Eu Curti Curitiba!

*(Eu Curti Curitiba = I Liked Curitiba)

Day 5: Curitiba June 12, 2010

Our overnight bus from São Paulo arrived to Curitiba around 6:30 in the morning and my first impression was COLD! I had on four layers plus a scarf and I was still really cold. The temperature wasn’t really so bad, maybe in the upper 30s, but the fact that I’m from Florida and it was raining (I’m convinced it was basically snowing) made the weather seem much more drastic. We hung out in the rodaviária (bus station) for a couple hours waiting for things to actually open and ate in a little lanchonete. I ordered a “Sanduiche Especial egg e cheese” (Special Sandwich with egg and cheese) that ended up being a hamburger with egg and cheese on it. The funny thing was when I read the menu and saw egg and cheese, I tried to say the words in Portuguese (ovo e queijo) but they didn’t know what I wanted until I said ‘egg e cheese’ (but pronounced in Portuguese of course).

Since we only planned on spending one day in Curitiba, we decided to take the tourist bus line that would pass 24 ‘destinations’ throughout the city, with the option of getting off at any four places of your choosing along the way. And when I say it was a tourist bus, I’m talking big double-decker bus, barely clearing stoplights with speakers blasting information in multiple languages...I’m sure you’ve got a good image in your head. And if not, you can see us freezing below (because, of course, we decided to sacrifice our bodies to the windy open-air top deck in order to get a good view). It ended up being a great sampler platter of Curitiba - I’ll have to put it on my list of places to re-visit in depth one day.

Curitiba is known as the most ecologically-friendly and environmentally-conscious city in Brazil, and it seems like a very nice place, with lots of huge parks that I would have loved to explore if we had more time and more degrees on the thermometer. For example, instead of regular old trash cans all over the city, they had bins for every sort of recyclable you can imagine. They're so colorful and even decorated with animated garbage! (see below: bins for metal, plastic, paper, organic products, and glass).

The first place we got off was the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, where we got in for free (seems we have really good luck with going to museums on days they are free, this is the third time it’s happened). If you read my blog on Niterói, I talk more about Oscar Niemeyer (famous modern architect), who not only bears the name of the building, but also designed it. The museum is nicknamed "Olho do Niemeyer" ("Niemeyer's eye") for it's unique design, as you can see below.

We saw several special art exhibits and an exhibition of Oscar Niemeyer’s famous works in miniture (he also designed most of the distintive governmental buildings in Brasília when it became Brazil's capitial in the 1960's..if you haven't seen pictures, you definitely need to google it) . We also entered the actual "eye" of the museum, which not only had a neat design, but also contained an eclectic mix of artwork (below).

Our next stop was pretty spontaneous, but everyone else was getting off the bus, so we figured we might as well check it out. It was called Ópera de Arame and it was this beautiful theatre designed completely out of glass - almost like a greenhouse - perched on a river, and completely open to the surrounding forest. My pictures don't really do it justice, but I saw some beautiful ones of the opera house lit up at nighttime, and, wow...it must be amazing to see a performance there.

Our next stop was the Oi! Observation Tower, a communications tower/observation deck, to get a sky-high perspective of Curitiba. We got an awesome view of the whole city, from its sprawling parks to its sprawling skyscrapers.

Oi! Observation Tower and Oi! Pay Phone

There were so many other places I would have liked to stop, such as the historic downtown, the Ukranian memorial, and all the parks (of course). But our final stop was awesome- the Botanical Gardens. It's grounds were covered with beautiful landscaping leading up to a huge, picturesque greenhouse.

View from Greenhouse - Grounds of the Botanical Gardens/Curitiba's skyline

We sadly had to head back to the rodoviária, but not before we popped into the Mercado Modelo, a local market that sold everything from vegetables to huge cuts of meat, so that I could buy some fruit. We returned to the same lanchonete from earlier in the morning to eat a meal of feijoada, rice, meat, pasta, and salad and guaraná (Brazil’s national soft drink, really tasty) before catching our five hour bus to Florianópolis.

We arrived to Floripa (as the city is nicknamed) around 10 at night because we planned on staying with someone we met on CouchSurfers (a website that helps people get in touch with locals to meet/stay with while they're traveling). However, after a confusion with the address and a costly hour and a half in a taxi, we eventually ended up at the Lagoa Hostel, which would be my home for the next 7 days!

More on my incredible week in Floripa in the next blog...Coli