Said goodbye to chelsea yesterday at the bus terminal in são paulo. shes going to the northeast, so it wasn't really worth my while to go back to rio for two days. the bus took a full three hours to finally get onto the highway out of sao paulo. i guess that's to be expected in the third largest metropolitan region in the americas at rush hour. all told it took about 16 hours to get the the terminal in brasilia. despite the crying baby, foul bathroom an lack of air conditioning, the trip really wasn't that bad. i had a good book and even slept some. luiza said that the family car was occupied, so i' have to take a taxi to her house. i tried asking the smelly, but seemingly friendly old man next to me how much a taxi should cost to luiza's neighborhood, but we could barely understand eachother and gave up. i'm always wary of taxi drivers, so when i finally got to brasilia i asked a guy in the terminal if there was a bus that woul take me where i needed to go. it turned out he was a classical guitarist picking up a peruvian pianist an they were going to the same part of the city as i, so they offered to take me. his car had taken a beating- according to him it was the result of some sort of jealous girlfriend sitatuation. i was thankful for the ride, so i didn't mind brushing some broken glass off the seat. on the way we stopped at his work to pick something up, and he took me inside to meet his co workers. i guess he does autopsies for the police or something because there were a couple pretty grisley looking corpses laying around on operating beds inside that showed signs of untimely death... kind of startling early in the morning, but, once again, i was thankful for the ride.
luiza and her distractlingly beautiful friend showed me around brasilia today. it's one of the wildest looking cities i've seen. i guess back in the 50's they planned the whole thing out an just constructed it in the center of the country where there was nothing but wilderness. i'd seen pictures of some of the architecture before, but seeing it in person is really impressive. it's like a 50's idealised futuristic city in marble... but outside of the center it's just apartment buildings on roads with letters and numbers instead of names.
in a few days we'll go to ouro preto to celebrate carnaval. supposedly it's one of the best carnivals in brazil. the city looks pretty cool in photos... colonial and everything.
são paulo was really fun. chelsea's friends are complete badasses. the dialect down there was really clear. i had no problem conversing. here, however, it's back to not being able to unerstand a damn thing anyone's saying. it's frusterating, but i guess this is how one learns languages...
florianopolis was incredible as well. we met up with some locals and had wild times.
hope all is well in the US. i've barely gotten homesick my whole time away, but there's times when it sinks in... like last night the bus stopped at a rest area and while i was walking around i had a lonley moment when i considered that i was alone at 4 in the morning somewhere in the interior of brazil... but generally my time on the roa in south america has been one of the most amazing experiences of my life. i've found myself in countless amazing situations... lamentably, they don't en up on the blog, but rest assured that they're happening.