Land Ho!

Long time, no talk, eh? Since I was on the ship for 14 days crossing the Atlantic, not much of importance came up to write about. Then, on November 7th, we arrived into Rio de Janeiro and everything got exciting.

Warning: I was in Brazil for 7 whole days, so this post might be a bit lengthy. I promise that it’s all interesting, though. Hopefully.

So, after 14 days of doing absolutely nothing, we pulled into Latin America. At 6:30am, about 300 of the kids could be found racing up the stairs to deck 7. At the top, we were rewarded with an incredible view. As the sun rose, the ocean glittered, just as it had for all 14 sunrises I saw while crossing. The difference was that this time the sun was lighting up some of the most incredible landmarks I’ve ever seen. On one side of the ship we could see Sugar Loaf Mountain and its smaller sidekick, and off in the distance on our other side was Christ the Redeemer, which proved to be even more massive than I had ever imagined. After the initial amazement wore off, we all retreated back into our beds, a place which we had all gotten very used to by the time we hit land again.

Kissing the ground as we got off the ship, we were intent on hiking up to Christ the Redeemer. Now I was well aware that it would be a difficult hike, and I was prepared. However, no one told us how difficult it would be to get there. Apparently it was going to be more challenging to get a driver to take us to the start point than it would be to actually hike the damn thing. After haggling for an hour, going in circles with cab drivers, pushy tour company reps, and random people on the street, Kelsey and I finally decided to give up, head back to the ship, and try to find a plan B. Little did we know, the ship was docked in a less than ideal spot and pretty much anything else we wanted to do was going to be equally as frustrating. So, feeling slightly defeated and honestly exhausted before it was even 11am, we slouched in our room, trying not to complain to one another but fully aware that we were both wearing our crabby pants.

Finally, we slapped each other in the face, realized that we were wasting precious time, and stomped out of the gangway. Of course, the ship had warned us about the crime in Rio. In fact, they had sent out a 7 page document that I prayed to God didn’t get sent to my mother, or else she would surely buy a plane ticket to Brazil and drag me back home. Essentially, the document promised that, if we weren’t extraordinarily careful, we’d probably be robbed at gunpoint. If we weren’t robbed, then we’d definitely be a victim of “express kidnapping”. If we didn’t fall victim to either of those things or get thrown in jail by the corrupt police, than we were at least guaranteed to be pick pocketed . (Spoiler alert: none of these things happened to me.) Needless to say, though, Kelsey and I had our guards up. She was even more skeptical than I, but she’s from a cute town out west and I’m from Chicago and I walk home past midnight with my pepper spray at the ready. Prepared is my middle name, so a little foreign crime wasn’t throwing me off too much. But what did throw me off was the lack of things to do downtown Rio. The city is sprawling-I mean huge. Chicago is huge, New York is huge, yada yada. But let me tell ya, Rio de Janeiro is actually huge. To make matters just a little more complex, the city is peppered with favelas. Slums facing incredible poverty, plagued with infamous violence, the favelas aren’t like anything I’ve ever seen before. I may say I’m poor, and by American standards I’m definitely low income, but I’ve never seen poverty like this. I’ve seen the projects (or what’s left of them) and I’ve seen TV shows showcasing the slums of various cities, but I don’t think anything could have prepared me for this. And lucky for us, our ship was docked right outside the entrance to a favela! (Reread the sentence where I say how incredibly dangerous favelas are.) Incredibly enough, this favela is, literally, right next to the downtown area of Rio, so as long as we stayed on the good side of the street, we would be okay. Unfortunately for us, my directional skills are limited to cities on the grid system, so we definitely wandered the wrong way once or twice. But by some stroke of luck, we eventually wandered right into the Museu de Arte do Rio!

