Reaching Brazil

Within our first few minutes in the country we started wondering if what Adrian had told us would prove to be true. "There´s just a lot of little things about Brazil that will really piss you off," he had said.

Crossing the border was pretty irritating because we had to take three buses and in each one they insisted that we pass through the turn style, even though this involved taking off all our bulky bags and heaving them across, then tyring to gather our scattered belongings, falling over and breaking my sandal while wondering if the driver had ripped me off in the peso/reais exchange.

Once in the bus station the ATM wouldn´t´t accept my card and we were forced to show our passports to someone new every step of the way to a point that seemed excessive. (Put it way, take it out, put it away again...)

We tried to look at the bright side; We were enjoying the new challenge of trying to communicate with people who speak Portuguese, using our Spanish skills to scrape by and surprising ourselves by how much we could understand.

The minute we crossed the border, I could feel Brazil all around me. There was a new sensation in the air. Two women in brightly colored clothes walked towards me and a young boy, dark skin, handsome face, baseball cap, who could have been in any one of the Brazilian moves I´d seen, was hanging around the bus stop.

Once on the bus to Curitiba we were surrounded by farms and small country homes framed by endless green fields and fluffy white clouds painted almost too perfectly in the sky one after another. The excitement of unexpected lands and unknown adventures overwhelmed me.

Welcome to Brazil.