seekingmygreaterperhaps

Oi! Tudo bem?

My last trip of the school year brought me to Belo Horizonte in Minas Gerias, Brazil. It was a quick 3 day weekend, and on the full days I spent them doing day trips, so I don’t feel as though I really saw Belo Horizonte more than just staying there. I traveled with 3 other people: Alex, Chris, and Max. We rented a car so we could more easily explore the destinations in Minas Gerais.

The first day brought us to the incredible Inhotim art museum and botanical gardens. It is the largest outdoor art museum in Brazil, and one of the largest in the world, spanning over 345 acres. I can attest, this place is huge, and we walked so much (over 15,000 steps in a day)! They have little golf carts you can hop on and hop off, but we chose to walk.

I was awestruck the entire day. The museum blends incredible nature seamlessly with art. Even the buildings blend into the landscape and utilize light in unique ways. I was so impressed by all of the benches using trees (this one is huge, but others were carved in cool ways). All the nature here was just so BIG. It was green and lush and very well taken care of.

Inhotim hosts contemporary artists, many Brazilian, but also international artists as well. I am not a huge contemporary art fan, but there are a couple names I know and appreciate, and am always willing to learn something new!

This exhibit by Yayoi Kusama was really neat. You get 1 minute and you are completely alone in this space full of lights, and there is music and the lights go with the music. It felt like being immersed in the world of the floating lantern festival from Tangled.

Above is one of the outdoor features, and I think Brasilia has something by the same artist at the CCBB here (unless there are other artists that do giant walls of one color, which there might be). Just a note about the size of the leaves on that tree behind me- they are giant, I’m talking possibly the size of my torso and I am a tall woman.

Inhotim may be one of my favorite art museums I have ever been to due to the way that nature is a focus. Some of the exhibits were quite fun to walk around in- there was one where the floor was covered in shards of glass that you could walk on if you were wearing close toed shoes. While I don’t always understand the contemporary art, I enjoy a fun exhibit.

The next day our group woke up early and headed to Ouro Preto. Our first stop was the Minas de Ouro de Passagem, which is a defunct gold mine where you start the tour by riding down an old mining cart. (If you do want to go, make sure you bring cash, because we had to take a detour to the neighboring town to find the ATM.) Riding down the cart was pretty fun, but I didn’t get to see any gold in the mine, so I guess that’s why it is defunct.

At the end of the tour, our guide demonstrated how they used to pan for gold with water. I tried it, and let’s just say I was not meant to be a gold digger because it was quite difficult!

Lunch was next on the agenda, and Minas Gerais is famous in Brazil for having “the best food.” We went to a typical Minas place, and Alex and I shared a tropeiro beans platter. It came with sausage, pork, kale, rice and beans. It was a very heavy lunch.

Ouro Preto is a city filled with very step hills, and a lot of churches. On the mining tour we learned that the mines were originally labored by slaves and the Portuguese made Brazil send back all the gold found in the mines… unless it was used for religious purposes. No wonder there are so many churches, and inside they are covered with real gold.

A quick note to beware of a scam that was attempted to be run on us inside the church. There is a guy who comes up to you and starts talking about the history and the background of the church. We thought he worked there, and then he sat us down and kept talking, almost like a tour. Well when we were ready to move on, he expected us to pay him for his time, and then when we didn’t, he yelled at Max and called us ignorant. (We paid to enter the church, not for a tour.) While there was no harm, Max understandably got really upset, and I was confused why this was even happening. On our way out, he was doing the same thing to another group of people.

If we were staying a full weekend in just Ouro Preto, we probably would have explored a little more. Honestly, we didn’t want to walk all the way down an extremely steep street just to have to walk all the way back up. But the colonial architecture you can see from the top is simply gorgeous.

I am hoping to go back to Belo Horizonte and visit the city itself, but having the car gave us the flexibility to get out of the city, so that was cool. I am super happy I was able to explore a new state of Brazil with a fun group of people!