Guaramiranga

Yes I'll ad mit it. I spent a long easter weekend camping, (eek!) in the mountains (eek!), three hours away from the closest beach. And here's the strange thing, I actually liked it! The weather was cold (and yes I believe that in the 60's is cold, especially given how hot it's been-90's- since I got here). Yes I wore my beanie, but other than that I was unprepared for the cold weather, which led me to buy this super sexy coat out of the back of a brazilian truck for 10 reais.

This easter weekend trip was a Fulbright get-a-way. A time for the four of us Fulbrighters based out of Fortaleza to spend a weekend hanging out, speaking a bit of english (finally!) and swapping crazy stories of living in Brazil. So let's introduce the characters for this crazy weekend in the mountains.

Here is Mike, (brazilians pronounce it Mik-ey, which is how I hear it in my head when I mention his name). Mike is a Fulbright MTV-scholar, which means he gets to write a blog for MTV about his Fulbright work. Check it out here.

So Mike is studying Forro music in Ceará, his research is entitled, Climate, Culture and Cancao, Drought and Forro music in Ceara Brazil.

Basically he gets to interview musicians and listen to music for his Fulbright. Not too bad eh?

Next we have Ross. (or as Brazilians sometimes call him, Hoss, because the R is kind of pronounced as an "H" in portuguese here). In this photo we have Hoss imitating his favorite animal as a child.....ok here's a hint...it is a sea creature.....here's another hint....it's a four letter word rhyming with teal....yes SEAL. you guessed it. Ross is studying Agro-energy Development and Social Inclusion in Northeastern Brazil.

Yes this sounds fairly complex to me too, but I think it has to do with planting crops for bio-fuels. Forgive me Ross if I've botched this up and this in no-way related to what you are doing.

The third Fulbrighter in our weekend get-away to the mountains is Colin. He teaches English at a community/technical college in Fortaleza. This weekend was also Colin's 23rd birthday. Colin's favorite childhood animal was a lemur, although he refused to pose as a lemur for his photo.

And we've got me. yours truly, author of the blog. see mom, I'm alive and well in my adventures in Brazil.

Guaramiranga is about 3 hours away from the coast into the interior of the state of Ceará. Despite my horror at being so far away from the coast, there were tons of fun things about Guaramiranga. One of which was the silly decorations and people dressed up as rabbits walking around for Easter.

So we traveled up the mountains by car, Mike has a car, and three hours later we arrived in a cooler climate. While we were there for two days we hiked and played around in the numerous waterfalls the region is known for.

This photo below is of the Dangerous Waterfall, the biggest and largest (?) in this area.

Here's a photo of the boys doing their favorite childhood animal. Colin-the lemur. Mike-the sloth and Ross- the seal! I was busy being the seahorse and taking the photo in the background.

Fast fact: Portuguese word for waterfall = cachoeira (cashew-era)

One strange an interesting thing that we saw throughout the weekend were these life-like scarecrows or dolls that had writing all over their faces. We saw them sitting on the side of roads, hanging out of windows, and underneath windshield wipers on moving cars. We finally asked what these things were, and it turns out that they represent Judas. Everybody creates their own, hangs it in visible places and then on the saturday between Good Friday and Easter people get together and burn them. I think as punishment because Judas betrayed Jesus. What an intense Easter tradition.

Never-the-less we went out for a nice dinner on Colin's birthday, at this cute little restaurant on the side of a cobblestone street. We had a delicious bottle of wine and a free taster of cachaça at the end of the meal. Another super special treat for Colin's birthday was the pasta festival! Although we didn't see much pasta on the menus or on the streets free to eat. So this aspect of the festival remains sort of a mystery to us. And just in case you thought we didn't organize any music for Colin, the festival sponsored an electric violin concert! Yeah! So we spent some quality time rocking out to song's like Final Countdown and Abba's Dancing Queen on electric violin. Yes that's right, if you click on those links, those songs are played on an electric violin. wow. If that's not the best birthday present, then I don't know what is?!