Moving on to Maringá

After São Paulo, we travelled to Maringá, a “medium-sized town” of 300,000 people. Here we studied with students at the Federal University at Maringá for one LONG week. We were in lectures or field trips Tues-Friday for 8-9 hours a day. Maringá's one claim to fame is being the 14th ranked city in terms of # of skyscrapers per capita. And it's weird cone-shaped church in the middle of it's downtown. The city is a Garden City colonized by the Brits in the 1700s.

It was nice to hang out with the students from the university. They took us to lunch to the local "por kilo" restuarants where they weighed your food to figure out how much you owe. On our last day there the students and staff threw us a "churrasco," a traditional Brazilian BBQ, complete with caiparinhas, the national drink of Brazil. Unfortunately, we learned all too quickly the punch of this drink the night before so most of us were not feeling up to imbibing too much upon these at the BBQ...especially with a 12-hour bus ride a few hours on the horizon...