Just Keep Swimming: Carnaval is Coming to Town

Thursday was full of even more adventures. The elementary students had their Carnaval Ball. The students were too excited to focus most of the day. They dressed into costumes of Disney princesses, super heroes, and cartoon characters, and went down to the cafeteria to dance and celebrate for 30 minutes. There was loud music and bags upon bags upon bags of confetti everywhere. This would be a wonderful tradition to bring back to the US! After school, our teacher friend Felipe took us around town again to show us some more local foods. We tried açai and guaraná juice. Açai is like a purple berry that they blend up with ice to make a smoothie. The guaraná is pure sugar juice that we watched them squeeze straight from a piece of sugar cane. The gym teacher at our school also told us about free dance lessons he offers for staff and parents on Thursday evenings at 7:30. Because it's Carnaval weekend and dancing is so fun, of course we decided to go. He taught us the first couple steps of Samba dancing. I'm looking forward to more lessons in the future! As we stepped out of the school, there happened to be a bloco right on our street. Carnaval is an annual festival in Brazil held from Friday to the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. Many people travel or stay to enjoy parties and celebrations all over the city called blocos. They are essentially large blocks of streets blocked off with dancing, music, street vendors, and crazy costumes. It's very common to see men dressed up as women and to see women with wild assortments of ribbons, flowers, and colorful costumes everywhere. The bloco we saw was very small. We met a couple friends there who offered to take us to a well-known pastel restaurant. Pastel (pronounced pashteo) is a deep fried pocket filled with just about anything you can imagine, including chocolaty goodness.

If you stay longer than 30 days in Brazil, you are required to get registered with the federal police. They give you a date to go and get your papers signed withing those 30 days. However, they typically give you a date outside of the 30 days which means you have to go and pay a fine. To avoid the fine, we had to go back to the airport on Friday morning and schedule another date. Luckily we got through the line within a couple hours and rescheduled our date for March 19th. After that ordeal, our exhaustion finally caught up to us. We spent the evening napping, waking up to watch cartoons and eat, and then going back to bed :)