Saturday, April 21, 2007

Big event coming up soon!

Coming up pretty soon, we have another trip to Florianópolis. This time it's not just to hang at the beach or anything like that. This time we're going for the "Terceiro Encontro de Escravidão e Liberdade".
I have been working on planning some events and things like that for everyone to participate in, so hopefully everything goes down well.
We don't get to do any presentations or anything this year, so that kinda sucks. I was looking forward to putting something together like last year, but this year I get to do some event coordination so that's cool by me.
I'm not sure yet where we'll be staying but whatever. I'm thinking about doing it old school and just showing up in Florianópolis and finding a place to stay once I get there. I have considered ditching the whole thing and just disappearing in the woods, but these are just personal issues I've been dealing with as of late that are making me think like that.
I'll do that once I get back to the US. Matt (from last year), and I are doing a three week hike of the Appalachian Trail. We're gonna start in Georgia and go up as far as we can, then go home.
Anyway that has nothing to do with Brazil. Umm, what does, what does? Ah yes, I'm eating mango right now!
As you can see, not much has been going on. I've been stuck in Curitiba with nothing to do, waiting for this Florianópolis event go come around. It starts May 2nd and goes until the 4th, but we will probably stay in the city for the whole week. I'm thinking about trying to find a little place to camp or something. I really need to be away from the city for a while before I go insane and start offing people 30 at a time. Too soon? Yeah, probably too soon.
Oh yeah I forgot, there is something awesome that happened recently. We bought plane tickets to visit a few places.
On June 25th we will be going to Salvador. Probably what we will do is go to São Paulo and stay for a couple days, then get on the flight to Salvador. We will be there until July 1st. We get to Rio de Janeiro on July 1st and are there until July 3rd.
I'm not a big fan of Rio but I understand the desire to see it, so I told Caroline if we go we should at least stay for a few days so we can make it worth it. Anyway, we'll be getting there on July 1st. We'll probably be tired, so we'll just go to a hotel or whatever and sleep, then we have all day July 2nd and most of the day July 3rd. That will be plenty of time to get on the metro and visit all the important places.
I really wanted to take a day trip to the National Park at Serra dos Órgãos but I don't think we'll be able to. It takes about two hours to get there and I can't be 100% sure of when the last bus comes back, so it looks like that will have to wait.
I'm just really psyched to be going back to Salvador. This time we're going to go to the Chapada Diamantina and try to get to some Forró parties. The end of June is when Festas Juninas goes on, so that should be nice.
I also got back in touch with Marcos to see how he was doing. Needless to say, I was kind of surprised. Apparently he has found a woman that got him whipped enough to make him settle down. He told me the two of them will be getting married sometime soon.
She studies the history of Mozambique for her master's, just like him. She also just got back from Mozambique, and both of them will be going there next year.
Kind of weird the way things work out. I am going to be applying for a Fulbright endowment to go to Mozambique next year to study human rights movements after the civil war there (that ended in 1992). Hopefully that works out or I will be mad. I really need to go to Africa. It's like the continent has been calling me for several years now, and what better way than to spend 10 months there. Definitely would be a nice experience.
Well folks, I believe that's all. I wil have more pictures and stuff coming soon. I need to remember to bring my camera when I go out at night with friends because those are the pictures I wanted to get the most of this year, but I haven't been doing a very good job of it. There will definitely be plenty of pictures from the event in Florianópolis and whatever else it is we do while there.
Okay people, hopefully you enjoyed this update. Take it easy and I shall speaketh to you all at a later moment in time!

1 comment:

Cindy said...

Are you really going to Mozambique?