Today, we went to the city of Ouro Preto or "Black Gold". It is a colonial town built in the mountain and full of narrow streets, old building, and a ton of churches. The town is about 120 km away from Belo Horizonte and it took us about an hour and a half to drive there. The city was amazing. It reminded me a lot of some of the small towns I have driven to in Italy, with cobble stone single lane roadways and little restaurants and shops right up against the road. As we walked around the town, I noticed that there was one church after another. You couldn't look out over the town without seeing at least three of them. I took a lot of great pictures of the place which you can see on picasaweb.
For lunch, we stopped at this overpriced fancy restaurant and I got some more Minas Gerais food. I have to start to learn how to order it because there are certain things that I just don't like. They have pork rinds as a major part of the meal, which I hate, and also there is usually one green food which is sort of like grass, also not very tasty. The others ordered filets which looked a lot better.
We could only go into a couple of the churches. Inside one of them, you find a lot of ornate religious decor, sculptures, and wooden carvings. They were all painted with gold leaf. In another church, we found that a lot of the religious figures were holding skulls to remind the people that they are mortal with finite life and to remember not to overly value material things. In both of the churches, there was a free standing doorway just inside the main doorway which was used to block the view of the ceremony from the unprivileged outsiders and uninvited lower class.
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