Tango

There is a lot of tango shows around the streets, many offered by restaurant to attract customers, this one took place in front of a restaurant in Boca, one of the most touristic spots in BA.

The cemetery

The old cemetery of Recoleta in Buenos Aires, it contains thousands of these houses (of the dead), each house is dedicated to a family or an important person. I guess the more extravagant the structure is the more important or powerful the family is, or the more important and powerful they want people to think they are. No two houses are the same, and it is quite fascinating to walk between them contemplate the design and style of each one.

Buenos Aires

I arrived in Buenos Aires on a perfect spring day; blue skies with a pleasantly worm sun. I just spent my first couple of days walking around San Telmo and the Plaza de Mayo. I met this lady that I already knew from a trek in Peru, and she offered me to stay at her place. When I went with her though, I found that she lives in a small apartment with her three daughters, I felt grateful for her generosity , but at the same time uncomfortable with taking a space in their little home, the place is a bit far from the center as well, so I ended up sleeping in a hotel in the city center for the night. Tomorrow she is going to take me on of car ride, with a car she borrowed for the purpose, I am not sure yet where we are going , but I am surely going to take a lot of pictures.

Good bye Brazil, Buenos Aires here I come

I am heading to Buenos Aires tomorrow morning, a 25 hour bus trip from here, which is going to be a new record for me.

I think Brazil´s number oneatractionn is it´s beaches, and so that is where I spent most of my time. The beaches of Rio, Ilha Grande and Santa Catarina were all nice, but mfavoritete has to be Ilha Grande.

When it comes to organization Brazil is a mixed bag, while I was impressed by their metro systems in Rio and São Paulo, I was not so impressed by their airport. I took a flight from São Paulo to Rio, on my boarding pass it said that the plane was to be boarded at gate 19, on the other hand the monitors in the airport indicated gate 21, the plane actually left from gate 23!

ipod, books and google

I managed to fill up my ipod with some music, I found this internet cafe with itunes containing a lot of music, and I copied some of that. Then I raided the pirated cd stands on the streets and bought about 10 cds. I am still can not find my favourite album yet, Clandestino from Manu chao. I am trying to buy a pair of nice small portable speakers for my ipod, but I need to find some store willing to ship it to southamerica.

I finished reading the alchemist in Portuguese, but even though I seem to manage well with reading Portuguese, my speaking skills did not improve much. I am going back to reading Harry Potter 3 in Spanish after this, but once I am finished with it, I am going to try and read some original Spanish works.

Google introduced a blog search web page : http://blogsearch.google.com/
It will search for blogs created with Google or other blogging services.

Surfing

I took a surfing lesson , which was more enjoyable than my previous ones. For starters I got a large surfing board, which is easier to stand on than the smaller ones, second the instructor pushes the students at the right moment for catching a ware, so we did not need to pedal and catch a wave our selves. The day after the weather was good , so I decided to give a try on my own, I took a board and wet suite from the hostel, and went trying. There is a small barrier there which allows an easy access to the sea, so I do not need to battle the waves to go on after catching a wave. I still could not manage to stand on that small board, but I enjoyed trying and it was the best couple of hours of exercise that I had for sometime.

Barra de Lagoa Santa Catarina Island

The weather has improved, and we had three sunny days. I took advantage of the good weather to do some trekking and surfing.

I am staying at the backpackers sharehouse in Barra de Lagoa, a place run by a Brazilian brother and sister, a very chilled out place where it is not uncommon to find someone smoking something. Often activities are organized by the hostel, a few days ago we went on a trek up the hills surrounding the town, and then down to a beautiful beach , which you see in the picture above. In the night a spontaneous party erupted, and lasted till the early hours of the morning, during which many bottles of Cashaça and cans of beer were devoured, and everybody was wasted in the end. The next day everybody was seriously hang over and just took it easy the whole day.