The museum was incredible-and I’m usually not a “museum person.” The main exhibit was on the favela that we had mistakenly entered and how it came to be, with an emphasis on the slave trade. America is known, to Americans, as one of the worst possible places during the slave trade. But how many of us know about Brazil’s dark history? Easily the worst partaker in the slave trade, Brazil was known to be a hell on earth for any slave that ended up here. Whereas Americans would keep slaves for years upon years, usually until the slave was aged, Brazilians usually kept a slave just long enough to literally work him or her to death. Gruesome and eye opening, Kelsey and I spent over an hour walking through the small exhibit, constantly asking the museum staff to translate pictures to us. The next exhibit we visited was centered around the Brazilian education system, which is one of the poorest I’ve seen. On the last day in Brazil, I visited a few of the local schools with my professor, so instead of boring you twice with the details of their terrible system, I’ll save it for later.

After leaving the museum, Kelsey and I wandered around for another hour or so, navigating the busy streets like experts, searching desperately for lunch that wasn’t McDonald’s. Finally, we looked into one of the doorways and caught a glimpse of people eating, so we hesitantly walked in and were handed a paper. Turned out, it was a buffet style restaurant, where they weighed your meal and charged you by weight. With absolutely no idea what I was putting on my plate, I popped a few peptos and went to town on almost everything they had to offer, from sushi to fried cheese balls (I’m sure that’s the technical term). Afterwardss, I was sure I’d be sick, but my stomach is apparently made of steel now, so I was just fine!

The next day, Kelsey left for her Amazon trip, and I tagged along with Rose, Andrew, and Meredith, took the Metro (I seriously love metro systems, and it helped that Andrew was happily taking the lead), and visited Sugar Loaf at sunset. Sounds beautiful, right? It was! But about 5 minutes after reaching the top, fog rolled through and blinded me completely. The view was killed, but it was well worth it. The lights of Rio were incredible and I finally got a good look at how massive the city truly was. We sat up top for a while, soaking in how unbelievable it was that we were even there at all. The next day, we packed our things and said goodbye to the M.V. Explorer as it set sail for Salvador and we set out for our hostel on Copacabana. Oh, did I say on Copacabana? Yeah, that’s what the description said, too. So we walked to the beach, walked along it, and found the street our hostel was on. Taking a right, we assessed the street numbers and quickly realized we were quite far from our end goal. Sweating profusely and itching to get to some AC and some wifi, the 6 of us basically sprinted down Santa Clara to #304 and happily checked in. Turned out, Rose and I had a beautiful room with a California king bed and a little tiny twin, and our own private bathroom!! Considering how much we spent, I shouldn’t have been that surprised. The other girls with us, Meredith and Monica, had a beautiful room with a hammock and a shared bathroom, and Andrew and Alex had one bed and their own bathroom. At breakfast the next day, Rose and I casually mentioned that we both slept in the big bed and still managed not to touch. Alex and Andrew almost broke their necks as their heads snapped up. It was then that we realized that we had left a whole bed empty, while Andrew, who’s easily 6 foot 4 had to share a bed with Alex. Almost immediately, Alex declared that he would have a slumber party with us for the next 2 nights.

Rose and I visited Christ, which was immensely larger than I had expected, but just as crowded. To get there, we used the not so detailed directions from our hostel guy. Ending up on bus 583, we headed in what we hoped was the right direction. After over an hour on the bus, we finally hopped off, laughing at the strange and frightening drive, and high fiving that we conquered the bus system! After getting a ticket and waiting for our cable car, we soaked in the view, broke some rules and scaled the walls, took a few pictures, and made our way back down. It was incredible, but there was so much more to Rio that made this giant statue seem so small in comparison. Perhaps it would have more significance if I was particularly religious, but neither of us were, so we got more out of the cable car ride up than anything else.

