the flight was...

29.08.09
Because all of my flights were delayed except for the flight that I missed, my trip lasted about 35 hours, like a day and a half I guess. And when I arrived in Salvador FINALLY, I saw someone who looked kind of familiar, looked my age, and I asked if she was from the program and she was. From my campus too. So we shared a taxi to the hotel, for which we had a paper with directions saying exactly what to do upon arrival; it was the address and name of the hotel and also how to use the taxis. You can prepay one with a credit card there in the airport or pay in reais, the brazilian currency, and wait on the white lines which are where the taxis hang out.

these are some things i saw, i'm not sure if this is tha amazon river, but i took this picture when the little virtual map on the screen in front of me showed that we were over the amazon, so it's very possible/probable
I thought this is so cool when you can see the clouds' shadows in miniature and contrast it to how it is to be in it's shadow it seems like the whole world got dark.

the most notable thing upon arrival was the humidity. It felt super humid compared to the cold airplane, and it was pretty warm too, but not hot. later i'll talk about the climate here, year-round. It felt really nice for me because my nose was getting too dry on the plane and once I got off the plane I felt free to breath as much and as hard as I wanted. my skind also felt sticky but it's all good at least for me, i'm not going to complain.

So once my classmate and I got to Hotel Tropical, we were pretty hungry so we decided to go out and have dinner. We got there and realized we had two roommates, respectively. And one of her roommates, came with us to search for a restaurant. It was around 7 or so. It was really hard finding a place because we didn't know our way around, but we went out and saw this big plaza, it was really cool, very artistic fences around really pretty garden like deals, and water fountains. On my taxi ride I realized that even more--possibly second to the humidity; even the airport has very artistic qualities.

Then we saw this big crowd of people on one side of this plaza, and we were curious; there was this big rainbow flag. It turned out to be happy lesbian day that day. so we chilled with this crowd for a while practicing our portuguese, and letting one of the guys practice his english. They were reallly cool people, two young women and one guy around our age, activists explaining what was happening, and also answering our questions of why at that particular place, and apparently it is a very popular place where people hang out, very public.

And this was a party in celebration but at the same time a protest. they were protesting by at one point getting into a big circle and kissing everyone, some on the cheek some a little more, with this really groovy music blasting, it was nice, and the people were so nice, and helped us find a place to eat.

This wasn't the best food at all, nor representative of brasilian food now that i've had more, but this wasn't that bad. This place whose name i forgot, it was like Gussy or something like that, was somethign like a fast food version of traditional brasilian food. the dessert was pretty good though. and it was pretty cheap like 6 dollars. for buffet, that's not bad at all.

Then several people went out to check out the bars, but I was sooo tired, and I had to take a shower and sleep because the next day we were going to have