Olinda, Beautiful

Today we had one heck of a trek. We had the opportunity to visit Olinda, a city that is a very unique part of Recife. It is unique because it is actually older than Recife and is the location of some of the oldest settlers in all of Brasil. It has buildings from the 1500s and if you think about it, those are older than ANY buildings in the United States. It sits pretty close to Recife and yet remains separate enough to keep it's unique heritage.  Yeah, it was an awesome experience, and I'll start by showing pics of which places we visited and what they mean. Here we go:

So this is near the actual port where the first colonists landed. Cindy and I decided to take some notes this time since we were in a very historic city.

So this is an example of what the buildings look like in the city. They have a cool story behind the whole colorful part, it being that rather than having addresses for everyone they just painted their house a certain color in order to identify the location. I thought it was pretty clever until I realized there could be problems with deciding certain colors belong to whom and to where the house can actually be found, no matter the color. Oh well, not my problem! haha!

During Carnival in February they have HUGE parade and at the front of each parade they put these flags. After each parade they leave the flag at this place. You can go in and get a drink and eat in this place, it was pretty cool.

This is the inside of a church that we visited that they still sing Gregorian chants in. The wood was hand carved and then covered with a layer of gold. It is 15 total tons of gold in the church. Yeah, that place is worth a little bit. There were several different statues representing different saints. It was a very beautiful place to visit and very historical.

So visited a few other beautiful churches and got to walk around the historic Olinda. It was a really fun day even though it was crazy hot. My neck now has a permanent tan line on it. Seriously. But on the way home I got a little reminder of normal Brazilian life. We got on a bus to go home, which was probably only like 15 miles away at the most, and it took us an hour and fifteen minutes to get there. Not only that, but out bus was packeddddddd with people the entire time. I had people pressed against me so often that if someone had wanted to rob me they probably could have gotten away with it. They could have taken my shoes without me even knowing it honestly. Plus, I had to hold onto a bar to make sure I didn't fall, and being such a large guy, whenever the bus moved people had the tendency to lean all of their weight on me. I won't lie, I was pretty glad to get home. Josh, Joe and I then went and put on some swimming suits and jumped in the ice cold pool. Great way to cool down, and when you're numb life is good. All in all, pretty fun day!