Sorry I didn't proof read these, I'm going to the airport in 20 minutes

Hey whats up everyone. So I realize this blog has really fallen off but I still appreciate all of you reading my attempts to keep this updated and indulging my huge ego. Believe it or not, I have finished my classes and I leave for Rio tomorrow! Over the last week, we had a group Thanksgiving among other goodbye events. We had Thanksgiving at the house of the program directors parents along the river of this nice beach town a little outside Salvador. The house was a great location but, like most EAP group things, food ran out within minutes. The much better party happened the next day at the penthouse apartment of my friends host family above us. If Jay-Z was giving a tour of this place on MTV Cribs I wouldn’t blink. Its so nice and has a huge open patio that outlooks the park and the bay. There was a guy making drinks with four different types of fruit and amble amounts of even more delicious food. His host dad is really humble and one of the best people I’ve met. He always makes me feel at home, but I got to admit he didn’t have to try to hard because his place is so cool. It was a tease coming into the final week in which I had a ten minute Portuguese presentation, a final paper and finals in both classes. It was intense, but I made it out okay and on the final day we had one more good-bye dinner at a nice steakhouse on the beach. Most of my friends have already taken off, but as of now I’m getting my stuff together and soaking in my final days in Salvador before I leave. Stay tuned for Rio and Buenos Aires! See you all soon (except you, I don’t like you).

My Last 2 Trips...in Bahia

The last weeks have flown by in a mix of fun and cramming (for school). My last two weekends were spent at a festival at a country town and in a jungle beach town respectively. In the first town, the have been having this huge party that was supposedly about something religious but I didn’t see any pious activities going on. The party started at 5:00…in the morning and was still raging when we left around lunchtime. I was out for the count by 10:00 Am. It was literally a bunch of people packed into the streets dancing and following a band around playing music. When everyone reached one side of the town, the just turned around and went back the other direction. There was also dudes painted red running around everywhere trying to get paint on you and, of course, and the abundance of cross dressers that appear at every festival here. The highlight of this trip for me though was wiping my eyes on the steps of the hotel at five in the morning when one of my professors came up like “You guys are missing the party come on!”. We followed him as he took his shirt off and started spinning it in the crowd and informed us “I can’t really speak English right now, sorry”. It was a wild time.

The next weekend proved to be even cooler. Some friends and I went to the aforementioned jungle beach town of Itacare in the south of Bahia. Itacare is one of the last places where the forests along the coast weren’t cut down and the trees came right up to the beach. The beaches were white sand, practically deserted, great for surfing and overall beautiful. The first day, I didn’t have a surfboard and a lifeguard tried to save me while I was boogie boarding. I was trying to explain to him that I didn’t need help and we were just arguing in the water until a wave came and I went in and he followed me and was still trying to save me. It was pretty funny, but regrettable on my part because the same thing happened to my friend Carlos twenty minutes earlier and I was making fun of him pretty bad. The next day I went on a river rafting trip through the middle of the jungle. The rapids were way more intense than I thought they would be and we stopped to jump off high rock cliffs and go ziplining too. It was an awesome trip. Our final day there, we hiked through the jungle to a beach an hour away. I felt like I was in the rainforest café, it was SO cool. There were vines hanging down and waterfalls going off right next to the little path cut out through the trees. Sometimes the path would disappear over big gapes and we crossed walking along the water pipes. The beach was awesome; I rented a surfboard and stayed out all day. Another thing that made this trip fun was that a dog from the hostel we found followed us around all weekend. We had some intense hikes but he always came, it was kind of cool. I only wish I didn’t have to leave.