May 22nd or: why it's better to take the bus

Today was gonna be a long day. Getting up at 7.30am sharp (NOT brazilian time) -- by the way, did I tell you about brazilian time? It works like this: you set a time for whatever (an event starting, meeting up with somebody, waking up, ...), and then you come between 30 minutes and 2 hours late. That can be very exhausting, but we somewhat got used to it.

At the shelter, we received Abioptica once again to show them our production process. Following this was an absolute chaotic discussion the brazilian way: everybody speaking with everybody in high volume and really fast while not really considering that this probably doesn't lead to anything productive. Aside of that, our portuguese wasn't quite sufficient. We managed to get some good talks in eventually though.

Afterwards, we caught up on the feijoada we missed out upon yesterday and waited for TV Globo, the biggest brazilian TV channel. Turns out they didn't show up and rescheduled us to Monday because of the protests going on in Sao Paulo (which I haven't noticed yet, I learned this in the German news). Well, we can live with that. Gave us more time for training, which is good as well. 

We packed up all the material for Belem and had a good talk between us four german trainers, because Deniz left on Sunday. It took of course longer than expected, but we figured we would still be fine. We called a cab to pick up our stuff, and then we encountered real Sao Paulo traffic. Nothing worked, everybody was basically stuck and we probably would have been better off walking. The only thing that slightly works are the buses, because they have separate lanes. So we got out at a bus stop and took the bus. Taking the bus here is gambling, because you cannot figure out where exactly they are going, it's just not possible. But we know two bus stops close to our place, so we figured we might as well give it a shot. It worked, and we got there after one hour (usually, this takes 15mins max by cab). We left the house 2.5h before our flight left. Plenty of time for a domestic flight, right? That's what we thought, too. Turns out we should take more than 1.5h to get to the airport, again because of traffic. Getting through Sao Paulo at rush hour isn't really possible. This city needs a real metro, wayyyyy more than is existing right now. 

We got our flight, ate some papaya we brought with us for dinner in the airport (nasty!) and flew to Belém. 3.5h in the plane, 3000km and still in the same country? On paper, yes. In reality, Belém and Sao Paulo don't have that much in common aside of the country and the language. At the airport, we were welcomed by 8 Enactees from the Enactus CESUPA team in the middle of the night. They even made T-Shirts for the OneDollarGlasses project! You could tell they were really excited to have us here, and that felt absolutely great. We were quite overwhelmed, and that was just the beginning. First of all, we were mostly fine with some water and a bed.