São Paulo

What a week!! This past week, we have been roaming around one of the BIGGEST cities in the world. São Paulo and it's surrounding metropolitan area is reaching a population of 20 million people. It's crazy huge. After a full week of using the mass transit system, we finally made it to and from our destination on Friday, without a hitch. This may be becuase we finally knew the exact name and number of the buses we needed. During earlier trips in the week we ended up at the wrong bus station, hitched a ride from a student on the University of São Paulo campus, and called up our hosts for a ride back home.

Highlights: I think our two favorite days were our visits to the Botanical Garden and to the Butanta Snake Farm. O.K. that was Kevin's exciting adventure this week. He tried to get me to say that one snake was pretty, I told him all he was getting out of me was that I liked it's color. I think there were about 70 different species of snakes, lizards and spiders. Butanta is the largest research center i Latin America for vaccinations (e.g. yellow fever, dengue (we think world wide too). They also had a microbiology museum that was explained some interesting things (e.g.cells, blood, micro-organisms, diseases, viruses). The Botanical Garden was a great escape to nature in a huge city. We enjoyed the outdoors and talked a lot while watching nature. We even saw and heard some more monkeys.

CD Shopping!: We went on quite the shopping spree trying to find some Brazilian music. Ana, Marina's niece, is a no fear shopper asking all sorts of questions at each of the dozen or so CD shops we visited. The shop owners knew there stuff. Kevin was refreshed to go into a CD shop and have the owner know the music and be able to suggest something. We finally found one shop that opened up the CDs (even brand new) and let us listen to them. We came away with a Brazilian hip hop CD and two Brazilian electronica albums. I still thing he's got a permagrin on his face! It was pretty much consensus among the rock music stores that Brazilian rock music doesn't hold a candle to international rock.

Movies: At the beginning of this week, I told Kevin I was tired of traveling. I have since been revitalized and am ready to keep going. I think part of my revitalization came from the two movies we saw.. in English!! All the movies are shown in English with subtitles in Portuguese. So, we felt like were back in the States for a few hours.. popcorn included! And boy.. do they know how to make butter popcorn. They coat all the popcorn with butter, not just the top!

Tomorrow we head to the Amazon! Those little piranhas better start swimming up river.. because we're on our way to catch them!