The first time I visited my dad in Brazil I had to get a yellow fever vaccine and endure an hour-long, alarmist presentation about all the ways you can get ill while traveling. The lady warned us not to eat at any buffets UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. I was like “awesome I can’t wait to get cholera because my dad frikkin loves buffets” and indeed we basically exclusively ate at buffets. Like, he went out of his way to find them. The cheaper the better. I was fine as far as I know.

The embassy was sponsoring a film at a film festival in Rio Branco; it was a documentary about the revitalization of the Wampanoag language. The director came to the festival and we traveled with her to meet an indigenous tribe that lived in “Village 27.” I guess the theory was that her documentary was about a tribal language so it’d be cool for her to meet a Brazilian tribe. They told us their history, we played some games, and although technically the food was not buffet-style I still think that vaccine lady would have been mad about it. I didn’t pay close attention to what my dad was doing but you can see in the pix he was schmoozing. 😄

As part of the visit, they asked my dad if he would plant a tree. You can imagine how excited he was about that. He nodded and said, “with my daughter.” It was probably just for show and the tree is probably no longer there, but it’s nice to think that it might be.

The other big event on this trip was a visit to a jaguar sanctuary. It was cool as hell and now I’m terrified of big cats holy crap they are scary.

I actually didn’t see much of Brasilia itself–most of the rest of my time there was spent watching Dad watch Big Bang Theory in Portuguese, which was how he kept up his language skills. I did get to see that cool curly bridge though.