DAY 6: 3 August 2009
Hello Iowa!
No soccer today. After breakfast at the Cruzerio Club, we traveled by bus for two hours out of the city to Ouro Preto, a historical city of about 40,000 people. The city’s history ties to gold mining and is a very hilly city with narrow cobblestone streets and small shops and homes interspersed among large churches and historical or governmental buildings. The state in which this City and Belo Horizonte sits is Minas Gerais that refers to rich minerals or something like that. The boys began with a brief tour of a former gold mine. The Portuguese used slaves to work the mines, so the slave trade, their plight and their lives were a significant theme for the day. We visited a church whose construction was financed by gold smuggled out of the mines in the hair of the slaves. After lunch, we visited another museum, and then the boys had the freedom to explore city centre in groups of threes to shop and take in the sites on their own. We ate both lunch and dinner at a very nice restaurant situated in the narrow cobblestone streets of the town centre. Lunch included a birthday cake to celebrate Isaac’s 15th birthday.
This was another excellent weather day. Darkness hits by about 6:00 so we saw the city at night as we walked from the restaurant to the bus for the ride back to Cruzerio.
– Submitted by Brian Bergstrom
