First Week in Brazil in Pictures

Here are a few pictures of my time in Brazil thus far.

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Welcome to São Paulo

The view from my bedroom window. What a great place to write papers on urban geography : )




The night view... as best I could capture with my camera.




This is looking down into the Mercadão (fruit market).




At the Museo de Linga Portuguesa they had an entire hall way with a screen showing film and pictures related to the exhibits.

One of the exhibits at the Museum of Portuguese had parts of poems illuminated on the black floor. This one stuck with me:

Who does not see well
ONE WORD
Cannot see well
ONE SOUL

Playing with an interactive word game. I'm with two friends from Macalester who are doing the same program in São Paulo. They are wonderful and we are having a great time : )

One of my favorite pictures I've taken so far, this is another exhibit at the Portuguese Language Museum.

As in most big cities, graffiti is all over the place. What I didn't expect was elaborate works of art/murals like this. I snapped this picture quickly, but I'll have more examples up soon.

Maracatu deserves a lot more of an introduction than I can give it. Basically, this group of people meet every Saturday at this school and play a type of music that originated in the Northeast of Brazil. You have muscians, dancers and spectators... and if you want to learn how to play something new, just walk up to someone and they will hand over their instrument before you can open your mouth to ask. Not only that, but they stick around to teach you how to play. In my case it took a long time to learn how to play a simple beat on one of those big drums, but it was worth the effort. I will definitely be back.

Escola Mocidade!! Sunday night we went to a carneval rehearsal with one of the best schools in São Paulo. So many people and so much energy! Incredible! I can't wait for carneval!

YES!

We all got to try one some of the head dresses from past carnevals. The one I am wearing is HEAVY. I can't imagine samba-ing for an hour with this on.