Today I slept in since we did not have classes. I had originally planned on going to do a guided tour at the teatro municipal, but I realized that I really needed more time to pack and get my things in order for our trip to Salvador the following day. In the afternoon I made plans to meet up with Mari and Molly at Shopping Bourbon to see Monsters University. To get there you take the 875H-10 bus from Paulista that goes down Sumare, there are also an 875P-10 and an 875M-10 that go down the same road but to different places. Normally, the 875H-10 comes by every 10-15 min, however, today I waited 45 min for the first bus to come. It turns out that the other bus was broken, so by the time is reached our stop it was already packed with people who had backed up the line waiting, but I was determined to get on the bus and make it to the movies! I teamed up with a nice guy who normally takes the route and asked him to help me find the right stop (since I got off at the wrong one the last time that I tried to get to Shopping Bourbon). I became fast friends with many people on the bus since we were in such close quarters. We had to gang up and fight with the bus driver to get him to quit stopping at all of the stops since there was no way that anyone else was going to fit.
Once we were finally on our way and got on to Sumare, the nice guy, a girl and I all started to work our way through the people to get to the scanner/turnstile and get through to the back of the bus where the door to get off was. It took a good five stops to get the 10 feet from the front of the bus to the turnstile, and once I got there I got separated from my guides so I asked people on the back of the bus if they were going to shopping Bourbon and I was overwhelmed by four people all trying to give me direction at once. It basically became a team effort to get the lost American girl off at the right stop, but it was a success and I said goodbye to all my new friends from the steps of Shopping Bourbon!
Once inside I was able to quickly meet up with Molly and Mari at the theater and we got tickets to the movie before it sold out. This time we got popcorn (the do not do buttered/salted popcorn here, you can do sweet or plain and then salt it yourself) and waited outside of our theater. The tickets this time were more affordable because we talked the ticket lady into accepting our US student IDs, even without expiration dates, (to get the half off the regular price!) and we only paid us 7.50 for a 3D movie. The movie itself was dubbed, but they got good voice actors who were able to fit the roles of the characters well and it was not much of an issue for me aesthetically. Granted it was a children’s movie, but Molly and I were both pleased with how well we understood all of the dialogue and jokes in the movie, it was so much easier than the comedy we watched a few weeks ago!
After the movie we decided to get a quick dinner at the por quilo place (Mari was not sneezed on this time thank goodness!) and we experimented with McFlurries afterwards (we had to see if they were the same you know, for scientific reasons…) Mari and I got a simple soft serve cones in a normal portion/non-American size for .75 cents. Molly went all out and tried the McFlurry with minibis (Bis is a popular chocolate wafer candy here, so yummy!) which was also good and rationally sized. We called it an early night and Mari’s mom offered to drive us all home.
We made it to Molly’s house fine but when we headed towards Paulista the traffic slowed to almost a stop. It took us almost an hour to get to MASP, and it is normally a 10 min drive at that time of night (9:30). It turns out that there was a small, but destructive protest on Paulista that was held by about 30 members of the radical anti-government anarchist group. They vandalized and almost destroyed about five of the banks on Paulista and the mobile police unit trailer. All the broken glass in the road was the reason that Paulista had been closed down, causing the traffic backups. Overall this type of demonstration has been very rare and there did not seem to be any clear objective to the events. On the bright side, I did finally get a picture of the armored truck of the Tropas de Choque!
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