Day 1

Hi everybody! I arrived at Jeffry and Helen's place last night after a long long journey. My plane left from Amsterdam at 10.05 so I had to check-in at 8 o'clock. Having dropped off my baggage I hugged my parents goodbye and went on to the passport control. My ticket stated that I had to go to gate E24 and I thought: how far away could that be? Well, it was the other end of the airport so muito bem I started my walk. While on the plane I met a young man and woman, Humberto and Fabiana and we had a very nice time on the plane. They are Brazilian so we talked English and French and they were really nice to talk with! Made the 11 hour flight much more bearable. After that flight I had a stop at São Paulo for 4 hours. It was hard to find my way there because nobody speaks English. When I found my way I still had 3 hours to kill and I spent them walking around and I had some tea. To be critical too: São Paulo is a mess. The Fifa World Cup is going to place a part of the matches at São Paulo and they're not even ready for it. They had years and years of thinking this out, but didn't realise their plans. Muito doido. My second flight lasted only 54 minutes and when I arrived at Belo Horizonte Jeffry, Helen, Hugo (Helen's son) and Hugo's cousin picked me up and Hugo's cousin drove us home. If you think it was a good trip home: it wasn't. The streets are a mess at Belo Horizonte and it goes up and down and up and down, people don't care about others, they just drive where they want to and the roads are bad. Really bad. It's as if i'm in a whole new world in here, but it's a beautiful world full of pure nature.

After being awake for 24 hours I did a good job only sleeping 6 hours. I took a shower and unpacked my suitcase, had some breakfast and me, Jeffry and Helen went to the supermarket. Jeffry also showed me around a bit of town and the school. When we went back home at the apartment I went to bed again, to catch up some sleep from the day before. After an hour or so we went to pick up Livia from the busstation, Livia is Helen's daughter who visits us this week. When we arrived at the apartment again we had lunch. It's usual to eat warm food at noon, cold food such as bread in the evening. Helen prepared rice, feijao (bruine bonen) and delicious meat with unions. After lunch I proceeded to learn some Brazilian Portugese grammar and had a facetime conversation with Jochem. Later went to get some ice cream at some place nearby. It's not like Venezia! Here you get the ice cream yourself and you weigh it at the counter. It was delicia!
While i'm writing this blog at the moment i'm sitting on the couch, door to the balcony open, looking at the beautiful open sky. Today was a good day.

Tchau!