brazil selling jewelry who offered us a joint. Not today man! I dont even know how we talked to him since he spoke no english and we speak pretty much no portuguese. Then things were getting late and we had to go to our random meeting place (these were all just addresses we were blindly given). The building was a kind of cultural center and the elevators sucked so some of us took the stairs....all the way to the 15th floor! Woo, work out for the day. The 15th floor was the roof and there was a cafe and tables and japanese style sitting and stuff. What a freakin relief. So we talked about our experiences on Paulista. Then chaos ensued as everyone realized that we were all together and could potentially go out together...but it was only 6 and some people had to go home for dinner and some people wanted to go to bars and...bleh. My roommate was hungry though and we only have one key so we went home...which is where I am now.

Oh yeah, sorry for lack of pictures. Its actually kind of dangerous to walk around Sao Paulo with a camera, let alone a really nice digital one. So I dont take it out that much. And it takes a while to upload pictures so...

Hardcore Brazil

Today me, Gabi (my roommate) and Flavia walked around the city a bit. We went to the Japanese district (there are LOTS of Japanese in Brazil) and walked around a flea market they were having there. I got a new purse and we ran into some other IHPers. We got lunch at a por quilo place which just means its buffet style and they charge by the kilo. It was pretty good Asian stuff-spring rolls, yaki soba, tofu, veggies. Then we headed to the organization Flavia works with for world peace and anti-violence. We met her friend Marco who drove us to a town just outside Sao Paulo for an activist hardcore show that they had been asked to speak at. There were all these kids there that looked just like all the kids I hung out with in high school wearing band t-shirts of bands I listen to, and wearing piercings and tattoos and stuff. Just like Im in high school again! We waited about 3 hours while they were setting up since these kind of shows often take some time. This guy Joel started talking to us (though he didnt speak any english so flavia was doing a lot of translating). Then he went and told everyone we were Americans so everyone wanted to talk to us...and then we went inside and one girl told me her friend wanted to kiss me and Im like...uh...no...i dont speak portugueuse...uh... Then the music started and after a little playing Flavia and Marco got up to speak. Some kids started talking to me about what "rock" I listen to and we talked about Guns N Roses and Nirvana and stuff. Then it turned out my buddy Joel had gotten pretty drunk and was coming on to me pretty hard. and would not take no for an answer! So Marco, who is probably in his 40s was trying to convince him that he was my boyfriend so he would go away and all these kids want to talk to us about Obama and then Flavia is just like, time to go! Oh Brazil, good times.