On our first day here the first thing I did was wake up and open up the blinds to see the view outside my window. The first thing I noticed was my window did not have a screen and I thought “wow, that is very dangerous, good thing I had my glasses on otherwise I might have tried to lean on a window that wasn’t there”. I also felt the heat, it is winter here, but winter is still 90 degrees and 80% humidity! I prepared for the day and went downstairs to meet the rest of the group, we got brunch together at a local restaurant down the street from our hotel. The owner of the restaurant let us exchange our American dollars for reals which was great because then we would not have to pay an exchange fee at the bank. We walked down the streets which are covered in graffiti; which is actually very beautiful. One of the things I noticed about walking around is how many dogs there are just wandering, they just lay around and are everywhere. Another thing is that there is a lot of trash and broken pavement and also pretty deep holes in the sidewalk. These holes can easily break an ankle if you are not watching where you are walking. There are a lot of motorcycles here because they are taxis here everybody takes motorcycles. We walked to the mall and walked around and bought some goods and bottled water, there is a lot of chocolate in Brazil and it is all delicious. Everything tastes different here because they do not put as much sugar in food and drinks and things are not usually processed; also, every item with sugar uses sugar cane. Everyone is very nice here and accepting and many people speak a little bit of English. The malls here are extremely similar to our malls at home. After the mall we went on a tour of the city with our driver from the hotel, he took us to the Manaus World Center and the Amazon Theater. The Manaus World Center is an area with black and white rock symbolizing the Amazon River and the Rio Negro River meeting. In the center of this area was a large statue made out of different types of rock not native to Manaus, when Manaus was first settled it was settled by many foreign countries. Rich people came to the area for goods such as rubber and rock and to invest in the harvesting of such, this statue has sides each with a name of a different continent on each side symbolizing how they all united and came here. We then walked across to tour the Amazon Theater which was made for the rich to have something to do. This theater is 118 years old and very very detailed and beautiful. During the tour we saw costumes and photographs and things that use to be used when it was first built. Outside of the theater, the roads use to be paved with rubber so that horse carriages would not make noise when going by if a performance was happening. We then stopped at the church across the street really quickly before we went off to the pier. At the pier we were shown the Rio Negro River which is the water where it is stationed. On the side of the pier there is a wall with marks of years that show how high the water rose that year which. We discussed how the boats here are flat on the bottom because when it floods there are trees underneath the water and the boats can get stuck in them if they do not have flat bottoms. Another thing we discussed is how Brazil has poor transportation. There are not good highway systems the roads are very long and unstable and dangerous and people do not like to travel on them. They do not have a network of highway and train systems so they fly or take boats everywhere. In Manaus, it takes 7 days to get to the pier from the ocean and 12 days to get to the ocean from Manaus because it is against the flow. Our guide explained to us how it is cheaper and easier for them to fly from northern Brazil to America that it is to go from north Brazil to south Brazil. After the pier we visited a local marketplace with many tiny shops that sold everything you could think of. One of the most interesting shops was the medicine shop. The shop keeper goes to the rainforest and collects certain plants for medicine. Instead of going to take a pill for indigestion, here people buy certain plants to cure everything from a headache to the flu and other things. After that, we went back to the hotel and talked about our day and prepped for the next day. We all went to the mall and got dinner, and then went to bed after a long day and little sleep. |
January 3 2015
Manaus Day 2 Our day starts by waking up early and going to breakfast where we meet Tysa, Taits friend, who lives in Sao Paulo and came to spend the day with us. After our breakfast we took a taxi to the pier we had seen the day earlier and discussed how the docks rise and fall with the water levels, which rise so high they reach the top of the pier and sometimes flood it. We boarded a boat and started our tour down the Rio Negro River and went to the area where the Amazon River and the Rio Nergro meet. Because of their different densities and temperatures, the water does not mix, and stays separated for miles. We went through the local village which was a floating village, even the schools and churches floated. The people in the village add more wood to make their houses rise and fall with the water levels throughout the seasons. After this we made our way to a dock where we got off and there was a little market place with items made by locals. We took a short walk into the rainforest where we took in the scenery and then afterwards we ate at a little restaurant on the dock and had some local food including real Piracu, the most precious fish in Brazil. During lunch one of us accidently broke a glass, but everyone started cheering, as Tysa explained to use breaking a glass was a superstition for good fortune in Brazil’s cultures and many others. Once we finished lunch we continued our tour down the river when our ride was interrupted by some locals in a row boat who boarded our boat and brought with them a baby alligator, a small anaconda, and of course my favorite, a baby sloth!. After our visitors left we made our way down the river to a native village where we were greeted by the natives and went into a hut they had made which they performed local traditional dances for us and I was even taken out of my seat to join them in their last dance! Although the chief of the tribe explained the dances in Portuguese, the natives speak in their own tongue which is very different from Portuguese. After we had departed from the village and learned some of their culture, we continued down the river to a dock where we were able to get off and swim, in the river, which is not only home to alligators and piranhas but to pink river dolphins as well! One of the people who ran the boat went into the water with us and fed the dolphins fish so we could get close to them and swim with them. Once our boat tour was finished we went back to our hotel and showered off and discussed issues such as illegal animal trafficking, deforestation issues, and gold mining issues in the Amazon.
January 4th 2015
Day 3 Manaus We started our day by packing up our things and eating breakfast where we were greeted by another one of Taits contacts, Dave, who was our age and lived in Manaus and was going to hang out with us for the day. We took a Taxi ride to the beach area and chatted with Dave the sanitation issues in Brazil. Dave told us about himself and told us how he live with a tribe for a year to try and educate them on one of their practices. He explained to us that the native people believe everyone is born with a good soul and a bad souls and if they give birth to twins, they believe one has a good soul and one has a bad soul. However because they don’t know which is which, they ended up killing both of the children, and although it is a cultural practice, it is still essentially murder, and there are programs where people try to go in and help educate the culture on many things. We also discussed some other issues like how there is no punishment for the rich and discussed an instance that happened recently where a rich neighborhood did not like the loud sounds of the birds chirping and so they all sprayed their trees with poison and killed thousands of birds that were still being disposed of and they had no punishment. On a lighter note, we also talked about how the beach was a nice place in the area to hang out and play soccer or swim. We stopped and got ice cream which was all local flavors that were much different from home, even the chocolate was different. I personally got a cone of a flavor called Tacuma, which is a pale sunset orange and some sort of fruity flavor, it was probably some of the best ice cream I’ve ever had. As we waited for the next bus to come Dave taught us some dances before it started to down pour. We boarded our bus which was very crowded and didn’t stop for very long at all, in fact when it came to our stop some of us got left behind! Luckily we started shouting and the bus stopped to let the rest of us off. We walked around the mall and talked about youth culture with Dave and we all became very good friends by the end of the day. We returned to our hotel in the late afternoon to freshen up and prepare for our next flight. |
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