So far we have stayed in Medellín the longest this trip. Our idea was to learn Spanish there, so we stayed two weeks. Something threw a wrench in our plan. Not a big wrench, but it was definitely disappointing and depressing to me and my family. Now, since you’re dying to find out, I’m just going to move on to something else.

Medellín is bigger than we expected. The city is tucked into a valley of mountains. I felt like we were in a little cave inside the world. This little cave used to be dark, scary and violent. Medellín was the most dangerous city in the world. Now, Medellín is far from its past. Medellín is now filled with delicious Colombian cuisine, art, views and many friendly people.

Now, about that wrench; it was the flu. My mom just had a cold but colds spread fast in our house. I soon caught it. But, on the first day we realized that mine was not the cold. I had a bad flu. I threw up three times the first day. Each time I threw up it was terrible. I just kept asking and asking when it was going to stop. I learned that you can’t be sure how many times you’re going to throw up but you can dare to think that you will only throw up for one day. We had recently been in a malaria zone so my dad started worrying that I had malaria, which totally freaked me out. It was chaos. My mom didn’t think I had malaria and was trying to calm me down. We reached the hospital and we waited in the waiting room. I was feeling horrible. We finally went in after what seemed like forever. They gave me some medicine and I started to feel better. They also delivered the news that I did not have malaria. But, the only downside of going to the hospital is they made me drink Pedialyte, which is like Gatorade and is high in electrolytes. Electrolytes are supposedly good for you after you loose a lot of energy when you throw up. It was grape flavored and I swear if you took a big gulp of hand sanitizer with grape juice in it that’s what Pedialyte would taste like. I was really glad it wasn’t malaria but the flu wasn’t much fun. While I was sick I also developed a phobia for throwing up. Every once in a while I would think about throwing up and I would get so scared I was going to throw up I would start to gag and cry. My mom would calm me down though and I did get better.

Before and after I got sick we went to learn some Spanish; that’s the reason we came to Medellín. We hired a tutor and met her at a café every day for an hour. I enjoyed these sessions, but my brain got fried. I would be concentrating so hard that I wouldn’t blink, and then at the end I would blink and my eyes would fill with tears. It would look like I was crying. Our tutor would send us homework and then the next day before class we would study it.

Food was what I missed most while I was sick. While I was sick, I planned a big food day for when I got better. It would go like this: bagel and lox for breakfast, then pizza for lunch at a delicious pizza place we went to before I got sick, then I would try ice cream at a place our tutor recommended, and then finally for dinner we would go to a fancy vegan restaurant called KAI that we also went to before I got sick. When my big day arrived, we headed out to the Hija Mia Café to get my bagel and lox. My mouth watered. It finally arrived and I took a bite. The saltiness, sweetness and sour all mixed in; it ran down my throat. I smiled a big smile. My food day had begun. We ended up not going to the pizza place, but we did go to the ice cream place called Elixor. There was a flavor called black ice cream. It was ash flavored. I’m not joking it was disgusting, but my dad got it. I got coconut with honey drizzle, and it was delicious. We also ended up not going to KAI either. We went to a place called Modongos, which has a specialty called modongo. We actually tried to go to Modongos before but I had one of my phobia incidents on the way there, and then I just wanted to go back and sleep. Modongos was yummy. I was just glad I could have my food day.

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NEXT STOP: BOGOTA

We were only in Salvador for one day so we didn’t get to explore much. We went to a church with golden colored walls and gargoyles. We wanted to go to a street where there were supposed to be ladies doing a traditional dance but it started raining and no one was dancing. We decided to go have lunch. We went to a fancy place and had delicious food.

To get to our Air BnB we had to go up a gigantic elevator like a gondola to go up the hillside. My biggest fear is elevators because we once got stuck in one. So this was like my biggest nightmare. It ended up being ok. Later, we found out that it was the world’s first mechanical elevator. We stayed at the Bahia Cafe Hotel. I really liked that hotel. When we woke up in the morning, we had a huge buffet breakfast with pastries, salami, make your own parfait and a bunch of things we had never heard of before.

