Florianopolis is great. I’m happy to report that boredom has not yet set in. We’ve been out exploring the island and its many beaches, hiking trails, towns, restaurants, etc. The people are very friendly, and while we’re in a sleepy fishing village, it’s exactly the break we needed from Buenos Aires for awhile.
We have noticed a tremendous number of differences between Brazil and Argentina, which include the people, food, culture and language. We initially thought that since the two countries were neighbors, we’d see more similarities, but the differences are striking. We’ll write more about that in another post, but one example is the language. For some reason we thought Portuguese would sound more similar to Spanish, but we quickly learned that our rudimentary Spanish did not get us far here. The two languages sound nothing alike to us! Even when the words are the same (about 89% of the language overlaps or is close), they’re pronounced much differently. Luckily, having our basic Spanish does help though as a lot of people can understand the basics and can figure out what we’re saying. English has been pretty useless for the most part here.
We’ll be back with some more updates soon, but for now, here’s some pictures from my time here.