The next day, we went hangliding. If you know me, you know that I’m stingy, so spending $150 to run into the sky wasn’t something I really thought I would do, but after seeing Meredith and Andrew’s pictures, we immediately called the company. What can only be described as the most casual phone call of our lives proceeded. Shrugging off how strange the whole thing was, we waited outside our hostel and at exactly 10am sharp, a car pulled up. No sticker. No professional looking t shirt. Just a guy with broken English who knew our names. Rose and I grinned at each other, because this whole trip was nothing short of strange, so we got into the car as our driver blasted Eminem and tried in vain to communicate with us. My fear of taxis escalated as we witnessed, and almost participated in, a nasty crash. I swear the car ride to hangliding was significantly more frightening than the actual flying in the sky. He took us to the beach where we got out and met Klaus, our hangliding instructor. We went into a little building, filled out a few forms, (they asked us our blood type and our passport number and I had to make up both, oops.) and got into Klaus’s pristine pickup. I documented Rose’s ever-changing emotions while we drove up the mountain. Visibly shaking, she asked to go first so I had the pleasure of watching her race to the end of a rooftop and catapult herself off the side of a mountain, desperately clutching to Klaus as she soared into the sky. Then I waited, and waited, and waited. I met a lovely Brazilian man named Leo, and we discussed pretty much everything for about an hour. He had learned English in Miami and loved America, particularly Hawaii and Colorado, but he hated how sheltered we were. At one point, I was explaining that I hated the vacation system America has. European countries and Australians all have insane vacation time packages. I’m talking forced, paid vacation time. Sometimes two whole months!! As I was talking, I saw him contemplating, and as soon as I came to my conclusion, he brought up a good point that I like to pretend isn’t true. Work isn’t necessarily the only reason Americans don’t travel. I meet 5 European travelers for every 1 American because we’re scared. We have this idea that the world is big and bad and scary. If we leave, we’ll surely lose our jobs. We’ll certainly be pickpocketed. We’ll definitely be forgotten back home. There’s a good chance we’ll fall victim to a serious crime, or find ourselves in a situation that we can’t escape from. And anyway, why see the world when we have America, right? Our society is so afraid that we’ll fall in love with what’s outside our borders that we built this fear around it. We go to work every day and maybe every few years we convince ourselves to go out of town for a week, to somewhere tropical with fruity drinks and beach chairs. Then we come back and wait a few years to do it again. Leo was onto something, and just then he, too, ran off the roof to my left and left me sitting with my thoughts on the side of a mountain.

Finally, Klaus returned for me! After a quick practice, he strapped me in and we walked to the platform. Counting down, I looked out and realized just how high off the ground I was. He reached “1” a lot faster than I expected, but I confidently ran, full speed alongside him, off of the platform and into the sky. We soared over Rio for almost 10 minutes. At one point, I asked him how it worked, and he promptly let go of the handle bar and calmly asked me to grab it. Teaching me how to steer, he let me hold the reins… until it was pretty clear that I wasn’t cut out for it and was about 30 seconds from running us into the side of a mountain. He took control back, and I happily let go. Stretching me arms out and feeling the wind through my fingers, I looked down at all of Rio de Janeiro; the favelas on top of the hills, just feet away from huge resorts and mansions with tennis courts. I saw the world famous beaches stretch out beneath me and Corcovado and Sugar Loaf next to me. Once again, soaring through the sky above a Latin American country that I never in a million years imagined I’d be visiting, I realized that I am, in fact, living the dream.

