Arriving in Brazil

Second day, second country. From Mexico City to Sao Paulo, Brazil, the flight was about 11 hours. There was some sort of time change, so my estimate is probably wrong, but it was a long flight. AeroMexico flights are really awesome though. We got to take our pick from 8 movies, listen to music, or play free video games on our personal screen. We also got free toothbrushes, toothpaste, eyemasks, ear plugs, and headphones. Yoontae and I watched Marley and Me. Even though I knew how it ended, it was still really sad. Yoontae almost cried. Then we played Tetris against each other (yes, you could even play against other passengers) and I owned him. noob. I also slept a lot, so once we arrived I was fairly well rested. We bought R$30 (R$ means reals, 1.9 reals = 1 dollar) bus tickets to Jardins, a region in Sao Paulo, and found a hotel. It cost us R$84 for a room, where we put our stuff, and then we headed out to the city. We went to a free art museum and spent an hour there, it was really interesting.

After we came out, I started noticing a ton of lesbian couples. Yoontae noticed too, I'm not weird. We walked around the city just observing the city life and looking at shops and restaurants, but it started raining so we went to get our umbrellas from the hotel. By the time we went out again the rain had stopped. Then we went to find an internet cafe to contact family and let them know we were fine. It was really tough communicating with the workers since we knew no Portuguese, but we managed to pay for 30 minutes of computer time. We contacted our family and found a hostel nearby to go to in the morning and left. We ate our first meal of Sao Paulo and ordered random stuff on the menu since we didn't know what anything was. We ended up getting a chicken sandwich and a ham sandwich and a guarana milk thing that tasted just like banana milk. We also got Cebolitos, which are similar to Funyuns but way better. We headed back to our hotel but on the way we got some corn with salt and butter from a street vendor (SO AMAZING). It was a pretty expensive day, but hopefully we'll be cheaper as we learn how to travel for cheap.

We didn't interact too much with people, and I felt like that's why I didn't really learn as much. Of course traveling is an educational experience but I think interacting with the locals and other travelers is the best way to have a good experience. Starting with the next day, I wanted to take advantage of all the people I could communicate with, even if it was only through gestures. (Since I'm actually writing this a few days later, I can say that I HAVE made more effort to interact with people!)