Hello! After a few great weeks of reminiscing travels to Brazil, it is finally coming to an end. I have grouped these two together, as they were both fairly short trips, with few pictures to show for them. That said, we obviously loved our time in both. In Nova Iguaçu, we were with our university group - it was an interesting time in which we learnt a lot about the communities. Petropolis was a trip we took on our own, where weather definitely wasn't on our side.

Petropolis

The mountains surrounding Petropolis, as well as a Christmas tree!

Petropolis is a city that is perhaps a little more interesting to people from Brazil itself rather than us - Europeans. The charm of it comes from the architecture style that makes it a lot like a European city - it could very well just be a town in Portugal and you wouldn't notice a difference.

Historically, it was a summer residence of the rulers of Brazil. Its name lends itself to a Brazilian ruler - Pedro. Polis meaning city, hence - Petropolis: the city of Pedro. Here is a palace - Quitandinha - that.. well, all I know about it is that there was a treaty between multiple American countries.

In general, the part we enjoyed the most about Petropolis was the greenery that we walked around in. It was not necessarily something extremely special, but simply enjoyable.

Finally, we also visited a little Christmas Market. It consisted of a few stalls, as well as multiple decorations. Because of the fairly unwelcoming weather, it was sadly nearly completely empty - not too much of a Christmas atmosphere, but we still made it exciting! Well, it is hard not to be excited when you find every single place to be suitable for taking a cool photo!

That's not the cool photo - just a part of the hangout place where the market was.

HERE is the cool photo. Well, for us at least.

Nova Iguaçu

In Nova Iguaçu, we only managed to take pictures on a long forest walk that we took with our guide. That said, we did some other things that I can write about.

First of all, we visited the city market (lots of markets!) with supposedly mostly stuff made by the sellers. This city is quite close to Rio de Janeiro and struggles with high crime rates - at least according to what we were told. Here I'd just like to note that I am simply relaying information I got from the locals: if you are from here and find that some information is wrong - please let me know, I'd love to learn! Back to the market: we had some time to walk around and buy stuff - personally I didn't. I feel like the idea was to get us to leave some money in there; smart marketing strategy!

Once we were done there, they told us a lot about the city and the challenges it faces. Many of those challenges were related to lack of money and education, as well as lots of crime - all intertwined. They then took us to two places I want to talk about, before I get to the forest pictures.

The first place was an auditorium, in which we got to present what our university is; after which we got presentations of what some small entrepreneurs do in Nova Iguaçu. Likely the most touching of the bunch was a few women who worked with recycling (or well, circular upcycling), creating bags and other accessories using all kinds of used and thrown away materials. It was a beautiful presentation full of woman empowerment, as well as a great showing of where motivation and hard work can take you.

After that, we went to a cultural complex in the city. We were there to be presented an exhibition that was ongoing at the time, related to the contribution of Afro-Brazilians to the formation of Brazilian identity. It was a great experience that showed us multiple ways in which such contribution occurred, presented by an incredibly good host. He was clearly passionate about the subject himself - he's been brought nearly to tears while talking about the various punishments that slaves were going through during times of slavery. It was truly touching and we learnt a lot as well.

That's all we've got from there - a great booklet that we sadly can't understand.

Finally, to let off some steam (and learn some stuff about nature and how it was formed!) we took a bus away from the city to a nearby nature reserve. We had a pretty long walk towards a tiny waterfall, in which we could take a dip in the water. Instead of doing that with the whole group, me and my girlfriend decided to climb some rocks and check out some other parts of the forest.

We were inside a huge crater that apparently used to be a volcano!

We even found a Brazilian couple that took this picture of us.

The successful explorer.

Conclusion

Right, this is the end of my posts from Brazil. Sure, I have lots more travels to describe, and hopefully soon we will start adding on to that list - but I'll still miss writing about Brazil; it was likely our favourite trip. Definitely go to my profile and check out the other posts from Rio de Janeiro, if you haven't seen them yet!