Belo Horizonte

We had a couple days left in Salvador, so before heading to the Mercado Modelo we went to a book store and got some more books. I got the 3rd Harry Potter, we got Gabriella a kids book in Portuguese and we got 3 English books for Shelley. She read one the first night, the Beach House by James Patterson. She’s now reading Windy City Blues by Sara Paretsky. At the Mercado we ran into a lady we had met while Gabi was getting her hair braided, and talked to her for a little bit and traded email addresses. While out I also tried Acaraje, which is dried shrimp and spices in a batter fried in palm oil, and I didn’t like it. Gabriella tried it too, which was surprising, but did not like it. We all also tried Coconut water, which is huge here, people sell it everywhere and you can get it in all the stores. The vendors all have huge piles of coconuts, and they just chop them open, poor out the water into cup, or sometimes just put a straw right into the coconut, and then you drink it. Neither Shelley nor I liked it, but Gabi said she did.
Tuesday we went to a pool at a big apartment building. Sergio knows the people that work the door, and he had them let us in. It was really nice, it had a huge adult pool and a pretty big kid pool too, that Gabi could walk around all by herself in. We hung out there and swam laps and played around with Gabi for a while, then went back to Sergio’s to start packing up to leave on Wednesday. We also made fried rice for dinner, which was really good.
It was sad saying good by to Sergio, because Gabi liked him sooo much. She would always run and hug him in the morning, and play with him all the time. We made it too the airport Wednesday with about an hour to spare, so we grabbed some quick food and rushed over to our gate. We needn’t have worried though, because our flight was delayed two hours. Eventually we got on the Fokkerprop 50, and took off for Belo Horizonte. It was a 3 hour flight, and it wasn’t too bad at all. It was cool too, because it was such a small plane, we got on and off on the ground, instead of in a tunnel right into the airport. We got into Confins airport, which is about 45 minutes away from Belo Horizonte. We took a big bus in, and then we were picked up by Boca Rica, a Contra-Mestre in Cordão de Ouro, my Capoeira group. He took us to a pousada near his house, and we conked out.
After a quick breakfast we went walking around the city. I really really like it here. It reminds me a ton of Chicago, and the weather, a little cool, but really sunny, made me miss Chicago. We went to a huge park, Parque Municipal and walked around for a bit. Gabi really wanted to go on a "Merry Round" that they had, so we bought her a ticket and plopped her on an Elephant. She was okay for about half a turn, than she just burst out crying. Shelley even walked around the thing with her, but she wouldn’t stop crying, so the guy stopped the ride and then she got off. Afterward she kept saying that "something happened on the Merry Round, and then I wanted to get off" What that something was is a mystery, because I was watching her as she came around and went from kinda happy to crying for absolutely no reason. We think it was just the ride itself that scared her. We went to Boca Rica’s house later that day and hung out with a Capoeirista from Israel, Gavião. who was staying with Boca. We hung out and watched Capoeira videos and talked for a while, and then had some food when Boca got back, before heading out to a rehearsal for a Samba Bloco, a drum group that does Samba. They were really cool and fun to watch.
The people at this pousada, Pousada Piauí, are super nice and helpful. They let us use their washing machine, and we spent all morning Friday doing laundry. Some of the people that work here were talking to us while we did it, and Shelley had a conversation about taxes and poverty and stuff with the people who didn’t speak English, and everybody understood what everyone else was saying. I was quite proud of her. We talked to the owner of the Pousada that evening, who is really nice, and her son ended up driving us to an area of the city, Savassi, with lots of restaurants and shops. On the way into Belo, Shelley had said how she really wanted to go to a Pizza Hut for their pizza buffet. We laughed because neither of us had done that since grade school. We had told the pousada owner and her son that we felt like pizza for dinner, and they said that there were a bunch in Savassi, including a Pizza Hut. We walked around Savassi for a little while and then finally saw the Pizza Hut. Brazil was for Pizza Hut what going to a new school is for a dorky kid, a chance to reinvent themselves. If this Pizza Hut we saw was in the US, people would say "Pizza Hut, who the heck do you think you are, acting all fancy and stuff?" It looked like a fancy Michigan Ave. restaurant, but with the same logo. And the pizzas were ridiculously expensive. You can get a really, really good large pizza for around R$20 most places, and Pizza Hut was charging at least R$30, for the smallest size, so we ended up going somewhere else and getting a really really good pizza for about R$20, and watching the opening Ceremony for the Pan American Games, which are here in Brazil.
Saturday we met up with Boca, his girlfriend Jabu and Gavião around noon, and then going for lunch to an Arab place, another thing that made me miss Chicago. But the food was really good, and then Boca took us to Parque das Mangibeiras, a huge nature park, that also had a lot of cool playground stuff that Gabi loved. And we saw some cool animals Kuati, which look kind of like Raccoons, but were way used to people and came right up to us when they saw that Gabi had popcorn. We played around at a playground for a while, and saw some really great views of Belo Horizonte.