Summer in the Sand Dunes

 Me and some hostel buddies in front of Casa Coco Verde, the hostel I volunteered at for three weeks from January to February 2014 in Jericoacoara (aka Jeri) :) We were about to leave on a buggy tour to explore some lagoons around Jeri!

Ok so first for a bit of background on why I did what I did this summer. Two summers ago, after my study abroad program in Portugal, I stayed in a youth hostel for the first time in Lisbon and had an amazing time meeting people from all over the world. One of the girls I met, a Canadian girl just slightly older than me, was making her way around Europe on a shoestring by volunteering in different places around the continent. When I met her she was on her way to work at a restaurant in southern Portugal, then she was going to France to work on a farm. In exchange, she could stay in these places for free!

Meeting this resourceful, solo female traveler who barely had to spend any money, yet was able to visit various beautiful places all around Europe, made me vow that one day I would participate in a work-exchange program myself. And, I finally got around to doing it this summer! Earlier last semester I signed up for workaway.com, a work-exchange website, and I got in touch with various hostels in Brazil to try and volunteer at one during my summer break. I ended up spending three weeks volunteering at Casa Coco Verde in the tiny town of Jericoacoara, in Ceara, a state in northeastern Brazil. In exchange for 5 work hours a day I got a free bed and breakfast. I actually spent minimal money on food because the great thing about hostels is that there are communal kitchens and when you befriend the guests they often share their food ;) With room and board pretty much covered, I ended up spending most of my money on just a few things: transportation to get to Jeri (expensive because of distance from Rio and high season), and the occasional caipirinha (just 5 reais!), surfboard rental or buggy tour.

                           

 #nofilter. One of my favorite memories was surfing under these pink cotton candy sunset clouds before my night shift one day!

 

The work was a bit boring and consisted mainly of cleaning up after breakfast, gardening, grocery shopping for breakfast, and helping guests check in, but the downtime I had on my time off made it all worth it. Getting away from Rio in an isolated paradise was JUST what the doctor ordered. I was completely and utterly burnt out after my semester in Rio. And although I loved having my family and later my friends from California visit me there, being the designated "local" and translator was a bit stressful. By the end, I really needed time for myself where no one would rely on me... In Jericoacoara I could finally exhale, make my own schedule (ie read in a hammock for three hours straight if I wanted to), walk in the streets (made of sand) barefoot, go out without any fear of being robbed (oh Rio....), watch the sunset on a giant sand dune, nap, etc. Aaaah the simple life. I miss it already!

 The giant sand dune where the whole town would go to watch the sunset. 

Some of my favorite memories from the summer:

-Arriving in Jeri. I got into the Fortaleza airport at 1 am. At the crack of dawn at 6 AM I boarded a Van that took me all the way to Jijoca de Jericoacoara. From there, I had to switch to a truck that took us into the sand dunes. Jericoacoara appeared like an oasis in the desert after the long journey (more than 6 hours in total).

-Becoming really good at making pancakes, french toast and garlic bread! I made pancakes daily for the hostel breakfast. And, with the leftover bread from breakfast, we would make french toast and garlic bread around 3 PM so guests could have a sweet or savory post-beach snack :)

- Dancing forro until 4:30 AM with my fellow volunteers and friends Pia (24, from France) and Selina (18, from Germany). I got really into dancing forro in Jeri. It's an upbeat, northeastern style of dance and music that uses accordion, triangle, and drums as the main instruments. By the time the forro ended, the three of us were some of the last people there along with Angela, our boss. We joked that it was a Casa Coco Verde staff party. After forro, we went to the bakery, padaria Santo Antonio, and ate delicious pao de chocolate (only 2 reais!) fresh out the oven. 

-Walking to the Jeri lighthouse at sunrise. It is a sorry excuse for a lighthouse, being more of a glorified pole with a small light at the top, but it sits at the top of a huge hill covered in cactuses and wild goats/donkeys. Walking up there to take in the view and be completely alone in the silence of nature was such a treat!

   Walking up to the lighthouse :)

-Taking buggy tours on my days off. The first one was to lagoas paraiso and azul with my hostel buddies Matthew, Felipe, and Nick. We had a hilarious driver who insisted on taking a bajillion photos of us doing all kinds of optical illusions. The lagoas were great as well...they had crystal clear waters and hammocks built such that half of your body was in the water!

