Dear readers,

Praise yourselves happy torecieve news from us, because in this retarded village were we are currently residing,the era of computershasn't begun yet.

A while ago Carlos, me and my wart checked out our São Paulohostel and thanks to my IT skills we got a discount for our stay! They had a computer running on Ubuntu that was 'broken' according to some IT geeks, but in one way or another I managed to fix it and the hostel embraced my skills with this kind reward.

Then left this Gigapole for the nice colonial town Paraty. Unfortunately the buscompany lied to us about the length of the ride, so we arrived at 3am at the therminal without a map of the village. We decided to set up camp there for the next few hours until the sun and noisy travelers would wake us up. This time don't imagine a therminal like those on previous pictures. In Paraty it looked more like a shed then a21th century airport.

In the morning we discovered how pretty Paraty was and even better was our hostal! The barely awake nightguard showed us our room, this was strangely enough located in another building further in te street and even more dissapointing was that we had to sleep in a garage converted room! All happiness suddenly vanished.

The first day we wandered a little bit around town, but because we are about right underneath the sun, the heat was almost not bareable and shadow was non-existent in these cobblestone streets. The rest of the afternoon we spent under water waiting for the sun to set. The hostal was full of friendly travellers.(I met my first travellers from Alaska! I think I only miss Hawai and maybe one or two other states!) With a bunch of them we decided to go visit an orangery, gorope swinging, cliff diving, rock sliding and visit a cachaça distillery the next day. Put theseactivities in reverse order and you can imagine how fun the sliding, swinging and diving was!

That night we went (again) to a pre-carnival party, and all the following nights until today too. Carnival is more thanfive days of Carnival alone. It starts weeks before and ends weeks after theactual five days. (which will start now friday at midnight!)

The next day we went visiting a little town nearby called Trinidade where we could go to the beach or go to the beach, so we went to the beach.. Luckily we had two very cool Israeli girls in our company and we had an amazing day! We had our first lessons of Hebrew. We can fluently count until ten and that's it for me. But it is about the same as learning Mandarine Chinese, the words just make no sense. The busride home was the best ever, it waslike a never ending roller coaster with crazy zero-gravity moments. From time to time the G-force swung us on our neighbours, which was not that unpleasant because it was a group of Argentinian girls. The next 36-hours were filled with walking, harbour swimming, and more pre-carnival.

Sadly we left our Jewish friends at 5am and moved on to Rio de Janeiro. We were just here fortwo hours to wait for our bus to São João del Rei, so wedid not leave the therminal. While leaving Rio we had a quick glimpse of'El Christo Redentor' on top of his hill from the bus.

To help future travellers among you with the language barrier that we are encountering, Brazilians have sometimes very funny or strange pronounciations of words. For example Rio is pronounced 'Hio'. And if you want to be cool and say: 'I am dancing hip hop on my flip flops', here they make this sound like: 'I am dancing hippy hoppy on my flippy floppy's'. Now imagine 50cent saying that and you see how cool he would look. You can also try to guess the following band names pronounces in Brazilian Portuguees: Hedgy Hodgy Chili Peppers or Ledgy Zeplin.

Another thing about the language barrier that irritate us is the fact that sometimes we are told that our Portuguees is very good and sometimes we have the hardest times to get people to understand us. An example of my latest and worst attempt to a conversation with a mature woman. I was asking her where the a certain square was because there was a Bloco there that night. (A Bloco is a neighbourhood pre-carnival party. Here there's one every night.)

So I started to ask her where 'Sqare,Skweir,Squre,Suare,... X' was in town.I did not know theword for square, soIguessed at it. If you would ask this in English, they would immediately know what you mean, as long as you pronounce the name of the square right!?! Here they don't, so our attempt to a converstion went on. I asked it in every different way saying that it's not a street(this word I know), but something rectangular that is not a street. Alas, it did not work out so I gave up. Five minutes later I tried again and then suddenly there was a light in her eyes and she said: 'Oh, you want to go to square X where there is a Bloco tonight??' For a moment you try to stay calm and not kill the illiterate woman. She just pronounced it the same as I did the last15 minutes! This is a village, not a city, so there aren't 20 squares in town! And this is not the first time thatwe are lost in translation.

Apart from that, São João is a lovely town with too many churches. Our lodging is ahouse that beats all Brasilian prices! In exchange for that low price we get to sleep in a kind of retirement home (that calls itself a Poussada)for mentally disfuntional people who stare at you like the Google-Eyes add-on. There is a woman that lies in her bed all day long, one that wonders through the corridors with her wide-open eyes and also a man that watches 24/7 television in the living room without moving.

Yesterday we went visiting the beautiful town Tiradentes with its picture-perfect houses and churches. The whole region (Minas Gerais)is full of these rich towns, because many years ago this was one of the most important gold digging regions on our planet. The names of the towns are quite funny and referring to that too: Ouro Preto(Black Gold), Diamantina, Divinópolis, Teresópolis, ... The region is also known for its waterfalls, and the wrongly scaled map from the tourist info in Tiradentes showed one just out of town. As I said, it was wrongly scaled and it was a serious hike out of town to get there. Carlos was hungry and constantly naggingabout his low blood suar level that I gave in and at 100m from the falls we went eating in a bar. For $5 the woman served us an imperial dinner that we downed in no-time listening to the sound of the sky falling on the roof. As you can guess, we never made it to the falls. There was a kind man in the bar that proposed to take us back to São João. (Yes, there are very friendly people here!)

In São João the tourist information was the worst ever. They had no folders or mapsto hand out and could only speak a kind of Portuguees that we don't understand. Luckily when we asked for info about the surrounding towns in the main church in town, immediately three people strated running around and looking for papers and addresses that could help us! The sons of the Lord are and will always be the most helpfull people.

On this religious note, we are going to end and start thinking about the five next days of most intense Carnival of our lives. We hope all goes well at the other side of the Atlantic!

Shalom v Haava! (Peace and love)

C. & G. on the road!

PS: For those who aren't my virtual friends on Facebook and did not yet see our pictures, check out the following links and tell me if it works! If the IT God is favorable to us, there might be new pictures online today!

Uruguay: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=140752&id=634868429&l=5b9398d46b Brasil (part1): http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=142687&id=634868429&l=17ae13d2ea