Benvindo em Brasil e Peru: Europe in Brazil

Hello my friends,

I'm writing you now from Curitiba in the state of Paraná, underneath São Paulo.
Since last time I did write you I travelled a long way.

Tuesday the 7th of March I arrived from Bonito to Foz Do Iguaçu, the Brazilian city next to the border to Argentina and Paraguay. The Iguaçu waterfall's are right in the middle.
So I went one day to Argentina to see the waterfall's. At the Argentinian side you see the fall's from above and from the Brazilian side you see the giant fall's from underneath. We where very lucky because the day before it has been raining really hard so the fall's had swolen to his maximum. At night we went eating in a "churrascaria" that's a typical Brazilian meat restaurant. You pay a set price and you can eat as much as your body can bare. Brazilians eat tons of meat. Well it's nice to experience once. But it's really decadent. I don't want to know how much meat there trowing away every day.

My camara died some days before so I decided to go with Sandra a scotish girl from my hostel to go shopping in Paraguay. You can take a local bus in Foz Do Iguaçu that take you over the border to 'Ciudad del Este' the "tax free" shopping paradise in Latin-America. When products in Brazil are more expensive than in general in Europe, in Paraguay with a bit of luck you can find them much cheeper. So the whole of South-America sees Paraguay as 'o paraiso das compras'. The sell everything, electronic's
But it's really not a nice place to stay, big trafficjams, the streets are full of little markets selling a lot of stuff really cheep and bad quality and fake brands. And one shoppingmall after an other selling lot's of electronics, clothing, shoes, musical instruments, toys, games, dvd's, music, etc.
The United States of America use Latin-America ass there playground. So big multinationals are taking over the place. Coca-Cola is everywhere. They even have shoes from Coca-Cola. And you can see in Brazil that people apreciate north-american products and fast food. Lot's of Brazilian food is very fat, they eat lot's of grace, salt and sugar. I saw lot's of Brazilian people that could survive a cold winter without food...
But apart from that Brazilian food can be very tasty and divers. And lot's and lot's of exotic fruits, hmmm.

In the evening I left for Curitiba the capital city of the of Paraná.
Curitiba is a very European city, the buildings. clean streets, the public life and transport well organised. In the city centre you see almost only quite rich white people, although there are lot's of collored and pour people. Unfortunately also in Brazil most of the richer people are white and the pour people are collored or black. This is the same fenomenon I sow some years ago in South-Africa and Namibia. It's still very difficult or sometimes inpossible to clime the social ladder for pour people and some groups of the population.
Maybe you don't see it immediately, but also in Brazil there is still a lot of (hidden) rascism.
Curitiba is aslo the coldest statal capital city of Brazil. I don't feal very much in Brazil when i'm walking the streets here.
Curitiba means 'place with lot's of pinethrees' in the native Guarani language. The native people lived in the mountains and used to come to the planes of Curitiba every winter to live from a specific type of pinetrees, Araucária, that grow a lot in this region and carry fruits in wintertime rich of proteïns. Here in the South of Brasil (and Argentina) are lot's German and Italian imigrants that's flyed there country after the World War II. There are also lot's of Polish, Ucranian and Japanese immigrants.

Brazil is one of the possible new upcomming economic world leaders together with India and China, they are producing for the whole world and are starting to colonize parts of Africa to encrise there production even more. And they are losing there borders for European immigrants that want to escape the crisis and come to Brazil. The same thing Europe is already doing for decades.

Curitiba carries the name of 'the ecological city' of Brazil. It's a big example with his dozens of parks and natural reseves. It's also the first city that started recycling garbage in Brazil. Brazil is learning very slowly, but it still has a long way to go in terms of recycling and re-using materials.

From Curitiba I took a tourist train throu the 'Mata Atlantica', Atlantic rainforest, to arrive in Morretes a really small and old town. From there I travel on to Paranagua, the second biggest harbor of Brazil. Santos in São Paulo is the biggest one. The train tracks (Curitiba - Paranagua) where build and are still used for transporting corn, soy, cars and electronic's from and to the Paranagua harbor.

From Paranagua a boat brings me to Ilha do Mel an Island with 2 small villages and the rest are beaches and presurved nature. At this time of the year there are very few people. Summer is over, it's getting colder and it rains a lot, whitch means you almost have your private beach. But like a good Belgian pesron we are specialised in searching for sun where there is now. So I got the opportunity to get nice sunburned.
At the Island I met a German couple that lived in Brazil 20 years ago and told me about the evolution Brazil made, in terms of people and infrastructure. The were also Argentinians and 2 German people in my hostel.
Until now, I have been speaking, dutch, french, english, german, portugees and spannish or portuñol.

Now I'm back in Curitiba and tomorrow I'm meeting Luc Vankrunkelsven,
the coordinator of WERVEL vzw in Brussels, and we will travel together for one week.

For Brazilian people or people who can speak and read portuguees, here more information about the books Luc Vankrunkelsven wrote about economic, social and agricultural topics and alternatives.

I hope you still enjoy reading my blog!

Some pictures:

The borders between Brazil and Argentina