-My friend Kate's visit! She arrived in Rio in January to study at PUC and we had met at i-house in Berkeley my junior year. We took another awesome buggy tour, this time to the Tatajuba lagoon. This time the lagoon was rather muddy and anticlimactic, but the journey there was the real adventure. We had to cross a river on the buggy (by going onto a man-steered sort of raft). We also got to climb these huge and amazing mangroves, ski-bunda or sandboard (and walk all the way back up the dune... a struggle), and swim on a beach on our way back to Jeri that was completely deserted as far as the eye could see!

Post sand-boarding happiness! Although climbing back up a huge sand dune with only a rope to help is not so fun. For each foot I would climb it felt like I sank 11 inches haha!

Kate after a swim on our own deserted beach!!

After Jeri, me and Kate continued onto the Lencois Maranhenses park in the state of Maranhao for a couple days. Now that trip was a whole other adventure deserving its own post.... someday soon I will write about it hopefully, although things are heating up in Rio for Carnaval, with tons of pre-carnaval celebrations happening right on my street in Ipanema, so I can't make any promises....>__<

Thank you for reading!!!

Tchau beijos

Marie

Summer Part 1: Lefebvres in Brazil!

So I was supposed to go out to a samba club tonight, but considering it just started pouring rain tropical-downpour style I've chosen to do some blogging in my PJs instead =)

Excuse the lack of chronology but although I've updated you on my return to Rio I haven't talked about my summer yet! I'll try to give a summarized version broken up in different parts or else this post will never end.

Let's see...so PUC wrapped up in early December for summer recess and shortly after my parents and brother came to visit me in Rio and then we traveled around Brazil for a bit.

Some highlights from our Lefebvre family vacay:

- Getting brunch at the beautiful Copacabana fort with my parents and lovely housemates from last semester Blair and Monica who are now back at Brown University in the states. *tear*  I am going to miss them, although I have to admit that it's a relief to not be in an apartment that is constantly falling apart anymore...

Monica, Me and Blair at the Forte de Copacabana 

-Getting shown around Rio by my PUC yoga teacher, also named Monica. Monica generously took us all around Rio, showing us some cool local spots that are hard to access without a car such as a cute neighborhood called Urca next to Sugarloaf mountain, Pedra bonita (the place hang-gliders take off from to fly over Rio), and she even brought us to her apartment in Recreio dos Bandeirantes where we had dinner (meat with beans and rice of course!) and met some of her family! 

Enjoying a snack on a beautiful Rio day in the neighborhood of Urca. It is next to a historic military fort and has a lovely small-town feel that made me want to live there! But no more moving for me for a while haha....

-Visiting Salvador (took my family to my favorite street food vendor from my trip there in August =) ), Foz de Iguassu (we ate at a Turkish restaurant for christmas because all other restaurants were closed for the holidays!) and Paraty, an old Portuguese colonial town just south of Rio.

 On the macaco safari boat tour in Foz de Iguassu. The falls were amazing and we kept seeing rainbows form from all the mist and sunlight interacting!

-And of course the grand finale: New year's in Rio! We had a great time ringing in the New Year on Flamengo beach where we rented beach chairs, sat in the sand and just people watched and watched the fireworks--all dressed in white of course! It was less touristy and less crowded than Copacabana beach and it worked out perfectly because we were much closer to our hotel as well so we got home quickly after the fireworks show!

NYE 2014: Reveillon Rio de Janeiro style--wearing white brings good luck!

Also, I finally made it up to Christ the Redeemer! I had hiked up to Cristo earlier in December with some friends (three hours of intense uphill hiking in the heat---overpriced ice cold coke waiting for me at the top at one of the tourist kiosks has never tasted so good haha) but I waited for my parents to come to actually go up onto the viewing platform to see the Christ statue. I can tell you that it's NOT overrated! I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being up there even despite the 100 degree heat and heaps of cranky tourists and cruise ship groups mobbing the monument around me. The panoramic views of Rio are truly amazing from up there; everywhere I turned was a great view and the Christ himself is HUGE! Fun fact: the Christ statue lost a finger last month because it got hit by lightning! I'm just glad there wasn't a thunder storm when we went to see it... haha!

