As promised.........meus aventuras (my adventures)
First and foremost, after leaving the front gate of AMAN in White over Gray uniforms, we stopped at the "laranjeira". Imagine if outside of Thayer Gate (location, roughly where McDonalds is) there was a large orange house with lockers and clothing racks where you could change out of your uniform and into the civilian clothes. Just the best. Off comes the bright white sign that screams, "I am a cadet" and on comes khaki shorts (calcaos), a purple shirt (camisa roxo), and some fly white kicks (sapatos brancos). Winning.
From there, our next stop was one of our new favorite restaurants (restaurantes preferidos), Habib's (http://www.habibs.com.br/) Habib's is Arabic fast food with some other international favorites as well (hamburgers and beer as well) and is one of the largest chains in Brazil next to it's American brothers in McDonalds, Burger King, and Subway. "Bibs'fiha" (pronounced, "Sfee-hah") is much like a small pizza (roughly hand size, depending on how large your hands are) and is a staple at Habib's. It costs about 1 Real (Brazilian currency, pronounced "Hey-Ai") and is the equivalent of aboout 70 cents. A generous stack of these generally takes care of any hunger pangs quite well.
From there we played a bit of musical chairs with trying to reach one of the nicer, more touristy areas of Resende (after all.....we are tourists) where there's more people, more drinks, and yes, you guessed it, more food. After nearly getting hit by 2 different buses, which, as it turned out, were both going to the place we were trying to get to, we waited around a bit for a taxi. Since there was a group of 5 of us, we needed to wait for a minivan taxi which, if you can imagine, are less commonly found than we're used to in New York.
After finally squeezing all 5 of us into a sedan and having the driver proceed to explain that he needed an additional 5 Reals per person due to the illegality of his actions and taking our money, we headed to Penedo (see: small tourist laden faux Finnish village. Lots of fun) and proceeded to check out a variety of their shops and restaurants before stopping at a small restaurant for beers and some live music. Speaking of beers, a beer on tap in Brazil is "chopp" and anything from a can or bottle is "cerveja". The more you know.
We stayed at this restaurant listening to live music and drinking Bohemia (The original and first beer of Brazil, as they claim) which was my first........few Brasilian beers. (http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/bohemia-pilsen/24536/) We also got some fried potatoes and meat appetizers, very delicious. Following this we ended up heading towards the nearest night club, Glave do Sol (not entirely sure what this means. Google translate is wildly unhelpful. Maybe it was Clave. That's like a key. Sun key, key sun........whatever). There was some bumping electronic music, an outdoor patio, and what seemed like a lot of people inside. After attempting to talk to door people down from the semi steep charge of 33 Reals (harder to convince someone to do you a favor when they can't understand you, apparently) we walked around the building a bit just to get a glimpse inside (If I'm dropping 33 Reals on a cover charge, I better get a t-shirt and a funny hat). There was a window into the patio area and we could see that the place was largely devoid of people, much less beautiful ones that wanted to dance with me. We decided against it.
As we crawled into another cab, we watched 2 cabs worth of Brazilian cadets head into the night club. It was surprisingly easy to spot them. Short haircuts, jeans, and blown out running shoes. Some things are universal. We headed back to the Academy, crawled into bed and called it a night.
On that note, that sounds like a great idea. Another story for another night. Fogo dancing lessons and Brazilian pizza. Stay tuned!
Portuguese word of the day is "ladrao" which means "thief". Just the worst. Tchau for now!
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