After I finished, I bought the pictures and video from my trip (Now I really am broke) and we hopped back in the car with our Portuguese friend. He sped through the confusing streets of Rio without getting in an accident, and safely returned us to our hostel. We quickly changed and headed to the beach. The sand was incredible and the beach was nearly empty, since peak season ended months ago. We found the rest of our friends, who were mostly just happy to see someone who they could make watch the bags while they played in the ocean. Taking turned watching the bags, I jumped at the first chance I got to go play in the ocean. The water was warmer than most of my baths, and the waves were bigger than anything Lake Michigan has ever offered me. We bodysurfed for hours, I swallowed more salt water than is probably healthy, and my bathing suit came off more times than I’d like to count, but in the end, I was just so stoked to be splashing my friends in the ocean in Brazil to even care. We eventually all made our way back to our towels, shared a few coconuts, and played soccer with a volleyball we bought from some guy on the beach. Panting and sweating bullets, we called it quits and the boys started up a game of volleyball with some locals while the girls talked and gossiped and drank our coconuts. When the volleyball game died down, Andrew asked Monica to lead us in some yoga, and we all made giant fools of ourselves on one of the most famous beaches in the world. Sitting in downward dog and covered in sand, we all laughed at ourselves as the locals from the volleyball game joined in. Eventually, the laughter died down, and Monica proved to be an amazing instructor. At some point, sitting in Child’s Pose, it hit me that I was doing yoga with some of my best friends on a beach thousands of miles from home. That’s pretty damn cool.

The girls eventually headed back to the hostel to shower and I stayed back with Andrew and Alex, playing a little more soccer and splashing around in the Atlantic until the sun started to set. Heading back, the boys decided they’d do the shopping and put together a little dinner for us. They dropped me off at the hostel and headed out. I showered and the girls and I eventually ended up sitting on the bed watching old Taylor Swift music videos and reminiscing on our ex-boyfriends, laughing at bad date stories, and rolling our eyes at our high school relationship trauma. In unrelated news, I’ve come to love Taylor Swift’s new album, and I really hope that it will forever remind me of sitting on a bed in Rio with 3 of my best friends, laughing over the most trivial things. After what seemed like an eternity, they returned and we all put our domestic hats on. Cutting up fresh mango, papaya, kiwi, bananas, and apples, we set the fruit next to the meats and cheeses they bought and poured ourselves some wine. Talking about absolutely nothing important, we laughed for hours and quickly finished the wine. By this time, it was almost time to head out for the night, so we all got dressed and headed toward the other hostel. Our night out was pretty uneventful (No Barcelona stories here). We finally headed to the club and spent hours dancing in a circle and showing off our most terrible and cheesy dance moves as the DJ made a dreadful mash up of Portuguese and English songs, none of which stayed on for longer than 45 seconds. We stayed for several hours, much longer than I had thought, and headed home to our hostel.

The next day, I was rudely awoken by Andrew pounding on our door and his gigantor limbs pouncing onto our bed like a 5 year old, bouncing up and down and throwing Rose and I off. Moving onto Alex’s bed, he happily reminded us that we had to wake up to get breakfast. I threw a pillow at him and then raced out to take advantage of the free cocoa puffs. We packed up, check out, and the girls headed to get a milkshake while the boys headed to the water. We reconvened at noon and hopped in our airport shuttle to head to Salvador.

Rose and Alex have a fear of flying and I’m a bitch, so I was poking a little bit of fun here and there. In hindsight, I’m afraid of taxis so I had no room to talk, but either way, I thought I was funny at the time. Regardless, Karma got the best of me. My seat was the last row of the plane. I sat, by myself, next to a couple that spent 3 hours smooching (yes, smooching. Loudly) and behind a guy who kept violently reclining his chair so that my knees would stab my chest. Then, to really punish me, the universe sent my arch nemesis back-a crying baby. The baby cried in the back of the plane for an hour straight, making sleep impossible. Dear Universe-I promise to never, ever make fun of anyone’s fears again.

After what seemed like an eternity, the plane touched down and the six of us headed out of the airport. Andrew, the Dad of the group, took charge and asked the information desk how to get back to the port. The six of us unanimously decided to take the public bus into town, costing us each less than a dollar. We hopped on, popped a squat in the back, and quickly realized we had no idea when to get off. As the bus drove and the sun began to set, we spent an hour driving through rural areas and favelas. Monica spent an hour with her head out the window, battling car sickness as we all tried to explain that there was no way 6 white kids could get off at any of these stops. An hour and a half passed and the sun had completely set. In the darkness, we drove alongside the ocean, and finally entered Salvador. As Monica turned to us and looked like she was on the verge of tears, the bus driver pointed to us and then pointed to the door. We dashed out and contemplated what to do next. Walking to the edge of the sidewalk, we could see the ocean… And in the distance, there was a little string of lights stuck between the top of two buildings. I’d know that string anywhere. High fiving each other, we raced back to the ship, which has come to feel more like home than anywhere else in the world.

