back from carnival :( wish it went forever

okay guys, so the reason that i havent blogged in over a week is because i was celebrating carnival in Cabo Frio. 
ok, so for those of you who dont know what carnival is, it is a week long festival that quite literally stops the nation. nothing is open except for food places and drugstores (pharmacies). its just a week long party really! 

music and dancing all hours of the day, everyone (except me) getting drunk and having a good time. it is truely amazing and oh so much fun! for carnival, my family rented an apartment in Cabo Frio, a smaller coastal town that is about an hour out of Rio, and a 9 hour drive away from Belo Horizonte.

i very rarely get car sickness in Australia, but i found out that pretty much all the country side from BH to Cabo Frio, is twistier and windier than the great ocean road. the whole way. this unfortunatly can induce car sickness on even the smallest travel sickness suffers. needless to say i was prepared for the way back, i popped a sleeping pill to dope myself up enough, slept half the way, and was fine. lol 

it really is beautiful countryside, but too much looking out the window was not good for the stomach. best to just close your eyes.

Our apartment was literally a 50 metre walk away from the beach, and all of the music and partying. it was a perfect spot to stay. on the first day, we got up and went straight to the beach. i put on spf 30 sunscreen every half hour and thought i was being the most sun smart person in the world... unfortunatly this was not the case. after 5 hours at the beach, i literally looked like a lobster and felt like i had been boiling in a pot like one too. My poor white shin didnt fare too well. next time i buy sunscreen i will be looking for an spf 500 one. 

every day was the same sort of routine, we went to the beach around 9am, and stayed until around 2, then went home for lunch, and slobbed inside for the rest of the arvo. best to avoid the afternoon sun at the beach. i got burnt on the saturday and didnt actually venture out into the water until the tuesday, as i was just too sore. i looked like a tool, because i was the only one sitting on the beach in knee length shorts, a cardigan to cover my shoulders and a hat and sunnies to cover my face lol. but the upside to this, was that my mornings were somewhat relaxing. i sat under our barraca (beach umbrella) reading my les miserables and sipping agua de coco (coconut water) straight out of the coconut. it is soo good! 

I also tried several other beach delicacies whilst i was sitting there. cocada, and cus-cuz, milho (corn on a cob) keijo on a stick (cheese on a stick cooked on a little portable churrhasco, with orgegano sprinkled on it) i ate the flesh out of the inside of a coconut using a mussel shell as a spoon to scrape it out, was very cool :)

the beaches in brazil are so different to those in Aus. firstly, there are all of these people walking around selling all sorts of things, there are food carts being pushed around and people walking around selling sorvette's (icecream) and refrigerante (softdrink, beer and water) and with pastrys and other little nibbly foods. 

there are also people selling hats, sunnies, stubbie holders, beach dresses, bikinis, bracelets and so many other things. it was amazing.

secondly, almost everyone wears bikinis and budgie smugglers here. for an aussie girl who is used to boardshorts and singlet tops, its a bit confronting lol. 

also one of the biggest differences is the amount of rubbish on the beaches. it is incredible how much there is. nobody picks up their rubbish, when their finished with something they just throw it on the ground. there are people who go along at the end of the day and clean it all up. this then leads me to the point on the poverty here. All over the beaches and all over the streets in carnival were people, carrying bags and sacks, collecting the aluminium cans that people have just dumped, to take to the recycling centres to exchange for money. This is how they survive. 

The main part of carnival is essentially a competion between 14 different samba schools in Rio. Each school has over 2000 participants and they have an hour to make their way down the 2 mile runway of the samba drome. Each school spends over 2 million US$ a year on carnival, for costumes and floats and so on. and most of the population of the country just watches it on tv. This brings so much joy to people, but what if each school were to halve their expenditures even. Imagine how much they could do for the poverty of the people of their country on that money alone! This is what I find hard to comprehend. That there can be such wealth next to such poverty. I suppose this is what rotary is about right? Recognizing this, and if anything, raising awareness, and getting the idea into peoples heads that there is no need for this poverty. Now that i have had my little serious speel, it seems weird to move on to talking about fun things aging but thats how life goes really isn't it. 

At the beaches in Brazil there are these things called bananas which are big inflatable raft things which you pay to sit on and a speed boat takes you out and pulls you around for a while. it looks really fun, but i wasn't game enough to stay out in the sun for that long with uncovered legs and arms. next time though. apparently they are everywhere! there were 3 at the beach i was at.

on one of the days we were at Cabo Frio, we went for a day trip to Buzios, a small but absolutly stunning town about a 45min drive away. we went to the beach there, and it was beautiful, even though i didnt even bother taking my bathers as i was still too sore. it was on the monday after i got burnt, and it was painful.
 after the beach we got MacDonald's for a bit of lunch. hahaha i had to get a sneaky picture of their uniform coz it is absolutely hilarious. they have a grey polo shirt with yellow and red stripes, a yellow and red belt, blue jeans with a Maccas M in the back pocket, and even the buttons have the little m on them, and then they have special maccas converse type shoes with the red and yellow again. and if they are working outside they get to wear these dorky little green caps with ear flaps to protect their ears from sunburn! i had a bit of a giggle :)



Busios is absolutely stunning though. the little main shopping mall that we went to is like stepping into a little european lane, cobblestone road, paved sidewalk, and beautiful little shop buildings and features. it was gorgeous.

but the best thing is that it runs parralel to the most stunning bay you have ever seen, and there are little laneways linking the shady mall to the beautiful white sands and clear blue water.

there are little boats sailing and anchored in the bay, and there are kids swimming and playing. it is the most beautiful picture. i loved it.

there were some souvenir shops and i bought a badge pin for my blazer and some postcards, whist the other girls were looking at sunnies and shoes. ahhh what can i say, the more time i spend here, the more i realise just how much of a complete tomboy i am. its funny :)

i really hope that if i got to the coast again that we spend some more time there because it is a muito muito bonita place. :)

 as for the rest of carnival, things are active during the day, but crazier into the night. a couple of the nights i went out with my family, and things are just nuts. there were people selling hats and flashing headbands and glasses and all sorts of things, so people were wearing all sorts of things. its quite disturbing just how many males decided to dress in drag, but then again, they are the funniest people there. 

the music and dancing was fantastic, i was standing on the edge of a dance floor bit watching the people samba, and one guy even took pity on me standing there shuffling from foot to foot, and taught me the basics! it was so much fun. i could stand there for hours and listen and watch the bands, they were amazing. i had so much fun. 

i also went for a wander through a little market type thing, there was so many different things there, i wanted to buy everything! apparently the market on BH on sundays though is like 5 times the size. i want to go there :)

one of the whacky things that i saw and just couldnt resist photographing (i could just see dad, and uncle peter having a ball with it) was this beer tap thing at one of the outdoor bars. you paid 13 hais for every time they refilled it, it was a big tube thing on 3 legs and it had 3 taps on the sides, so that you could just self serve yourself from it. somehow im going to buy one, or get a pub to sell one to me or something coz i recon dad would love it  :P

okay, ive bin working on this for like the whole day, so im going to finish up for now, and will post another update soon :) hope you are enjoying my blog :)

PS, i have now officially been in Belo Horizonte for exactly a month today. it feels so weird that a month has already passed.