We are enjoying Minas Gerais

We don't have any guide book for Brazil for 3 reasons :

- it's too heavy to wear 16 lonely planet in a small baggage

- it's too expensive to buy them

- We would like to be a little (if it's still possible) original instead of meeting french and americans everywhere

Instead of buying some guide, we enjoy doing CouchSurfing, meeting people, chating about there daily life and enjoy to spend some time with them. Sometimes they don't speak a word of english. What we can do is to do our best to let them understand what we are saying. Julien's book named "G pa'lémo" (in english "I doo knot' have words for") is really useful in this time. We just show them pictures to make them understand what we are talking about. There are picture for everything like food, transportation, hotels, and even for making a move! As far as I know, we didn't use the last one by the way!!

When I teached chinese ink drawing, I was told by my pupil Joël, an art lover, that Brazil is amazing for nature and baroque art. As he advised me to hang around the Minas Gerais's state, we decided to come here. Joël rounded the world so many times that he always give me advices about my next trips!

In Ouro Preto, we enjoy the churches, the national park around and doing parties with students. Yesterday we hiked for 3 or 4 hours. We went to a deep forest. Its dense and wet like Amozonie's forest with dangerous snakes and so on! I was afraid to meet some but my guide thought I'm stupid because they don't out out in this season. We are in fall here in Brazil.

Today we went for a ride in an "old train" with a locomotive going to Mariana. We saw such beautiful landscapes, it made my day!!! At this time I had happy memories of Honju, Satoshi and me riding the rokko densha to Kameoka on the sakura's blooming season. I also thought to Masano and her lovely family, living here. When we arrived in Mariana, I wanted to visit every churche like I used to do in Japan. Julien kindly joined me but I think he would prefer doing BBQ with the guys who host us. Finaly, we went down into a gold mine but we didn't find any! I thought that Saint Etienne's one (the city I used to live when I was an art student) is much better than Brazilians ones!

The jungle, oh yeahhhh!

Ouro Preto by night

I liked it because it reminds me japanese paintings

Spot the odd one out!

Mariana city

Landscape from the train

Inside the gold mine