Coming up... a post about my summer volunteering gig in northeastern Brazil! Stay tuned :)

Marie

I'm baaaaack!

Hello lovely readers!

Today marks one week that I have been back in beautiful Rio de Janeiro. I am slowly getting back into the swing of things here in Rio, and the pace of life is as quick as ever here as I am keeping busy with a new internship, lots of baby-sitting, birthday parties, and figuring out my classes for my last semester of college...ever! *sob* Sadly, I cannot be a super senior forever...but, as long as I still am, I plan on taking as many classes as possible! So far, I'm really excited about my geography class on urban space (we get to read lots of my namesake, the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre!), and a class on the development of comunidades (the politically correct term for favelas or the infamous Rio slums) offered by the department of social work. The latter is really fun because each class we get to have small group discussions where the teacher pairs the gringo students with a Brazilian. I was paired the first day with an adorable Brazilian girl named Jennifer who lived all the way in Queimados, a city north of Rio de Janeiro in the poor northern region of Baixada Fluminense. She is on a full scholarship to PUC (As are most of the brazilians in the social work department) and has to take three buses to get to school every day! She also lost all the furniture in her house when there were bad floods north of Rio a couple months ago. Speaking with her really put into perspective my own petty complaints about commuting to school and my old apartment where everything was breaking, we had a small fire, and then on my last day there the toilet overflowed, flooding the whole kitchen. A pain to deal with, but we did not actually lose anything... 

In other news, in keeping with my continuing narrative of housing dilemmas, I have moved into my *sixth* apartment in Rio de Janeiro. Sixth time is the charm, right? I sure hope so because I am completely fed up with housing in Rio. It is kind of a long story but basically the homestay I was supposed to move into in Botafogo for this semester did not workout. While I was away for the summer volunteering in a hostel in Northern Brazil (more on that later) my future intended host parents got a divorce, put two students in the room that was supposed to be mine, and then turned the entire (tiny) apartment into housing for PUC exchange students. After working in a hostel for three weeks I really wanted my own room, and that condition along with the fact that I would be kicked out for the World Cup, not being able to have guests, and a lengthy list of rules (no cooking with oil?!, breakfast only at 7 am, etc.) the host dad (more like a landlord at this point...) had e-mailed me, I decided I needed to do what was best for me and find somewhere else to live that would be a true home as opposed to an additional source of stress.

In a gift of fate, right as my Botafogo housing situation was decaying and I was beginning to panic trying to deal with it while so far from Rio, around this time one of my friends from last semester messaged me on facebook asking if I or any of my friends would be interested in living in her Ipanema homestay with her. Erin, who I met last summer at the Boren orientation and who goes to University of Maryland (and also a super senior :) ), has also been in Rio since July and has been living right in the heart of Ipanema in what I think is the absolute best homestay there is in Rio... I jumped on the opportunity and I can say with fair certainty that I have hit the housing jackpot this time around!

What do I mean? Well first of all, here is a picture with the view from my balcony.

Yes, you read that right, I have a balcony! Pinch me! It also has the perfect view for sunrise. Below is a picture taken at sunrise on Friday.

So basically, me and Erin share our own floor in our hostmom Marinez's 14th floor (penthouse...) apartment. In the living room when you walk in there is a spiral staircase that leads up to our floor which is basically another living room area (where my bed is), Erin's room, a little kitchenette area with a mini-fridge, a bathroom, and huge sliding doors that open onto the balcony where we have a churrasco area, an outdoor shower (we shower outside in our swimsuits under the stars!) and, my personal favorite, a huge potted plant of basil! Marinez gives us breakfast every day (the classic Brazilian misto quente, or ham and cheese panini) and she just the right amount of chatty without being invasive. She has an adorable shih-tzu named Jack (but of course pronounced the brazilian way, "Jackie"). Also living here are her two kids, her daughter who is 25 studying law at PUC and her son who is 15. There is another bedroom downstairs where another PUC exchange student, Charlotte from Paris, just moved in yesterday.

Well that about sums up my first taste of Rio: round 2! I'm hoping to write about my time volunteering at the hostel in the Northeastern state of Ceara and my summer travels soon, but in the  meantime here's a picture of my new friend little Jack eating a bone :)

Tchau beijos!!

Marie