visiting a friend in Cianorte...

A really long bus trip, the whole day and the night, took us from Porto Alegre to Curitiba and from there to Cianorte, where we arrived at 6 am. Since Martha and me arrived one day earlier than we had planed with our friend, Aline, before, and the communication wasn't perfect, we were as always stranded at the bus terminal :D We waited for two hours and started to look for an internet-café. Well, Cianorte is a relatively small city and in the south-american culture, cafés or internet-cafés won't open until 10 am!! We walked around for 1 1/2 hours asking people, in spanish (we tried to make it sound like portugese- which is really not too diferent from spanish), for internet-cafés or just WiFi...but they wouldn't get what we were trying to say :D First it was pretty frustrating but after a while it got kinda funny!! The weird thing is, that the word "internet" exists in portugese and is pronounced almost the same as they say it in english, german etc. Maybe they were scared of us strangers and stressed out as soon as they heard a different accent. Jajaja
In the end we found a café with WiFi and got help from the lady that owned it. She was so adorable...she even offered us to stay with her neighboor, have a shower and take a rest :) soo sweet!
Our friend picked us up half an hour later and went with us to her grandmas house, where we freshened up and had lunch. We met Aline in Santiago, in our spanish school "Tandem" and she invited us to visit her one day...so we took advantage of that right away :-P
Her parents and her live on the "campo", have cows, chickens etc. It is one of my favorite places in the world to relax and have some good quiet days without connection to the world outside. But see it yourself:

Litschis just hanging around there

Muhmuhs

Coconut-tree

my friend, Aline

We spent four really relaxing but fun days with Aline. On a Saturday we took a night-bus to São Paulo, where we had friends we could stay with.
São Paulo is with ca. 18 million habitants one of the biggest cities in the world! And it's true...IT IS freakin' HUGE!! I think as we got into the city, we still drove more than an hour to get to one of the bus terminals. After taking the metro for another half hour, we got to the station where our friends mum was waiting for us.
She was so lovely. She took so good care of us, showed us the city (at least a part of it), cooked the best brasilian food ...
In the three days we had in São Paulo we saw a lot of the city, had some good time with the family of our friend and went to the MASP (Museum of Arts de São Paulo). They had paintings of Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Rembrandt etc. there...really interesting, since I had all those painters in my last years of school and could totally remember what I had learned about them :D

Sao Paulo center

That was all for now, gotta go...

Sorry for being so bad updating you guys!

Greetings, saludos, Grüße
Nina