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!