Goodbye Brazil!

Tonight is my last night in Brazil. Our flight leaves here tmrw afternoon at 1, and after 30 hours of travelling, we'll be in Canada!
We left Manoel Viana Friday morning, and have been staying in Porto Alegre (a large city - the capital of the province) for the past 4 days. Words can't really describe how it felt during the goodbye dinner for the host families the night before we left and the days leading up to it. How do you leave a place and people knowing you'll never be back again? I'm not going to say that I had the easiest time living there.. it's a really small town, and the adaptation was super hard - there was never anything to do if I wasn't working, and we were all under this intense scrutiny from the town - but after leaving that world behind and going back to a city, I realize that I will actually miss the way of life there.
I don't know if I can even begin to tell anyone how it feels to leave somewhere wondering about the mark you've left while you were there. It's different if you were to leave somewhere after a couple days, or weeks even, but we lived there. Sure, there's now a day marked on the calendar now for cleaning the city, sure there are more garbage cans around the city, sure CIANE is painted and beautiful, sure there are more trees planted along the side of the river, sure the library is painted an amazingly bright orange that you can see from across the park, yes we did all of that. But aside from the physical changes to the city we made, I wonder about the mark and changes we've made on the people in the community. All the boys who cat-called and yelled things at us when we walked by them, the people whom we talked to in the course of our work there, the people we partied with on the weekend, the girls that the boys from the group made out with (and vice versa), the host families, the children we played with, the kids at the schools we made presentations in, neighbours, tia Laura (haha), the friends we made... it's weird to think about.
Two days before we left, we went to a baile (a dance where the community goes to dance traditional dances to tradtional music) to celebrate our last night out in a city we'll never come back to. Needless to day, I drank way too much and talked to a group of people we were hanging out outside with and ended up inviting them to come with us to the beach where more booze was given to us, and um new "relations" were forged..
4 days in an actual city has made me completely exhausted. As promised, our counterparts made sure we got to know the city in the last couple days that we were here. Saturday was the birthday of one of the boys in our group, and of course he was home and able to celebrate with his friends, which meant that we all got to go out and party hard, also in celebration of our leaving of Manoel Viana. We went to a club that resembled Circa on a Friday night. My counterpart insisted that we go there, and that it was totally my scene and she was completely correct. The music was good - most of it I had on my ipod, the scene was great, and the people there were definitely people I'd party back home with. Free champagne till midnight, Disco Rock, Miami Bitch - definitely calls for a good time. Relations were forged once again, and now we know that things not only work differently in Manoel Viana, but all of Brazil. The party was a good booster for mid-program. It helped me remember who I am and what I like to do.. it got lost somewhere between eating churrasco everyday and going to bailes to party.
Yesterday, some of us went to a soccer match and today we went shopping, and my counterpart brought me to the photography studio where she works, and I got to see how commercial photography works and got to handle $4000+ equipment (woohoo the third world!).
I'm completely physically and mentally exhausted, dealing with noise and pollution and traffic (people drive like nuts here) after living in a small town for 3 months is almost terrifying. I'm used to walking behind a horse and cart, and waiting for a flock of chickens and some dogs to cross the road, not busses and cars barreling down streets at 100km/hr.
It's actually really sad that I'm leaving here, because in the 4 days that I've been here I got to meet my counterparts family and friends and I don't know if I'll ever see them again. I know I'll return to Brazil some day, but probably not to this region..
For now it's tchau tchau e beijos para Brasil, and hello Canada, bonjour Quebec in about a day or two. It's hard to remember that the program isn't half over yet.. we still have 3 months left to go.. I don't want to know what it will be like to leave everyone at the end, but I guess we'll get to that when it comes.