The most Brazilian weekend you can imagine

This weekend was INCREDIBLE. I think what made it so great was that I hung out with Brazilians the whole time and practically spoke only Portuguese the entire weekend. It was great. I feel like I’m really improving my speaking skills and it’s really exciting. Here is a quick recap of the weekend:

Thursday (yes, the weekend starts on Thursday ☺ )
We met up with Mark, a South African friend we met at our hostel in Buenos Aires. He has been surfing all around South America for nearly a year and is on his final stretch in Rio and then to Colombia. It is so cool that we can still keep in contact with people that we have met on our travels here! In fact, the same night we also met up with a guy that owned the hostel we stayed at in Florianopolis just 2 weeks ago. He was in Rio doing promotions for his hostel! What a small world ☺

Friday night
Went to a Brazilian girl’s birthday party and danced funk at a club in centro at 10pm. The place was three stories, had dancers on a stage and videos of surfers on all the TV’s (kind of random, but cool haha). It felt like a 2am rage at 10pm and I knew it was going to be a good night. Then we went to Lapa (another area of the city with lots of bars, clubs, and outdoor places to hang out). As we were wondering up one of the side streets, we stumbled across this little parking lot that had been transformed (via a bar in a corner and a loud speaker system) into a Forró dancing place. I think I have fallen in love with Forró music. It is a lot like country/folk music and the dance is so much fun. Check out this link to see what I mean→ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dprByOLIxB4. We danced until 5:30am… sleep is overrated. Here is another link to some cool information on Forró: http://worldmusic.nationalgeographic.com/view/page.basic/genre/content.genre/forro_720/en_US

Saturday
I went straight to our university from Lapa for an all-day field trip with the International Program to a farm 2 hours outside of Rio. Thank goodness we had 2 hours to sleep on the bus ☺ The farm was really cool. It is actually a hotel, ecological preserve, and farm (cattle and they make their own minas cheese). There was so much to do there we couldn’t possibly get bored. I zip-lined from a really tall platform about 100 meters (wait, am I using the metric system now? Haha) into the lake. There were also a ton of obstacle-course like things to do over the lake as well. If you fell, which I definitely did, you fell into the lake! We also played volleyball, slept by the pool, and did a hick version of a slip-and-slide, complete with a tarp, soap, and a hose. It was a wonderful day!

Sunday
Sunday afternoon I was invited by my Brazilian friend to a family birthday party in a north suburb of Rio. The hour and a half bus ride north passed by miles and miles of slums, for as far as the eye can see. It is incredible how big of a difference there is between the area I live in, and other parts of the city. Because the birthday boy happened to be a HUGE Flamengo soccer team fan, and the party happened to be on the night of the Rio championship soccer match, of course the birthday was Flamengo themed. A bright red Flamengo cake and red and black balloons adorned the backyard. When we arrived in the middle of the game, the entire party was crowded around a 15” TV monitor, sitting on a stool in a corner of the patio and people were SCREAMING at the TV. I have never seen so much passion in my life. We ate some churrasco (Brazilian BBQ) while pretending to be absorbed in the game as well. The owners of the house support Botofogó (the opposing team), so when Botofogó won, the (very drunk) man did a belly-flop into the pool, then started popping all of the birthday balloons screaming about being the champions. The game was quite a buzz kill for the party because everyone was so pissed off after, but an hour and a couple drinks later, everyone was back to having a great time.

The people we met were so incredibly friendly. The woman who lived there gave us a full tour of her home, invited us on a family day-trip, and invited us back for a family dinner! Overall, it was another wonderful weekend in Rio.