Enough of cold weather – back to Brazil! The road to Curitiba became complicated. Instead of waiting for next day and take a 40h direct ride, we took a chance to go half-way to Posadas and look for another ride there, maybe even the same day. Bad choice. Posadas is right on the way, but few buses stop there and it’s not tourist friendly or organized. Looking for a table in any restaurant during a football game between Argentina and Brazil took place was also really difficult. But we got good food, and Brazil won the American cup with boring 3-0. From Posadas we actually had to go via Iguacu on both sides of the border. We stopped ca 10 times for each town, and also in many villages, picking or dropping people all the way. At last in Foz on the Brazilian side we got lucky and got a last minute ticket on a direct bus to Curitiba within the hour of arriving.Curitiba
Its true that is has no atmosphere and no long history, with empty streets in the night. However, we really like the city. Particularly because of its generous and very non-crowded parks. Everythings clean and tidy, taxis are nice, streets as good as European. The bad side of this is that some prices are European as well. The city spends a lot of money on maintaining parks and museums, with outdoor museums and smaller museums having free entrance. One park has a zoo with colourful birds and small bouncing monkeys. Another park has sheep with their shepherd, unnamed birds and big fluffy brown somethings – looking a bit similar to inflated guinea pigs. Chinese immigrants serve food, buffet and fast-food almost non-stop. Fruit-juices are good and really cheap. Our fruit-squeezer from Salta is on vacation, but once we figure out the fruit market maybe we’ll take it back to work. One Mercado municipal, an indoors marketplace, offers both known and unknown fruits, all kinds of muesli per kilo, cheese and smaller boutiques with delicacies from the whole world. The dialect in Curitiba is funny – maybe because of the mix of German, Polish, Ukrainian and Italian immigrants as the most representative groups. We also went to Morretes, as the guide book said it was a must. It wasn't too impressive, but we had bad weather so with clear view it could be worth a visit.
