leaving the pais tropical : (

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Itacare turned out to be everything that it promised: a real surf town with beaches with waves and surf boards and easy going people and some hole in the wall restaurants with cheap 2 foot long subs for about 2 dollars. i rented a board for 5 days and was able to catch some killer tubes, dude. it was so radical that my one hand occacionally gets stuck in the surfer hand-sign position (only pinky and thumb extended)whicch ecxplainsf why i cannt typeep sow weell nowe. i did have some trouble with staying out in the water for more than four hours since i am not used to swimming that long against powerful waves, or swimming at all for that matter, and after a few hours i would get dehydrated and my muscles in my legs would start to cramp up. and the surfer rash was especially good this time around, rubbing off most of the skin in the center of my chest.

one other thing to note: by the end of the week, we met enough locals and other tourists that every time when walking down the main street, we would bump into and start talking to one or two of our "friends", much like you might in a small town that you grew up in and never left. always someone, everytime i walked down the street.

sao paulo: on my way back to argentina, i decided to stop at a friends house in sao paulo, since he invited all of us to come see his city. i was a bit sick though when i arrived after eating some home made icecream from a street vendor i befriended in itacare; i really thought about throwing the ice cream away or spitting it all over his face, but did not want to offend, so i ate it with a smile. anyways, due to illness i took it very easy in sao paulo (in terms of eating too much or going out at night), but i really got to see a very different part of brazil. sao paulo is so different than any other place i went in brazil, that it is like its own country. in fact it resembles new york in two obvious ways; it is the financial capital of latin america and has a "wall street" and the food you order in a restaurant comes within 10 minutes, something unheard of everywhere else i have been in all of south america. the people here also are much more cosmopolotian and have similar lifestyles of new york in terms of working hard and playing hard.

after sao paulo, i left brazil, and am sad to see the pais tropical go, though feel lucky that i made it out of there with nothing too serious happening (we met some tourists whose ferry to an island in brazil got robbed by pirates!! they stole everything). i am back in buenos aires for a few days before moving west, and then north to bolivia. pido la paz hasta el proximo episodio.

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