This morning Ronnie, Scott, Stephen and I flew from of Buenos Aires and into Puerto Iguazu, Argentina. It was a smooth, uneventful flight (that's a good thing, I HATE flying). I started getting excited before we landed because it was jungle as far as you could see. The airport is literally a small section carved out of the jungle. When we stepped out of the airport it was obvious we were in a different climate. HOT and MUGGY. I'm from Houston and used to humidity but it's MUGGY here. I like it though! We drove from the airport to the Argentina/Brazil border where we passed through customs/immigration with no problem and made our way to the hotel. Until we got until Puerto Iguazu in Brazil, we were literally driving on a paved road through the jungle and it was beautiful. I've got some footage of the drive in the video at the end of this blog.
After unpacking at the hotel, we headed out to find some lunch. It was 4pm and we still hadn't eaten anything. We ended up going to a Brazilian steak house where they bring the skewer of meat to your table. I ate some interesting stuff, but it was all amazing. Chicken hearts and fried plantaes were some of the more interesting things I ate, and I think by the end of the night, they had brought us an offering of every single part of the cow that's edible! Ribs, Ribeye, Rump, Shoulder, Sirloin, it just kept coming and man was it good!
After lunch we walked off the meal and explored a street market for a bit before finding a store to sell us some water. You shouldn't drink the water in this part of Brazil so we needed to get some both for drinking, and for simple things like brushing our teeth. After that we headed back to the hotel and waited for the students to arrive.
At 8:30 we boarded a bus with the students to Dinner and a show at yet another Brazilian steak house (yes, I've gotten fatter on this trip!). The food was decent and the show was fantastic. It was a musical/dance show highlighting cultural music and dances from all over Central and South America. It was loud, colorful, and crazy! I filmed a lot of the dancers and you can see them in today's video, but others didn't adhere to ACU's dress code, so I didn't shoot them! Ha!
One cool thing that happened was one of the acts was a lady who swung metal balls on the end of 2 ropes and she'd use them to slap the floor to create a rhythm that she danced to. She came out into the crowd and picked one of the ACU students to stand on stage while she danced around him and swung them all around him. At one point she was spinning them above his head and coming so close that it was knocking his hair all around. Check out the video to see it, it was crazy!
Tomorrow we head to spend the whole day at Iguazu Falls! Look for some breathtaking footage tomorrow for sure (I hope I succeed at that)!
Here's a video summary of my first day in Brazil
And here's a sunset I shot over the jungle from the balcony of my hotel window.
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