Eu quero saber... Você já viu a chuva ?

I wanna know... Have you ever seen (that much) rain...?

Ok I am now in Florianopolis - I thought it was only raining in Sao Paulo, but apparently not... they decided to share the rain with other cities... and the rain I'm talking about is not normal rain... It's a deluge! It can be sunny for a long time, you can get some sunburns and as you are putting some sunblock on, the sky turns grey and the next second, it is falling on you... not drop by drop, but all at the same time... and you would expect that after it fell on you, it would turn blue again, but it doesn't... it keeps falling and falling and raining and raining until wherever you were hiding - you get wet anyway - and you are very thankful for wearing havaianas because anyway, even if you got long legs and you jump very far, there is just no way you will not step in some deep ponds of water on your way home... They had told me that summer in Brasil was the rain season, but I had not listened enough... I heard yesterday that some beaches were not there anymore... and there is something else that is not there anymore, my facial tan... it litterally fell off... At the beginning, there were just a few pieces gone, but I either looked as if my face was burned, or as if I was dirty... or both... so I took everything off and I look as arriving from the winter again! So the moral is that you should always carry sunblock AND an umbrella with you in Brasil!

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Here is a typical Couch Surfing story... Everything started when I contacted some other foreigners who appeared to be in the same city... Some of them replied to me - and they were two finnish girls... They actually made the perfect/impossible pair - I can't imagine one of them traveling without the other one... One was totally crazy (Stinke - fake name) - the kind full or piercings and tattoos who talks to every strangers - and the other one (Iida) was normal - whatever your definition of 'normal' is, she was the normal one...

The first time we met, they had a plan and it went fine... We went to swim in some 'natural pools' which meant at this time swimming in a lake with huge waves surrounded by huge slippery rocks... that were either dangerous when the water would push us on them or impossible to reach when the water was going the other way... It was fine though... The more typical CS plan happened a few days later...

I went to the finnish CSers' place - they said that there was a party somewhere in the evening... But they didn't have any more information... Their CS host was not home, neither was their CS co-host... There was an other guy who was talking on the phone with someone he didn't know - that the girls had met the day before - and that they also hardly remembered... so this guy came to pick us up to take us to his place - but not really - he was a brasilian CSer - he had to ask for the key to the neighboors... we entered the place - he said that the guy who really lived there was going to come later... So I asked for the plan for the night - I wanted to know because if there was no plan, I had to go back home by bus...

There was still no plan - the only answer I could get was that the other guy - the peruvian guy who lived in the apartment - was walking home... but he had to stop often because of the rain and this was why we had to wait for him for hours... So I thought that my best option was to go home but there was a problem... the gate was locked and the neighboors were sleeping... this is what I call a typical CS plan... So I climbed the gate hoping to catch a bus - that never came... it was too late - so I went back to the apartment - and finally met the peruvian guy... Then we decided to go to a university party - with a reggae band and a crowd of hippies (and cheap beer - something like 1$ each) fighting to stay under a roof - the party was outside - and the sky was still falling! At the end, we got in the car, completely wet - there was no way the driver could see where he was going, we opened the windows - I kept trying to dry the windshield - but anyway, the water splashed higher than the car and it kept raining in the car... we drove slowly and after a stop in a gas station to get something to eat (mmm... gas station food!) we were back at the first apartment! I was dry again + there was no more gate to climb to go inside or outside!

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So right now I'm in Florianopolis - on the Ilha de Santa Catarina... It is very different than most of the places that I've seen so far... There have been waves of immigrants from many european countries - mostly germans! So we can hear many spoken languages - but also a lot of spanish because we are not far from Argentina and the beaches here are just perfect!

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One last thing... I made many jokes about Charlie and his stolen kidney and the brasilians also stealing kidneys (and other organs) in the previous posts... but... I had been recommended a movie called 'My sister's keeper'... And I watched it... and the main topic is actually a kidney... that a girl is kind of forced to give to her sister to save her life but she doesn't want to do it so she sues her mother... It made all my kidney stories not very funny anymore... So thanks Caro! :P