Arcos

So the way I'm going to be posting these blogs is one post per city because the term day or night no longer has any meaning...

It's 7:10p.m. when the bus to Arcos arrives. We get on the bus armed with a backpack, a suitcase and enough cash to get us anywhere in a 1000 km radius in Brazil by bus. After the 5 hour bus ride, we finally arrive and are greeted by Jose in his small 30k people city. As we walk down what seemed to be there main street, he tells us that we won't be able to stay at his place for lack of furnishings and suggests a hotel for us to stay in. As we get settled in, we find that we need a bottle opener so Jose goes to his place (15min away) while Susan and I walk in the opposite direction(15min away) to buy another bottle of wine, some chips, and a bottle of water. It's around 1:30a.m. When we all finally get back to the hotel with all of our party supplies. We drink good (and bad) wine as we talk about the perks and downsides of being an American in Brazil. We talk about funny experiences, shitty times, plans for the future and how peach wine has too much sugar in it and that gas stations need better wine selections. At around 330 in the morning, Jose takes off to his place for the night seeing how we were all going to wake up quite early the following day.

The alarm sounded at around 745 in the morning, not fun when you stayed up until 3 drinking wine the previous night. I quickly smoke a cigarette as fast as possible so that the nicotine will at least sustain my consciousness until I can get my hands on some coffee or some other kind of natural or artificial stimulant. At about 830 in the morning, Jose joins us for breakfast telling us how his first class of the day was. We eat a feast of breads, cheeses, juices, coffees, hams, and I almost ate an entire papaya. The first item on the schedule was to figure out how we were going to get to the next city. So we head to the bus station and get an idea of when the busses were and there cost. We then go to CCAA, the place where Jose teaches English. We meet the staff and hold a conversation class with one of the students. Susan and I leave a little early because we need to check out of our hotel,(regardless of weather or not we stayed another night didn't matter, we were going to at the very least change hotels) on the way, we see Nayara, one of our friends from São João. We "command" her to join us to the hotel for check out. We pack our bags, pay the bill and head back uptown. We meet up with Jose and the four of us go out for lunch. After lunch, we go to the gas station to start drinking (yes, in the middle of the day) We go through something like 10 beers or something and then head back to the bus station to get everything down for sure. We end up buying our ticket for that night to a city called Formiga and then from Formiga, we would go to Passos, the city where my friend Pedro lives. After getting everything set and paid for, Nayara leaves to go back home and Jose, Susan and I start heading in the direction of Jose's place. Along the way, we buy another two bottles of wine, some bread, some cheese, and I stop at a LAN house(almost an internet cafe) to send pedro an email that we would most likely be there around midnight or one in the morning that night. We get to Jose's place, pop open a bottle and start munchin, reading quotes from On The Road. How fitting I thought to myself… We then head back to the bus station and wait to catch our bus. So the way that this bus trip was going to work was a bit awkward… We were to take the first bus and get off about an hour later at this gas station outside of the city of Formiga and wait for about 2 hours for the next bus to come. When it came, we were supposed to flag it down or else it wouldn't stop and then it would take us directly to Passos. Well, unfortunately, as any human being would be, we were a bit tired from having drank all afternoon and only getting a few hours of sleep the night before and so we fell asleep on the bus. Even though I told the bus driver twice that we needed to get off at that stop, apparently we missed it and ended up the middle of Formiga at 9 at night. One of the things I will defiantly miss about Brazil is how friendly and helping the people are here. As I wake up in the bus and ask where we were and if we had gone too far, two other people realized my situation, after I got done talking to the bus driver, they told me that all I would need to do is to wait for one of the city buses named for that place and it would take me there before my second bus. One of them decided that she would wait with us to make sure that we get the right one. As we waited, she told me that she was a law major and she had been visiting a Japanese friend of here's in Arcos. She also talked about the best places in the south of Brazil were to go if we had the time to check them out. So we got on the bus, got to this extremely remote gas station, waited for another hour, flagged down the bus and we were off to Passos.