Morro de São Paulo

General Impressions

This doesn’t have to do with general impressions but is about how we got to Brazil. The flight to Brazil was the longest flight yet: 10 hours 30 minutes. I watched 4 movies and 3 episodes of my favorite tv show. I also did school work and lots of starring into space. Ok, Morro de São Paulo is a little beach town off the coast of Brazil. To get here from the nearest airport you had to do an assortment of transportation, like this: taxi, ferry, bus, boat. Let me tell you, it’s not that easy. The ferry was blazing hot, and once it was getting very bumpy and a baby couldn’t hold his cookies. When we got off the bus, someone told us it wasn’t the right stop but the bus driver said it was. We kept on going, following some people from the bus. We asked them for clarification if this was the way to the boat terminal. They all said no. There was one taxi driver there. It was our only option because the bus was already driving down the road. We got in the car. The seats were torn and the paint on the taxi was coming off. The taxi driver accelerated and sped us down to the terminal at what felt like 100 miles per hour. Once we got there, we were stuffed into a speedboat. I had never been on a speed boat but when we started it was the best time ever! We finally reached Morro de São Paulo.

Morro de São Paulo was so awesome. It’s a very small town but I wouldn’t have been more happy had it been larger. The water was a brilliant turquoise blue and was never cold. Every day we would walk or, for me, skip down to the beaches and have an awesome day. Yes, there were multiple beaches. In fact, there were five.

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First beach

First beach was not touched by us more than to walk across to get to second beach. It could have been cool, and we will never know, but it really just didn’t look as interesting as the other four beaches.

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Second beach

Second beach was the ultimate party beach and by far my favorite. People were always there partying, laughing and having fun. There were restaurants alongside that could provide needed shade and were a good place to get piña coladas and coconut water. Also, there were courts for a Brazilian sport called fut volei. It’s like volleyball but played with your feet.

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Third beach

Ughhh! Third beach was such a disappointment. We read on the internet that it was great for swimming. I don’t know why they wrote that, maybe just to give it something. However, it was simply a parking place for rusty boats and, in general, the beach wasn’t as clean as the others.

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Fourth beach

We never really stopped at fourth beach. We could tell it was popular but we were in a hurry to get to fifth beach. And at high tide 19/20ths of the beach was immersed in water. Although, we did get coconut water there once.

Fifth beach

I think my parents liked fifth beach the best. Fifth beach was very long so we never explored all of it. At low tide a tide pool formed and their were tons of different kinds of fish in the pool. They would swim around you and you could feed them. My mom and I once explored further down the tide pool, when we reached the end we realized there were two little silver fishes swimming around us. We started heading back. I turned around to look back, and to my surprise the same two fishes were following us! They followed us all the way back to the start. In some parts on fifth beach, the water temperature was blazing hot like a hot tub. There were also horses pulling carts, galloping across the beach. We had one spot on the beach that we particularly liked; there were no rocks and it was calm. The first day we arrived at fifth beach, we had sought out this spot and had stayed there until the fruit carts started packing up. Finally, we got out of the water. We started heading back to fourth beach, but like I had said in the paragraph above, at high tide 19/20ths of the beach was immersed in water, not calm water but big waves slamming and crashing into the bank. There was no other way to go. Razor wire was at the top of the bank. So, what did we do? We took off our flip flops and headed in. We could all touch, but when the waves came crashing down they came uncomfortably close to my head. We finally made it through. Next time, we left before the fruit carts started heading in.

More

The dominant language in Brazil is Portuguese. One time when we where at second beach a boy came up to me and motioned to the fut volie courts. I followed him and he got another one of his friends and we attempted to play. He could do a bicycle kick but I could not. When he went home I tried practicing the bicycle kick. Then I got my first injury of the trip. I hiper extended my elbow. I was doing a bicycle kick and landed on my arm. It was better though the next day.

The inside of the city was very small. There was music and food at night. We also had a delicious meal multiple times called moqueca. It was a fish stew that was limey, salty and delicious.