Eu Vou para Paraty!

June 27th

            Today was the day we left for our group excursion to Paraty, a small colonial beach town in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Since we were leaving directly from class we had to carry all of our bags to school with us. Allison and I actually did very well with our bags on the bus to school. I would say that we are professional São Paulo commuters by now! Our classes went by very slowly considering we were all packed up for the beach, but had 7 hours before we left…It was so hard to focus on our culture class’s lecture on modernist art knowing that the following day we would be away from our rainy, tropical London and in the warm sun and sand!

            This trip was arranged by the program, so we were all traveling together on a charter bus. The bus was actually very nice and we were able to recline our seats and nap, or watch the two movies they played on the way down; the animated movie Rio and, ironically, a movie about the Vilas Boas brothers who contacted/pacified the indigenous groups in central Brazil in the mid-20th century. Alisha and I sat next to each other and napped most of the way down; however, we also had plenty of time to watch the movies because our 4.5 hour trip turned into 8 when the main highway was blocked off for construction forcing us to take smaller country roads with lots of curves and speed bumps in the rain…

            We finally arrived at 10 at night and we really could not see much, but our hotel was a very cute little place right off of one of the canals. The layout of the hotel, with its little connected cabins, reminded me of Campo del Silencio in Costa Rica. Since it was a rainy Thursday in a small beach town there was not really anywhere to go, so most of our group ended up getting some snacks and drinks in the micro-brewery that the hotel also owned. Roxanne and I were rooming together and we decided to go to bed early so that we would be ready for our boat trip in the morning!