Bits And Pieces From My Trip To Brazil : Preparation (Part I)

It’s been a little more than a year since I returned from my trip to Brazil. I was waiting to write something special and remarkable to pay tribute to the trip that so far has been a major undertaking in my travel history. Yet, by now I’ve realized I will never be able to write such special text and decided to just write something.

So here’s something about my preparations for the trip to Brazil first.

I felt that the time had come to go to Brazil. I had already been like 5 times to Portugal but being a Portuguese student one inevitably ends up yearning for Brazil. However, just a thought of going there was so vague. In my mind the first obstacle was the money. Come on, it’s so expensive that it’s not really worth thinking about it – that was the most common sentence I’d say to myself.

And then, looking back to it now, everything was a big jigsaw puzzle whose pieces started falling into place. First many of my Portuguese speaking friends from Croatia went to Brazil and that allowed me to gather a lot of information about the whole idea. Then I started meeting people. One summer in Lisbon I was sharing a flat with a guy and a girl from Sao Paulo who became my dear friends and my first Brazilian hosts. Then another summer in Berlin I walked into a guy while I was doing some sightseeing. Can you guess? He was from Brazil, too. And my second Brazilian host from Salvador.

However, one does not just invite you to Brazil and off you go. Money was still a problem, just like at the beginning. But thanks to my Brazilian friends, I started making fixed plans about how to save for my trip.

About a year before the trip I set myself a travel date which was end of March following year. That meant that within a year I was to save money for the flight and my stay there. Every month I’d set some money aside, which I jokingly called “putting it away in a sock” (something we’d say in Croatia). I had no credit cards, just cash which was, like I said, saved for the sunny day in Brazil (no pun intended ;). 

 

 

Yet living in Croatia and saving money are two different things. One doesn’t go with another, I’m afraid. Unless you work hard, like really hard, like doing more than two jobs at a time. That’s exactly what I did. At that time I was teaching at school, before and after that I’d have private lessons, Saturdays and Sundays I also had private lessons – in fact I couldn’t remember the time without private lessons back then. And somewhere in between (yes, there was still time left), I’d work on different projects that luckily came down my way. All that made my sock with money fatter and fatter and in December I was ready to book a flight for March following year, all according to my plan.

Everyone was celebrating Christmas and I was sitting in front of my computer shaking a bit, thinking ok, you’re really going there now, all on your own. I paid my money from the sock into my card and booked my roundtrip from Zagreb – Munich – Sao Paulo. Most of my friends knew about it but my family didn’t know a thing. Well, my brother only. I decided to spare my grandmother and father the shock up until shortly before my trip.

Then, the final obstacle was to be solved: my fear. I had never been afraid of traveling abroad, it’s such a pleasure. But then again, I had never been further than Europe. So where did my fear come from? Well, I started reading on the Internet, doing my own research of Brazil – looking for tips I needed. And everywhere I checked was the same saddening fact – a high rate of crime – danger of being robbed, mugged and all that you can possibly imagine. Of course I talked to my Brazilian friends a lot and they said there is a lot of that but if you’re wise enough, nothing ever happens to you. But it took time for their words to sink in. And when they did, I started taking precautions such as planning what clothes and stuff to take with me to blend in and be able to enjoy my trip.

And the final step of my preparations was deciding which cities to actually visit. Ok, Sao Paulo and Salvador were on the list, but how to go to Brazil and not visit Rio de Janeiro? And then I started thinking – who do I know there? (It’s an advantage of living in a global village that you can just “find” someone living in Rio). And I found them. It was my German colleague who I met online on German teachers’ forum. Conveniently enough for my trip, he was living with his family in Rio de Janeiro. So what happened was I wrote an email to a person I hadn’t spoken for years and only met online to ask them if they could be my host in Rio de Janeiro. And they said yes. In my further texts on Brazil I will write more about Brazilian hospitality, but this was the first bigger sign that it’s second to none.

 

To conclude, I booked my domestic flights in Brazil: Sao Paulo – Rio de Janeiro – Salvador and back to Sao Paulo and then it really was “off I go” :)