São Paulo

I purchased my bus ticket in Belém on Tuesday and was getting ready to leave for São Paulo on Wednesday. The guys at the terminal told me it would be about a 50 hour trip. I was getting close to finishing Around the World in 80 Days, so I decided to buy another book. I finally found a bookstore. Actually, I had found one, but it was all gospel stuff. I think gospel stuff is good, but only the right gospel stuff, not Joel Osteen's best seller translated into Portuguese, or whatever these bookstores had. So I asked a guy on a park bench and he directed me to a mall nearby with a good bookstore.

I had a hard time deciding what to buy. I couldn't buy a book in English, because they didn't have any. And that was fine, because I like reading in Portuguese. I saw a lot of books that interested me, but I was looking for one in particular: Les Miserables. I found it and bought it. In the edition in Portuguese that I bought, it has two volumes, and I just purchased the first one. I was a little afraid of the grammar and vocabulary because it is quite a bit longer and more complicated than Around the World in 80 Days, but I wanted to read that book. I read the first half about 4 years ago and loved it, but got really bogged down in the middle when Hugo talks about nonsense. That is what I got for trying the unabridged version. This version is unabridged too and in a different language, so I wondered if I would make it through. But I love reading much more than I did then, and I don't have anything else to do in the evenings because I didn't bring my computer, etc. I was also about to get on a bus for 50 hours, so I needed something.

The next day, as I was leaving the hostel, the guy at the front desk asked me where I was going. I told him, and he asked if I was going by plane. I said it was by bus, and he said: that trip is 4 days! That scared me a little because I had made my first night's reservation in the guesthouse for Friday night. But it turned out that he was not well informed.

The bus ride was interesting. The scenery was very pretty. There were lots of shades of green: jungle-type area, meadows, forests, etc. There were areas with red dirt, kind of like Southern Utah, and things like that. It was nice. Sometimes it felt like slow going because there were speed bumps all over the roads, which were like the interstate roads. These weren't really wide roads, which was kind of fun.

There were no movies or anything, and I forgot how I don't really like to read in moving vehicles. The boat was fine, but not the bus for some reason. It was ok. I finished Around the World in 80 Days and read a lot of Les Mis, but I could have read a lot more. It was really nice though to just sit and think as I looked out the window.

One of the most annoying things about the bus was the cockroaches. I never imagined that there would be cockroaches on a bus, but there were on this one! They weren't big, but they were annoying. I didn't see hundreds or anything, but here and there. I kept imagining them on my leg whenever I felt something, and maybe it was because once there really was one on there. It was so annoying. I have never seen a cockroach in a moving vehicle.

We finally arrived in São Paulo. It didn't seem that long, and it never got too boring. We arrived in the morning on Friday, which was a relief because sometimes it seemed like it would be 4 days. I got a taxi at the terminal and headed to the guesthouse where I would be for a few weeks. It turned out to be a nice place and I was happy to be getting ready to start my internship.