finally, i´ve gotten off my lazy butt, and have put some pictures up for y´all! in order, they are from the district conference at the beginning of may in São Laurenço, from my trip to Diamantina with my host family, and from the exchange weekend in Caraças. (and then the last picture is são laurenço again....)


me and bence (hungary) wrapped in each other´s flags...

so, right before the conference, Jon broke his foot, and so he was in a cast. At the conference, all there really was to do was walk around, swim, and dance, none of which he could do with crutches. So, we rented him a wheelchair, and i wheeled him around for a large portion of the day we had it.

a group of us at the Governor´s Ball at the São Laurenço district conference. Left to right: Rachel (texas), Erin (maryland), Oda (norway), Jon (minnesota), Elena (idaho), Me, Florian (france)



me with the exchangers in "traditional dress), plus mira. from left to right: mira (greenland), cherry (taiwan), elena, rianti (indonesia...her dress is the costume for the dance she did, which is a peacock dance), Pin (thailand) and Oda (norway).
Me and Florian (from France) in our Festa Junina costumes...alas, this dress didn´t fit me, so i went in a different costume, but the girls usually wear dresses like this...festa junina is a party brazilians have every june where they dress up like "caipiras" (brazilian hillbillies) and dance around. It is great fun.
My real festa junina costume...however, as it was ass-ugly, i changed out of it fairly quickly. I still had a LOT of fun though! (kim from Australia is on the left, elena from idaho on the right)

this is: a church in diamantina, where i went many moons ago with my family. Diamantina has many churches, and most of them look like this, with lots of baroque art work on the inside that you can´t take pictures off.

Right outside of Diamantina, there´s this completely beautiful natural reservation, called Biri Biri, where there´s lots of really cool waterfalls, such as this one.

this is the actual "town" of BiriBiri. yes, that is all it is. there´s a really good restaurant there though.Caraças, where we had an exchange student conference, is really beautiful!



It used to be a Catholic seminary, but years ago, a fire occured there, so now it´s combination seminary and hotel. When we were there, it was all foggy and cool.

from left to right, my bestest friends from my district: mira (greenland), Rianti (indonesia), Darin, Jon, myself, and Elena, (all from the States, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Idaho respectively). This ledge that we´re standing on was quite scary, because the other side was this really steep hill that was more like a cliff.
Me and Brendan, my future husband (if we´re not married by thirty) while we went hiking through the mountains of Caraças. Olha que linda!
A big group of gringos (and some brazilians) who braved the VERY cold waters of this waterfall in caraças, which was LAKE MICHIGAN style cold.

this is half of forespoken waterfall...it had like...six tiers to it, and was huge!

Myself, my host sister Vivienne, and my host mom, Junia, in this house/museum in Diamantina. The house is famous because the owner of the town, back in it´s hay-day, built this humongous house for his mistress, who was a mulata women, and the first person of that race to have anything remotely similar to money. (this was in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century, during slavery).me and my host family (or at least part, Lucas and Mariana, my other two siblings, are missing) on the cobblestoned streets of Diamantina.

A church in São Laurenço, "a cidade d ´agua" (the city of water...i guess there´s lots of of natural springs there, so a lot of mineral water comes from SL)