Week Two: Feb 2 - 11

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. - Andre Gide. 




Thursday, Feb 2 | work, hamburgers, and alley art. 

Milk & Honey restaurant: dinner w/ Brito & Roberto. 

$13 Ovaltine Malt Milkshake: soooo goooood

Afterwards, we drove around the neighborhood to look at the street graffiti. 

Friday, Feb 3 | Brazilian words with Brazilian beer

Street drinking near my apartment after meeting my pilates instructor/English student

Walked to Rua Augusta and stumbled upon my now favorite store. 

I love this store in Rua Augusta. It's a bunch of cubicles featuring local artists and their crafts. So many mustaches, cupcakes, skulls, cutesy meow stuff. 

Translated 35% of the menu with my lame Portuguese dictionary. Now I can recognize and order anything with lettuce, mayonnaise, sausage, egg, and strawberries.... and that's it. 

Around 10pm, I started heading home since I was by myself. #foreveralone , womp womp. 

 

I love Avenida Paulista because it's busy throughout the night. 

This kind of made me miss my friends. I was so used to doing something on Friday nights with my friends, so when I saw all these people just chilling with their friends, I got a little homesick. Well, not homesick, but friends-sick? Granted it was only my second week here, and it took me years to build my group of friends in San Diego, I still wished I had my solid group of friends in Brazil to hang out every night like this.  

I think it's suppose to be a high school, college, and commercial building all in one.

Saturday, Feb 4 | Beco 203 club

The following night I went to my first club with Tiemi & Mayumi' & their friends at Beco 203. I played arcade with weird dorky guys, danced with gay boys to Two Door Cinema Club & Daft Punk, watched a strip pole competition (the tranny with the transplants won, surprise), was bewildered by the random 70 year old man partying harder than me, and went home starving & drained at 7am. 

Sunday, Feb 5 | Avenida Paulista Feira

After waking up in the afternoon, I stumbled upon this little street fair market that happens by MASP every Sunday. 

I miss Rolberto's shrimp burrito in San Diego :( This burrito looks like a scary crepe mess. The chollo guy behind the sign is a little reminiscent of SD though................ 

Handmade beer candles

Life goal: own a dollhouse.

Mostly inspired by this dollhouse/shelf that I saw online. 

.....close enough to my dream dollhouse. 

It's made out of popsicle sticks and you put incense sticks inside the house. 

Ovo "egg" plant. 

SO GOOD!! I had no idea what empadas were but I knew "carne" meant meat and... you can't ever go wrong with meat, so I just randomly picked something from the menu. So far, pointing to random things on the menu has worked out in my favor. I have yet to eat something gross.  

Every Sunday, this one mall on Avenida Paulista has this thing where local designers can sell their stuff. 

This was the first "homemade" thing I cooked. My mom was so proud. 

It's amazing how popular crocs are here. And in Japan. And kinda in America. It's like the Ugg's equally ugly summer cousin. When I say amazing, I mean  shockingly-weird-these-are-not-mine-but-ill-take-a-picture-of-them-anyways amazing.

Monday - Wednesday, Feb 6 - 8 | Work, Work, Work. Food x3. 

I mostly worked these few days. Realized I had been eating all carbs and absolutely no vegetables, so my coworker Paulo and I went to the supermarket called Extra. It was a nice grocery shopping lesson because I found out that 1) vacuumed-sealed, un-refrigerated milk is better than refrigerated milk, 2) what was considered expensive/cheap, 3) that's all I remember. Went home and finally had my first serving of vegetables. 

Thursday, Feb 9 | Work & Portuguese at the Park

Had a crazy, scattered schedule where my first lesson started at 7am and my last ended at 9pm. In the beginning, I was really frustrated with this kind of schedule. It left me with pockets of hour or two hour long breaks, but they wouldn't be enough time for me to do anything significant. For the first two weeks, I mostly went home and confined myself in my room to wait for my next lesson. I got fed up with it and finally decided I'd go jogging in between or at the very least, do something outside. Luckily, I found Parque Trianon near my apartment and it's where I go to exercise a few times a week.

It's soooo beautiful and peaceful there. It's this preserved park, so some of the trees are really old and tall. It's such a nice little piece of vegetation and fresh air. It kinda sucks how polluted Sao Paulo is sometimes. I consume so much smog, petrol fumes, etc while jogging there. I also get a lot of air because of the shitty potholes on the sidewalks. I look so amazingly graceful whenever I run and trip.  

This is some sort of poor-man-makeshift gym that Sao Paulo likes to implant in parks. There are several machines throughout Ibirapuera Park as well. It's sooooo cooool, especially since I don't want to pay for a gym membershp

Haha!! Ellipticals! Absolutely no resistance. 

Then I did some studying. 

Saturday, Feb 11 | Weekend at Guaruja Beach

After my lesson with Tiemi & Mayumi, Brito picked me up to meet Larissa's family. The drive took about an hour to get to their beach home in Guaruja. I was excited to see a town outside of Sao Paulo city and to finally meet Hiromi's mom's friend, Bete. The day mostly consisted of eating, walking around town, eating a lot, going out to a bar, and then coming back around 1am. 

 The drive was nice! So much green, so much green errwhere.

But it was cloudy that entire weekend! The weather was still pretty humid though. 

Cheeeers!

Larissa's grandmother made suchhhhh good foooood, omfg. 

Larissa's family was so nice and welcomed me with open arms. It made me kind of miss my family and wish we did more things like this back at home, instead of just always working, working, and working. Brazilian families are so tight-knit, it's really admirable. 

It's always been my dream (literally I dream about it at night) to swim to a little off-shore island. 

We walked around the town and got ice cream before we took naps and went out to a bar. 

This reminded me of how I took the beaches in San Diego for granted. But mostly, it reminded me how badly I want to visit Rio de Janeiro. 

The apartment was one sidewalk away from the beach. 

Yay, it was nice being near a dog again. 

Sunday, Feb 12 | Santos Drive-Through

On Sunday, I woke up around 8am before everyone else, so I decided to go jogging at the beach. It felt so nice to be by the ocean again. I eventually took off my nikes and went running barefoot in the water. The water was sooo warm, despite the cloudy weather. People were already setting up their umbrellas early in the morning. After jogging for an hour and half, I went back to the apartment to eat breakfast with everyone. 

We went on a car boat!

Waiting to cross the water to enter Santos, the neighboring beach from Guaruja.

On the way back to the city, it got really foggy. 

lots of favelas. 

Went to Sao Francisco banquet restaurant. 

It was almost like being in San Francisco. They played YMCA and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, gay music. 

Gnocchi, Risotto, and FRIED CHICKEN. omfg

blurry fried polentas, it tasted like gigantic corn french fries. 

Great weekend to go to the beach, I know. 

After arriving in Sao Paulo city, we went to Brito's friend's house to pick up a surfboard. She lived in this nice high-rise apartment that overlooked some of SP's wealthiest homes.

yay, busy busy.