planes, trains, and automobiles....

Except not planes, just trains, automobiles and buses...I had some interesting experiences with transportation this weekend starting with moving around cars in a parking garage.  I should say pushing around, because none of them were my cars and I wasn't driving them out of the way, but pushing them out of the way.  It felt very "Sound of Music, escaping to Austria in the middle of the night."  I went to visit a friend Friday night and when she was going to take me home, we found that someone had parked her in.  Soooo, apparently, the norm in their apartment complex is for everyone to leave their cars in neutral and if you're in someone's way, they just push your car to another space and pull out and then push your car back.  I still felt a little funny pushing someone else's 2,000 pound property around.  

Today, I decided to brave public transportation in order to meet my cousin and her parents who are visiting from the states for lunch downtown.  My friends dropped me off at the train station at 10:15 a.m., and I wasn't supposed to meet my family until 12:30 noon.  I hadn't any idea how long the train would take....turns out, not that long.  After paying the wrong amount for my train ticket (I saw a fee for the bus which was R$7,50 and paid that, though my train only cost $5,10...the lady called after me and gave me R$2 back, if I knew how to ask for the rest of my change, I would have, but we'll consider that my ignorance tax) and trying to put my ticket in the wrong slot at the terminal, I made it to my train (I'm sure the lady got a kick out of watching me try to make the ticket go where it did not belong after she already made off with my 40 centavos).  It took 30 minutes, so I had almost two hours to kill in an area where I'd never been and with which I was unfamiliar.  I walked a bit and found a mall, where most of the stores were closed, but a Starbucks was open, so I ordered something (in order to avoid being asked to leave) and sat outside on their patio and read the book I'd brought for my looong train ride.  I met my family at 12:30 and had a wonderful lunch with them and the host parents my cousin has been staying with during her time in Brazil.  Fun times.  We even went to the top of Edifício Itália, a building from which you can look out over the city of São Paulo.  Then they dropped me off at the train station and I had an uneventful ride home and decided instead of calling someone and bothering them to come and pick me up at the train station, that I could just ride the bus home.  I had exact change, no big deal.  It was only sprinkling when I got on the bus.  After a few minutes, a torrential downpour began, which made it very hard to see where we were stopping and where I needed to get off.  I did manage to get the right stop, but stepped into a huge mud puddle as I exited the bus and, not wanting to hang out at the bus stop in the dark, decided to walk home in the torrential downpour.  It was only a few blocks, but I had to ford several rushing rivers that had been formed from the rain coming downhill from the streets around me and I lost one of my favorite flip-flops in the very first river.  There was no way to retrieve it, it was instantly swept away...boooooo.  So I walked the next several blocks home with only one shoe in a monsoon...but I felt very pleased with myself for having braved two forms of public transportation in one day, and tomorrow, in the daylight, I'm going to hunt for my long lost flip-flop!