Beautiful Horizon and Black Gold

Today’s PWOD: Pixinchar = to bargain. I’m currently planning a trip to the Pantanal for next weekend when my mid-semester break begins. You can’t necessarily go into the middle of the swamp alone so you shop around for various guides and tour companies. They quote you high and you gotta use your savvy bargaining skills to haggle them down or pixinchar

That’s where I was this past weekend: Belo Horizonte (Beautiful Horizon) and Ouro Preto (Black Gold). Both are cities in the state of Minas Gerais north of Sao Paulo. One of my roommates, Samir, is from Belo Horizonte – third largest city in Brasil – and goes home about once a month. So I tagged along with him, met up with his crew of friends, chilled at their local spots, and saw the city in what was an unofficially official guys weekend. Samir boasted for a while that, proportional to their populations, BH is more chalk full of beautiful women than Sao Paulo. The jury is still out, but BH made a strong case. BH is named so because of the, well, “beautiful horizon” that’s stretched out from atop the small mountains overlooking the city. So essentially I have two lasting images of Belo Horizonte:

This:

And this:

Which image is more beautiful, I’ll let you decide.

It was good to get out of Sao Paulo and see another city. As are many things compared to Sao Paulo, BH operates on a much smaller scale and you can feel the difference by being in a smaller place. The city has more of an urban plan to it than Sao Paulo, less traffic, and more greenery. Friday afternoon was tourist day. We had lunch in his apartment with some friends and then Samir took me to the city’s municipal market and a couple of parks and plazas in the hills that overlook the city. Friday night we hit the clubs followed soon after by an early starting samba street fest Saturday afternoon.

Sunday was a healthy respite from city trekking and partying. I took a daytrip by myself to the small city of Ouro Preto. I love the accommodating nature of Brazilians and how generous they are in opening their homes and services. On this trip so far I’ve been helped out a ton by Gleidi and her family and Samir and his friends. But on the same note, it was great to get out on my own and get that sense of independent travel again, albeit for just a day.

A little history lesson on Ouro Preto then I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking. According to the history books (i.e. my Let’s Go budget travel book) Ouro Preto was where the Portuguese first discovered gold in Brasil, which in a large way altered the history of the country. The Portuguese carved out trails from the mountains near Ouro Preto down to the ports in the southeast where the gold was shipped off to Portugal. By striking gold, economic activity shifted away from sugar production in the northeast and gave the southeast – and cities such as Rio de Janeiro – a new role in business and commerce. Today, Ouro Preto is a really beautiful and charming colonial mining town tucked in the mountains of Minas Gerais. It has hilly, cobble-stoned streets, thin roads, and at least a dozen 400 year old churches whose names I can’t remember each with simple faded facades, but lavishly and ornately decorated insides. Reminded me a lot of Toledo, Spain and many of the town in Andalucia in southern Spain. It was like a small town Iguacu Falls. By that I mean it was a photographer’s paradise. I took a million pictures my first few hours there before realizing that they all look the same, all are beautiful, but none do a justice to the antiquity of the town so I just stopped taking photos. I took an eight hour midnight bus back to Sao Paulo Sunday night and for the second time in 3 weekends came back with bloodshot eyes and rolled into my finance class on Monday morning. It’s the double life that I live here in Brasil. Weekends of partying or travel followed by the week’s grind of classes.

OK, enough talk, here is Ouro Preto in pictures.