First Snowman!

When you move to a place that has snow during the winter the first two things that you need to do, after losing the fear of it, are to build a snowman and go sledding.  But so far this winter has been disappointing. We got a lot of cold weather with wind chills reaching below zero, but where has the snow been? We had only two main days with snow; one was December 31, 2012 and the other was February 22, 2013.  On this last day, my wife and I built our first snowman.

After a day out of the city, my wife removed all snow from our driveway and sidewalk in the morning. I came back in the afternoon and looking in our backyard we had a good amount of snow to do something, so we decided to create our snowman. We had an idea how to do it, but when we started we realized that it was not as easy as we thought.

We built the base with a medium snowball but the shape was not too good. When we put the second on top of the first one, our man was looking like a mushroom instead of a snowman.  We started to rebuild the base. We tried once, twice, and the third time we got it.

The last part was the head and that was easy. It was a small ball and some sticks for the hair, arms, and mouth. We included a scarf and it was done. Our first snowman stood outside until last Friday when the sunlight destroyed it.

It was a good experience but maybe we need to wait until next winter to complete our journey and go sledding on the snow!

Carnival in the U.S.A.!

Who said that we would not have “Carnaval” here in the U.S.A.!

Carnaval (or Carnival in English) is the biggest popular celebration in Brazil. It’s a 4 day party, starting on Friday and finishing on Tuesday and in some places like Bahia the end of Carnival is not until Wednesday. Here, it was different. The party started Friday at 10 p.m. and finished at 2 a.m. It was short, but it was still very good.

The Carnival was in Champaign, a city with a good size college (University of Illinois). The host bar was Radio Maria, downtown. The place was crowded!

My wife and I went there with another Brazilian couple, and as soon as we arrived, even before we entered the bar, we heard Rio’s funk. It was a strange way to start the Carnival (Where was the samba?).

Shortly after we entered, around 11:00 p.m. the samba and axé music started. Instead of a band they had a DJ playing the songs. The guy mixed different kinds of Brazilian music, from Rio’s funk to axé to Sertanejo.

Another positive point was the number of Brazilian people inside the bar. I didn’t know that Champaign has a lot of Brazilian students. It was easy to listen to Portuguese there. We stayed until the end, exactly 2:00 a.m.

I think we need to visit Champaign more often to meet other Brazilians!

Happy New Year !

Is it possible to celebrate the New Year 3 times in the same location? I can say that it's possible, and I’ll tell you how.

During the New Year’s celebration, it's sad when you are far from your family, but we are building another type of family here. There are other Brazilian families that celebrated the New Year here in the USA, so my wife and I joined their celebration.

At this time of the year, Brazil is 4 hours ahead of Central Time in the US. So when it was 8:00 pm here, it was midnight in Brazil, and we celebrated for the first time. We watched on TV the fireworks at Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, the famous New Year celebration in Brazil.

At 11:00pm, we celebrated the East Coast New Year because CNN was showing the Times Square party, and we had an American couple that usually celebrates at that time. Our final celebration was at midnight, local time, with all the families together.

It was not the perfect New Year, but it was very fun and I enjoyed it a lot. But I can tell you right now that next New Year I will be in Brazil with my and my wife's families celebrating 2014.

Happy New Year !

First Journey inside the USA – Chicago (Final)

Well, this is the last post about my trip to Chicago, Illinois, but it’s no less exciting.

We started the day, it was a Saturday, saying goodbye to the hotel and the downtown. Our destination was The Field Museum near Michigan Lake. We thought that we could spend three hours inside the museum and see all the exhibits, but we were wrong. The museum is huge! We spent about six hours, and we still left some exhibits behind.

We started from the ground level, where we saw some sea mammals, one gorilla and the exhibition about ancient Egypt. We also came back to this level later to eat at MacDonald’s (fast and reliable).

After ancient Egypt, we went to the main level, where you have the main entrance with Sue (the T-Rex skeleton). On this floor, we saw almost everything; we started with ancient Americas, passing through the Northwest Coast and Arctic peoples, Pawnee Earth Lodge, and North American Indians. After that, we definitely walked through the nature section, and then we passed by the world of birds, world of mammals, Africa animals, lions of Tsavo, and reptiles and amphibians.

Our last floor was the upper level, where we saw the Evolving Planet exhibit, passed through the Dinosaur Hall, the plants of the World, some worldwide rocks and the Hall of Jade & Gems. But our last stop before going home was in the museum store. We bought one magnetic picture from the museum and a mug, and those items went into my collection. I try to have a magnetic picture and a mug from every special place or city that I visit.

