We've spent the last three days in a medium sized beach town called 'Floripa' - there isn't much to say apart from that we've done some cool activities and been out a few times at night on well organised joint events between all the Floripa hostels. Below (see bottom) is us waterfall jumping, sandboarding and chilling (we also did windsurfing but didn't get any photos)
Anyway, seeing as there's not a lot to write about I want to expand upon what Nick said in the last blog about the upcoming World Cup and Olympic Gamescin Brazil. Now, we've had an excellent trip so far, but the reality is that it hasn't exactly been helped by...well...Brazilians.
Not wanting to generalise, I want to clarify that this was only our experience and could be totally different for others. However, it seems that Brazilians are actually quite like the English - a bit cold, unfriendly and only speak their native language! Between Nick and I we actually speak three languages - English, Spanish and French - unfortunately very few Brazilians appear to speak any of these, even though Spanish and Portuguese are supposedly (grammatically) similar. Also, as I spoke about last year, I believe that English is much easier language to get a grasp of than those two Hispanic ones - and with Brazil hosting a global audience over the next few years, it is surprising that more emphasis hasn't been put on foreign languages.
When talking to one of the rare breed of multilingual friendly Brazilians about the language issue, it was largely brushed off as a side point. On the contrary, if the World Cup was hosted tomorrow, we can guarantee that this issue would cause horror stories (in conjunction with the fact that one in every two taxi drivers don't know where they're going or don't even turn up when ordered, pickpockets are widespread during high season and Jewish Mean Time is taken to a whole new level). It's not hard to imagine Spain waiting on the pitch for England in the semis while our team coach has been taken on a detour up Sugarloaf mountain. Actually, that would never happen - we've got no chance of making the semis.
In fact, as I write this we've just gone through the airport in which we were asked to write our emergency details on a scrap of paper (why do they need them so badly all of a sudden??) and at the gate the message went from 'please wait' immediately to 'last call', causing widespread panic. Back, then, to the civilisation of Argentina - and if you've been following this blog, you'll know that that's the last thing I thought I'd ever say!
Next up: Iguazu Falls
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