1st Day of Carnival (Fri)

We had to wait an hour for a taxi to Copa- which was a half hour ride which only costed 30 Reis (18 USD). Not bad. We had an interesting convo about seat belts with the Taxi driver too. Ha. We stayed at a family friends's of Joana's- its small and was super messy- but we cleaned up and brought some chocolates 4 a thank you.

After familiarizing ourselves with Copa, and checking out the local hostel (Our soon to become our '2nd home') we met up with some people from Couchsurfing.com. Amazing website that's volunteer-based that basically tries to get people searching for a place to stay or someone to show them around cities which they are located. We originally asked Gabriel (not Joana's bro- a different one) to stay at his place, but he was already hosting an Irish girl, named Christine (she's been traveling for a whole year!). Anyway, we met up with him after many texts (we used Joana's old cell). Along with him came a group of couchsurfers: Christine (mentioned earlier), Cloudino (French man who lives in China), Tolga (Turkish man who lives in Buenos Aires), and we met up with Diego (Gabriel's cuz), and Chago (...friend). ( We went to a Bloco in Santa Teresa, which was up on a collina (large hill) which was so much fun! We then got some pizza and headed back to Diego's place to chow down and listen to Chago play some horrible music on his guitar-don't worry we told him it was bad.

All blocos entail a mixture of people, music, dancing, costumes, drag, confetti, streamers, spray/foam, water, sweat, beijos (kisses), cervajes, no sleep...