After Rio, Salvador just didn’t compare. It probably didn’t help that we were all so exhausted from traveling. Kelsey, who returned from her Amazon trip the same night I came back, and I headed to the market, where I got the last of my souvenirs. Then the next day, we joined Semester at Sea and my favorite professor and headed to learn more about Brazil’s educational system. So, just to sum it up very briefly, Brazil’s compulsory education is from age 6-14 and it’s technically free. But while public education is entirely free, it also does a poor job of preparing students for the Vestibule, which is basically Brazil’s equivalent of the ACT. If a student does well on the Vestibule, they can go to any university they want, and the best universities are the Federal Public Universities (Essentially Brazil’s equivalent to Ivy League schools), and they’re 100% free. Seeing as so many of the public primary and secondary education did poor jobs preparing students, private schools popped up. With high costs, only the elite could attend. So these elite students pay big bucks to go to private schools until the Vestibule, then with their good scores, they can attend, for free, the federally funded public universities. Poorer students, on the other hand, attend public school until the test. Then, assuming they pass at all, their scores are too low to gain entrance into the public universities, so they are forced to come up with money to pay for a private university. Since they usually come from impoverished areas, they can rarely come up with the funds to pay for university, so they often end up working at super markets or gas stations. I have my own opinions on how Brazil should fix this, but that’s a whole other blog post.

We visited a public secondary school, which is proving to have a very successful model, and then we visited a primary school, located in a favela and serving an extremely poor community. Both visits were incredibly eye opening and humbling. From the first school, which had over 1,000 students, 4 passed the vestibular and made it to public university. Four. In comparison, that’s like 4 of the poorest kids from my school making it into Harvard or Stanford, so it is a truly amazing accomplishment. However, for us, if you don’t make it to Harvard or Stanford, there are hundreds of other options and in the end most of them lead to a career in whatever you want. In Brazil, if you don’t make it to public university, chances are you can’t afford private university, and you’re almost guaranteed to drop out and join the work force. As we walked through the favela at 10am, I noticed that all the jobs we reserve for high school kids (gas stations, super markets, etc.) were all filled with 30-40 year olds. Passing little hole-in-the-wall bars, men could be seen drinking liters of beer and shouting at us, already intoxicated before we had even had lunch.

We headed back to the ship, dehydrated and exhausted. Kelsey and I ate a quick lunch and immediately retreated to room 4122, turned on an episode of Friends, and fell asleep until dinner, when we walked up to deck six and waved goodbye to Brazil. While Salvador wasn’t my favorite city, I can’t wait to return to Latin America, and I’m already starting to plan my return.

And now begins another 7 days on the ship. After being on MV for 2 weeks straight, you’d think I’d be sick of this ship. Actually, I feel the opposite. With only 25 days left, I’m realizing how much I love this ship. Seeing this big blue boat in the distance, with its string of lights shimmering off the ocean, just makes me feel like I’m at home. Cabin 4122, where Kels and I stay up significantly too late talking about our past and our future, feels more like home than Chicago does right now. Waking up every day at 5:00am to work out, doing planks on deck seven while the sun rises over the ocean feel more normal than anything else. Eating lunch with my professor and then laying out and tanning before class is just a normal day. I can’t imagine saying bye to all of this in 25 days, so I’ll just focus on the week ahead.

I promise not to go 3 whole weeks without an update ever again. My sincerest apologies. But also, if you ever want to talk to me, PLEASE EMAIL ME. As much as I love the ship, it gets awfully boring, and emails help immensely. Adriana.kille.fa14@semesteratsea.or