Back to classes and life on the boat, although after four days on the Amazon I couldn’t be happier to get back to the MV Explorer with beds and showers!

Let’s backtrack a bit. So we’ve had 3 days of each of our classes so far. I’m really enjoying my classes and its kind of fun to be back to small classes like it was in high school. Some of the people on this trip are complete idiots and say jaw-droppingly dumb shit all the time... Basically if you can pay for the trip and have a 2.0 you’re in... Luckily, there are definitely some really smart people too. The classes give us a ridiculous amount of reading, but since we are stuck on a boat anyway I’ve actually been doing most of it (shocking, I know).

I was getting a little down on the social situation on the boat for a couple of days there, but have fully recovered. My roommate was a little too attached for me considering how different we are and what we like to do. I was also getting somewhat frustrated by the booze-cruise mentality of a lot of the students too. There’s 3 hours period where a bar opens and sells Bud Light cans for $3.50 each and we are limited to 4 a night. A good amount of people have been spending the $14 to get the 4 beers every night... That should be a nice bill at the end of the trip. Luckily, I’ve been able to find some cool people and have a good time. My roommate and I now have a nice balance of having breakfast together once and awhile, but having separate friends. It’s working for us.

We got into Salvador, Brazil on the 7th. I spent the first day exploring the city, which is extremely poor and dirty. Very few people speak English, but my Spanish was able to get the group I was traveling with around okay. We to lunch in a place that had amazing food but took about 2 hours to make it! It’s the little things like customer service that you forget to appreciate in the U.S. Luckily the food was so good that it mostly made up for it. I was still frustrated. That night we went out to the bars on the beach. One of my friends speaks some Portuguese so we were able to get around a lot easier. We started out (after a 6 person $10 taxi ride) at a small bar kind of hidden away. There’s a type of liquor here made with sugar called 51 and a popular drink is a lot of it mixed with crushed limes and other things we couldn’t identify. It tasted like a mixture of a Margarita and a Mojito and is very strong. After downing a few of those and watching a bit of the football (soccer) game we decided to move on. Our next bar choice was the one that all the other SAS kids were wasted at. There we got a few liters of beer and people watched our classmates. I was surprised how drunk people were willing to get in a foreign country. Not to say I was sober... but some people couldn’t walk on their own and puking their brains out before trying to get back on the boat.  The bars were fun and we really enjoyed laughing at our classmates. There was a large group, about 15 kids, that got locked into a club they went to and was forced to pay over $200 each (one girl had to pay $750) just to be let out. The police in Brazil are really corrupt too, so they had to just kiss that money goodbye. This was just another example of why you shouldn’t get blacked out drunk in one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

Anyway! The next day I left for the Amazon, which is completely across the country. After a long morning of bus rides and airplanes, we made it to our boat. The boat was pretty little and the two floors. The bathrooms went right out into the water and the showers came directly from the river... We all slept in hammocks on the top floor. We went on a long hike in the jungle and were introduced to all these natural medicines and things that the US and Europe imports to create things that we buy all the time. We got to take pictures with snakes, alligators and sloths that our guide caught or people owned. The ducks in the Amazon look like duck-chicken hybrids and it became an ongoing joke between me and later the whole boat with our guide. Near the end of the week he finally caught one for me to take a picture with, it was probably a highlight of the trip. I now want to one day own a Duck-Chicken as a pet. We got to visit a few villages and beaches. After swimming in the River Negro (which meets with the Amazon but strangely doesn’t mix), you were kind of covered in this thin layer of mud, but it was worth cooling off.

When we got back from the Amazon, after a very long journey back, I explored Salvador a little more on my own. I’ve found I’m a bit more of an adventurous traveler than some of the people I’ve traveled with so far so I wanted to check out some stuff on my own. Don’t worry I think I’ve found some others to travel with in future countries. Back on the boat and back to class today. I’ll be in Namibia in a week. I’m looking into either 4x4’s through the desert or sky-diving, we’ll see what I can pull together.

Miss and love you all!

Shabbat Shalom!
Fal Fal