After five flights (Charleston to Atlanta to BWI to Atlanta to Sao Paulo to Belem) and 30 hours of traveling, I finally arrived at the airport in Belem, a city of 2.5 million at the base of the Amazon. The flight from Sao Paulo gave me a great look at the rainforest:
I wasn't expecting to see so many triangular forests and fires on my way in.
Anyways, I landed and waited until everyone showed up. Before anyone could figure out the pay phones, SIT whisked us off to the program director's small farm east of the city. We spent the next couple days either doing orientation classes, language classes or playing soccer. So far, language class has been interrupted by: falling fruit, monkeys, monkeys throwing fruit at the ground from above us, electrical outages, and sound systems on passing cars (see below) once we got to the SIT office in the city:
After arriving at the the director's farm, we took a small hike into the rainforest behind his house and saw a couple tarantulas, rubber trees (huge!) and other good stuff. Later that day we made acai juice from the acai berries out back!
No mosquitoes so far... A few days ago we left the farm to go see some mangrove forests (2nd biggest mangrove forest in the world!). We got there by boat that left a small fishing village. The area was located right at the edge of the Amazon delta, where surges between ocean water and the Amazon create the right environment for mangroves.
After that we got back on the boat and went to talk with some fishermen on the atlantic coast. The boat that looks stranded on the beach really isn't - because of the tide it was floating in three feet of water in a couple hours! Great stuff. Got back to the farm late that night. Next we drove into Belem and prepped for the host family meet/greet.
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