Only 9 days left!

I can't believe we only have a few days left in Vitória! It makes me sad because I love it here but I'm also excited to share everything that I've learned with Marymount and my family.

Last weekend I went to Minas Gerais, a neighboring state, with my host parents and grandmother, Jacopo, and Mareike. Minas Gerais is famous for its Pão de Queijo, ("cheese bread") so we ate a lot of it during that weekend! I'm pretty sure it has become one of my new favorite foods.

While we were in Minas, we stayed in Mariana and we visited Ouro Preto, which means black gold. Mariana and Ouro Preto are both historical towns so we got to see a lot of different churches that we're built by rich families during the colonial period in Brazil. My host mom, Raquel, taught me about the baroque and rococo architectural styles of the churches and about Aleijadinho, a famous sculptor of the Baroque movement.

Antonio Fransico Lisboa was born in Ouro Preto in 1738 and was given the name Aleijadinho, which means "Little Cripple," because he had a debilitating disease that affected his hands. I learned that in order to create his sculptures he used pedra sabão ("soap stone"), a type of stone that is common in the region and easy to mold.

Church of the Third Order of St Francis in Ouro Preto. 

Marieke and I outside of a church in Mariana