Trevor's South America Trip: Car Spotting

Day 30 - 28 de Junho: Manaus

Wow, here's a milestone - 1 month since I started this journey. Things have become so familiar here, that the comforts of home may seem kind of foreign when I return... although, I'm sure it won't take long to readjust. Today started out like any other day, with café de manhã. That's another thing that's amazing; it's been one whole month since i've eaten a normal bowl of cereal with milk. This is something that I would eat every single day, as soon as I woke up. I'm glad I'm not having it everyday actually, because I much prefer to eat like the locals when I travel. Today turned out to be a day with a lot of driving - basically another city tour. It started with a few stops to deal with the artwork for their new ice cream parlour. Then, the plan was to visit the shops of the city centre. However, construction was blocking the way from our direction so we had to postpone it. Instead, he drove me over Manaus' new bridge which spanned a narrow section of the Amazon River. Keep in mind that this "narrow" section was 3.5kms long! I've been told that in some places, the river gets up to 10kms in width! And you'd believe it, looking out over the vast body of water. It's hard to call it river when we have narrower straights and inlets back home. The ride over was definitely a cool sight. Afterwards, we picked up the girls from school and headed home for lunch - pasta with meat sauce. After enjoying that, we had a quick rest before setting out again - this time making it to the city centre. It was a neat place; every street filled to capacity with stores that sold just about everything. There was a major indoor market too, but Jeffson said that it's chaos inside and that we were best off outside of it. This wasn't really a tourist-shopping area - all the stores were for the locals, so the real purpose here was picking up more supplies for the store conversion. We got paint and ice cream cups, and tomorrow we'll probably go to the store to paint it. On the way back, we saw an ice cream parlour that looked very similar to what he wanted for his, so he got his picture taken in front of it by me. Traffic was pretty thick heading home. As it's sort of my thing, I started spotting all the different VWs as we drove by. They literally have a VW for everything: flatbeds, semis, pickup trucks, cars, vans, cement mixers, and all the city buses. I started trying to take pictures of a few of them but they all turned out kind of blurry (it's hard to take pictures from the back seat of a car here - the back seats don't come with seatbelts!). So, i've decided to start a VW picture collection to see how many different ones are on the Brazilian roads. I've yet to get a good Amarok picture so that'll be my next target. Anyway, made it home and Jeffson's parents had shown up. We all had café de tarde and I learned that his mom would be coming with us to Jeffson's jungle house. Ya, that's the new plan for next Tuesday - we're going out overnight to this cool place in the jungle and really doing authentic survival stuff - we'll even hunt for our dinner and everything! Jeffson said that we needed to convince his mom to come along so that the food would taste better - mom's make the best meals! I sure could go for a piece of mom's lasagna now that I think about it - I guess I'll have to wait another couple months for that. Finally, we finished the evening off with the second night of this music workshop. We got more lessons and sang more songs. Everyone's happy that I'll be able to sing something in portuguese when I return home. I'm not the best singer in the world though, so probably best I save your ears and stick with talking, lol. It looks like the next half of my time here will include much more jungle work, so i'm definitely glad i've had these rest days lately. Even one morning in the jungle is tiring and soon I'll be spending several nights there. I'm really excited!