Sewage water in paradise

Kelly and I in hard hats..... yep says it all

Today were we SO lucky to have the opportunity to visit a potable (drinking) water treatment plant as well as a sewage treatment plant....yay! That is what I call a Friday! Our class, before we left for Brazil, toured Macon's waste water and potable water plants so the goal was to give us a comparative experience of how river water end up coming out of our tap.

Treatin' so sewage!

Finally having a morning of sleeping in, because between getting up early and working in the hot sun as well as the time change our group has been a little run down throughout the week, it was so wonderful! Another great thing about today was that the water people rented vans for us to ride around in - no public transit for us today! But seriously, Brazilian buses may be one of the scariest parts of our trip. You feel like you are on a ride at Six Flags with improper safety precautions. Anyways, the van ride was nice, especially since they were doing this for free for our group. When we arrive at the drinking water plant, they gave us shirts, packets, really cool plastic cups of water with aluminum foil on top to close it and the run down on the entire plant. After a really cool presentation, we were able to see the water from the local river be filtered in their facility - which they shut down for us so we could see the whole process. Basically we felt like celebrities the whole time, between the free swag and the millions of pictures their publications lady was taking we were kinda a big deal. Then we got to go to the water water plant..... yay. I told myself after seeing a poop collector in Macon that I would never go back - and then this happened.

UV light water treatment 

Actually the WW plant was not that bad, on the way their they provided us with snacks and a free water bottle - which was awesome but most of us were hesitant to eat it before our gross encounter. When we got to the WW plant they gave us another wonderful presentation from engineers and chemists who work there for the D2D operation plus hard hats! So we then got to see the WW and how it goes through a 7 step process before it is put back in the river, downstream from the drinking water collection site. It was pretty cool for a tour of a poop factory and we did get to see a fairly new and uncommon method of water treatment - that being Ultraviolet exposure. Basically they used UV rays to sterilize all of the bacteria so they cannot reproduce - the end result being their death and clean water. The entire tour of both plants took around 6 hours but that did not stop us from going out for a night on the down in Vitoria!

Favelas next to the WW plant

After we got back to the hotel we decided to all go the the mall, which is called "Shopping Vitoria" Brazilian business like to use random English words in their shop names because it sounds fancy, like Mister Pizza, Mr. Beer, Mr. Cat, China in Box, and many others. Anyways we were able to sample some more Brazilian food and it was very yummy, but when we went to shop everything was so expensive. Nike shoes were 350.00 Reals = $175.00  USD and those were the cheapest and ugliest pair. A pair of jeans was almost $150 USD and in a country were the average person, aka low middle class or high poor class, only makes $650.00 Reals a month - that is $325.00 USD per month.... that is $3900.00 a year and in Reals double that. So needless to say I was shocked at the price inflation and did not purchase anything. The shopping center however was enormous! I am talking bigger than the mall of GA and Arbor place put together and it was open super late - when I asked a lady (in very bad Portuguese) when the mall closed she said when people leave. These stores sometimes stay open until 11-12:30 at night on Fridays - which is the big shopping day here. So we walked the 3 miles back to the hotel (yes I walked 3 miles to go shopping and bought nothing...) and now we are all getting ready to head out to the beach in a more southern region of Brazil tomorrow. Shout out to my dad who apparently is a very avid reader of my blog and to my sisters - who send me very funny snaps chats while I am away. I will catch ya after I hit the beach!
Tchau Tchau,
Alexis

Kayla and I outside a Toy Store at the mall, PANDA!