Sunday, March 13, 2011

My Thoughts on Brazil


Brazil is very different from Ohio. Everything looks different including the cars. It is just weird how cars look so much different. On our roads you find big SUV's everywhere but here you only find a pickup trucks and small cars. You will see an occasional bigger car like a Honda mid size car. It looks huge compared to the little cars and seems like it could crush them. Most cars run on an alcohol based gasoline and are called flex vehicles. The Alcohol based gasoline is better for the environment than what we use at home, and makes the air smell different. I think the air has a sweet smell to it and so does my mom.

The houses all us the same tile roof. They are brownish red. People also live in apartment buildings and they are very very big and nice. Looking down from an 11th floor apartment is really cool because you can see stuff that you cannot see from a walking perspective. Standing on the balcony I saw lots of dogs walking around, the door man putting out mats, and when I looked to the side a saw a symmetrical road that had the same kind of trees planted all in a row, it was really really cool. I like being up high, because I see everything. 


In every apartment there is a door man. He opens the door, and we are not allowed to get it for him.

The soda bottles are very big. They use Liters and the metric system here. If I were to say it is 22 degrees, you would think cold, but 22 degrees Celsius is actually very warm it is equal to 72 degrees Fahrenheit. The road system is in Kilometers. So 100KM is equal to 62 miles. So in the car, the odometer said we were going 100 KM per hour and Austin thought that was in Miles.


We took a bus from Sao Paulo to Maringa at night. I thought it would take a long time to get there but we arrived at 6 in the morning. The bus was big, like a tour bus but more comfortable. It was really hard using the bathroom at the back of the bus because the driver kept hitting the bumps in the road.

When I pictured Brazil I saw shanty houses, one built on top of the other. Now I realize that not all of Brazil looks like that. The shanty towns are called flavellas. Brazil has a lot of apartments, homes and big cities full of beautiful things. Brazil just feels normal to me now. I thought it would be very different. 


Portuguese is everywhere and very confusing for me. It makes me feel left out to not understand what people around me are saying. Most movies, cartoons and shows are in Portuguese. We sit and watch but we don't understand. I am starting to pick up words and phrases that I feel like I know. If your watching a cartoon in Portuguese, you can watch the actions and it will tell you what is happening. 



PS help my mom is forcing me to write this!!

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

My First Blogg Post

My First Blogg Entry

When we first got our Passports I thought that mine looked really differnt than my Moms.  Her Passport looks older and is more worn, but mine was new and a hard smallish booklet.  Everyones is a small bookelt, but mine just looked crisp.  After we got the passports, we had to sign our names on the inside covers.  This was not easy for me because I do not like to write in cursive.  Then almost as soon as we got the passports, we sent them back, well we sent them to the Brazillian Consolate to get our Visas.  I thought my mom had sent them all the way to Brazil, but she sent them to an embassy in Washington DC.  An Embassy is a building or location occupied by another government on our soil.  My Visa from Brazil is a big sticker in my passport but it looks to me like it has just been taped on.  The passport itself has a lot of really neat pictures in it.  One of Mt. Rushmore, The Moon and even the Statue of Liberty.  We got our Passports so everyone knows we are Americans.  The Visa is just like a subway token, so the country you are visiting can tell you are for sure allowed in. 

I am really excited to go to a diffent place that is not the United States.  Portuguese has been kinda difficult to learn, but I have been practicing a lot.  My mom makes sure I study at least 1 hour a day.