We left the museum around 3:30 pm, and we still had four more hours to drive before reaching our home! It was an exhausting but very pleasurable day…..

Freezing……

The first thing that I remember from our third day in Chicago is the low temperature!  It was not too low, but the main problem was the wind.

We started our day with a short walk from our hotel to the Palmer Hotel at Chicago Downtown. The bus tour left that hotel around 10:30 am. The bus driver was an old man with a southern accent, who sometimes was difficult to understand for me but who was extremely kind. The tour started with showing us a big sculpture at Congress Plaza called The Bowman and the Spearman. After that, we went to the north side of the city, crossing the Magnificent Mile, made a short stop at Chicago’s Zoo and also passed near  Wrigley Field (home of Chicago Cubs), one of the most famous baseball fields in the USA.

After the north side we went to the south using the Lake Shore Drive to reach a south neighborhood when the Obama family has their house in Chicago ( as an explanation, if you don’t know, the current US President lived in Chicago before the move to the White House in Washington DC). We passed near the Museum of Science and Industry, and we stopped at Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum to take some pictures.

The final stop of the tour was at John Hancock Tower in order to visit the Observatory. The view  was beautiful because we could  see all the city of Chicago and Michigan Lake, and I can tell you that is an amazing view! We left the tower, and we walked a little more of the Magnificent Mile because it was Black Friday, and it was time for shopping !!!!!

Walking at Downtown!!

My second day in Chicago was on Thanksgiving Day. Almost everything was closed, except McDonald’s; therefore we decided to walk through Chicago's downtown.

My wife and I started our tour visiting Millennium Park. Our first picture was in front of a wall made of video screen bricks, which was showing us two faces. The name of this place is Crown Fountain. Near this place we saw an ice skating rink and from this skating rink it was possible to see the most famous sculpture at this park, the Bean!

As did a million other people who visited and will visit Millennium Park, we took some pictures in the Bean. It's really a unique sculpture to appreciate.

After that, we passed through a garden, which was looking like a dead garden because in November it is fall in the USA and all of the landscape does not look good.

We were a little disappointed with the fountain because it was without water; again the reason was the fall season. I realized that we need to come back there during the spring or the summer to fully enjoy the beautiful park.

We walked on the edge of the lake, from the fountain to the Navy Pier. It was a long and cold walk because the temperature was not too cold, but we were facing a lot of wind.

Everything at the pier was closed because of the holiday. Thus, we decided to walk again up to Michigan Avenue or the Majestic Mile. Our target was a restaurant that we could have lunch at, because it was almost 03:00 PM and we hadn’t had lunch yet.

We found an open restaurant near Michigan Avenue that was TGI Friday's, but at that time and considering the options that we had, they had the best food and the best restaurant in town!

After the lunch, we came back to our walking journey, and we passed through Michigan Avenue and came back to the hotel.

During the night, we had our Thanksgiving dinner at the famous American restaurant, MacDonald’s! (it was the only one open that night). It was less than one block from the hotel.

I'll tell more about day 3 and 4 in the next posts.....

First Journey inside the USA – Chicago (part II)

Continuing our journey to Chicago, we decided to visit a Brazilian supermarket near Chicago’s downtown before the hotel. I drove 2 hours and 30 minutes to Chicago, but reaching the city, I spent an extra hour just to cross part of the city because the terrible traffic in Chicago.

I found Pepe’s Supermarket  (it’s a small grocery store) ,searching on the Internet looking for Brazilian food. We reached Pepe’s earlier in the afternoon, but it’s a normal grocery store with only an aisle of some Brazilian foods such as cheese bread, guaraná soda, Passatempo, cassava flour, Brazilian coffee, etc.  I bought some things just as a reminder from my country.

Walking a few blocks from Pepe’s there is another grocery store that is selling the same kind of food but with an extra.  The name of this place is “Brasil Legal,” and this store is owned by a Brazilian lady called Silvana. The store has a Brazilian specialty called “coxinha”, that Americans call a chicken ball. My wife and I ordered “coxinha” and guaraná soda for our lunch. I can tell you that it was delicious !!!

Thank you Silvana for good food and hospitality……..

After this good time, I spent another one hour in Chicago’s traffic to come back to downtown and another 30 minutes to find the hotel with the GPS (it’s not working properly through the tallest buildings at Chicago’s downtown) but in the end, I found the hotel…….

Let’s start the four-day weekend !!!!!!