Sometimes this cozy atmosphere goes too far I guess, apparentlyy the night before I arrived, the girl part of the Brazilian pair running the place, decided to drive ten of the tenants to a party in her jeep, she had an accident on the way and the car flipped over (it might had to do with the fact that she had a few too many beers before that), luckily though almost everybody came out unhurt, the only serious case was one guy from New Zealand had a blood buildup in his leg, and have to stay in the hospital for two weeks.Fortunately the lady escaped an alcohol test from the police, probably due to her emotional state after the accident, she was feeling quite bad about the whole matter and was very apologetic for here part in the incident.

Santa Catarina Island

I am staying at Borra Lagoa, which is a surfing hot spot, the beach is very beautiful and the place is very chilled out. The problem is that the weather has been mostly awful, cloudy , rain and wind, the last two days though it has been improving, but it could take a turn to the worst minute. Though it seems this weather is hitting the whole south of Brazil and there is no where better to go at the moment, except maybe the north of Brazil, but it is too far north.

I tried to do some surfing yesterday , but I gave up after ten minutes, the combination of the hang over, the cold water and the strong waves got the best of me. I might try again tomorrow, maybe take a lesson or two.

I am staying at the backpackers hostel here, there are people from all around the world there, Ireland, Israel, France, Australia and New Zealand, and the atmosphere is quite relaxed and friendly, and it is hard to recognize the people working there from the people staying there.

Ilha Grande

A sub tropical island with lush green vegetation and white sand beaches, the perfect beach vecation. At least it was the perfect beach vecation until the weather started to change on the second day, and in the evening of that day it started to rain. It is amazing how two days of non stop rain turned this place from one of the most beautiful places I visited during my trip to one of the most depressing ones. Anyway it was still worth it even if I could enjoy it only for a day and half, if you are visiting Brazil, you should definitly have this place on your itenary.

Ilha Grande most beautiful beach, with extra fine white sand and palm trees, though it was already starting to get cloudy when we arrived. The beach is reachable by a 2 hour hike, or a half an hour boat ride followed by a ten minute hike, the place is uncrowded and unspoiled, and you can have a large stretch of the beach for yourself.

I played a football game with some Brazilians, unfortunitely I was on the weak team and we got badly beaten 6-1 , atleast I scored the only goal for my team.

Portuguese and Spanish

I am in Ilha Grande at the moment, but it is raining none stop now, so I have nothing better to do than sit in an Internet cafe and rant about something.

I decided to try to learn as much Portuguese as possible during my stay in Brazil, I started by buying some books : a phrase book, a pocket dictionary and the Alchemist in Portuguese. I found that reading the Alchemist in Portuguese was not that difficult, Portuguese is very similar to Spanish in writing, and the language Paulo Coelho uses in this book is very simple.

The differences between the spoken Spanish and Portuguese is much larger though, for starters the pronunciation is different , e.g. "gente" in Spanish is pronounced as "khenty", but in Brazilian Portuguese it is pronounced as "jentch", generally speaking Spanish pronouncement system is regular and quite simple, while the Portuguese system is much more complex. In addition to the pronunciation the melody of the speech is quite different between the two languages.

Though Spanish is one of the easiest language to pick up , still there are some difficulties for English speaker. One such issue is with the verb "to be" in English, which translates into two different verbs in Spanish, "ser" and "estar". Generally "ser" is for things that are permanent and estar is for things that tend to change (although there are many exceptions), e.g. "I am Wael" translates into "soy Wael" , while "I am here" translates into "estoy aqui". Another feature of the Spanish language is that in addition to the simple past tense, there is the imperfect past tense, generally used to describe actions in the past that are continuous. Now if you combine these two features, the verb "to be" in the past tense, you get four possible translations in Spanish, e.g. "it was" can translate into "fue", "era", "estuvo" or "estaba", depending on what you are describing, choosing the right one is by no means an easy task for a Spanish novice.

Ouro Preto

The city center, at night some kids and teenagers performed capoeira and samba dancing, I think they were from the local dancing school. The town is not so big, in a few hours I managed to see almost everything, and although it is a nice place to relax for a few days, I decided I would rather do the relaxing on the beach, so I am heading to Ilha Grande.

Oulro Preto is a very beautiful and well preserved 18th century mining town.