South American Adventure

Pictures are soon to come, but as of now let me brief you on my current situation. I came home from Korea in June and went to taiwan right before I came back (I will when I return home post the ast of my Korea and Taiwan pictures). I camehome ultimately because of the stress of my job and the fighting with them over money and because I knew my boyfriend was going to break up with me. So after many months of couch surfing (thanks Kate) and 90 hour work weeks I treated myself to this one last adventure to meet my friend Francesca in Brazil.

I can´t be more clear when I tell you no planning was put in this trip. One random day in June she asked me to go with her and I worked my ass off until I got on the plane to afford it. So when the day came to leave it was slightly surreal. I slept bascially the whole flight becasue it was at night and in the morning I opened the window and was like holy shit I am in Brazil. This is the fourth country I flown to by myself and you still get that uneasy feeling of like where the hell am I going. But I made it to the hostel in Sao Paulo, where Francesca was waiting for me. Our hostel was great; clean, accomandating and everything was free to use. We knew we were being spoiled to what we are probably going to encounter on the rest of our trip.

Sao Paulo is a huge city. The first night was pretty tame ending up in their china town and eating at there equivilant of Thai Lake (late night chinese food place in Philly). The we had a night cap of capíhrina´s. The sceonf day we explored the city which is endless, covered in graffiti (some beautiful and some ugly) and full of women wearing really tight clothing with their guts hanging out. The downtown/ historic area is kind of poor and at night we went to a more upscale part of town to go to dinner at an over priced sushi restautant. We did go to a total expat bar called OMalley´s: Your Home Away From Home. The Phillies game was and we met to really nice Braziliam men. Afterwards I got something to eat with the one and we went for a small tour of Sao Paulo.

We just got into Rio and getting to out hostel was a bitch. All the ATMs to get money out were broken and the taxi´s would not accept credit cards. In the midst of this I realized I left a bag with ahlf my clothes on the bus. Half out of the basically 14 items of clothing which I brought leaves me with practically nothing. Finally we found a working ATM, made it to the hostel and now am going to start my Rio adventure with a friend of a friend back in Philadelphia.