Mini Josie keeps warm after arriving in Brazil

I’m super happy that I’m finally in Brazil. Brazil is the biggest country in South America and it has 8,515,767.049 km2 where more than 200,000,000 people live! Wow! The country is formed by 27 states that are very different in nature, culture, and climate. Here they speak Portuguese since they were colonized by the Portuguese people a long time ago. The country has amazing natural landscape and the people are super happy and warm! And another thing is that their money is called Real. Well, in this photo I show where Brazil is located on the map!

While I was in my host’s house I was able to watch her studying a lot since I came to Brazil while she was in the middle of her semester in school! One interesting fact about schools here in Brazil is that when they want to go to university, they have only two ways of entering: ENEM or vestibular. Both are tests and they only rate the student’s knowledge. Here they don’t appreciate other aspects of the students. The rest of the school and university years are very similar to the USA.

I also was able to help my host with her French homework a lot of times. This reminded me a lot of Marie Grace and Cecile. I miss my big sisters a lot, but when I come back home I’ll have so many stories to tell them.

The region of Brazil that I stayed at has defined sessions of the year. This means that they have a hot summer and a cold winter (it isn’t hot all year long like in some other places in Brazil). The seasons of the year are reversed here because it's the southern hemisphere: their summer starts in December and their winter starts in June. When I arrived it was oddly hot because according to my host this April they didn’t have such high temperatures. At least I can say that I enjoyed having a hot Brazilian day. When it was the end of April/beginning of May, it became cold. And when it was end of May/beginning of June it became super cold, especially in the night. In the majority of the nights during that time, the temperature reached below zero degree Celsius (freezing, 32 degrees F).

Most of these super cold days were gray days. I loved to spend some of my time on these days just looking out the window and enjoying the view.

I’m glad that I came to Brazil with cold weather clothes. These cold days were hard to bear with.

In those super cold days my host would study with the heater by her side and I took advantage of that and stayed close to it to stay warm.

As I wrote before, most of those cold days were gray days, but some days, the sky would be clear and blue without any clouds. When the sky was blue in the afternoon, the sunset would be amazing at the end of the afternoon.

The good thing about those days was that the sun made these days a little bit less cold!

Look at one of the amazing sunsets that I was able to watch! They were breath taking.

To see more of Josie’s adventures, click here to view her Travel Log!