Curitiba: Rainy day in a Nice City

When we first saw our trip itinerary and it read that we will be spending a night on a bus from Iguasu to Curitiba, we dreaded the thought.  Our fears, however, were unfounded.  At 10:30 at night we boarded a huge modern semi-cama bus with leg rests and seats that reclined about three quarters of the way back.  Even though the bus swayed a lot because it was so high, we had a good sleep by the time we arrived in Curitiba at 6:30 am.

Curitibita is Brazil's model city.  It's clean, has a great infrastructure, modern transportation, lots of parks and numerous educational institutions.  It is also quite young, founded only in the 19th century.  The population here is also quite multicultural since there are not only descendants of the Portugese but also descendants of Italians, Germans, Poles and Ukrainians.  The area was settled around the same time as the Canadian West, just over a hundred years ago, when farmers from Europe came looking for new opportunities.  The vast areas of forest in this region were cleared and agriculture established.

We were quartered in a nice hotel in the centre of the city, right on the main shopping street and spent the day walking around the city.  In the evening we had dinner in a pub and goofed by overordering on our food and it must have been amusing to the people around us as we had plates of chicken, beef and french fries that could easily have fed 6 or 8 people.  So that is a consequence of not knowing Purtugese.  We actually got along quite well in Spanish when in Bolivia and Paraguay, and could even engage in basic conversations, but Portugese is a different story, especially trying to understand the spoken form.