Dancing, Cooking, and Studying…and a bit of macumba.

Me and Camila, we had a good time, as you can tell!

Well since everyone was so curious about this dress I bought I made sure to take some photos. It turned out really well thanks to Camila’s aunt! But about the dance….
It was a lot of fun! There were lots of people there of all ages, the greatest thing I saw there was like a 65 year old man with light-stick bracelets on like the youth dancing along to some Axe….it was great. The boys there were funny and really forward. I got sick of dancing after a while so I turned a few people down, but oh well…I couldn’t help it if my feet were tired!

Kellen, one of the other voulnteers I work with and me.
One guy was really forward and asked me to go meet his family and parents….lol, they were nice people, and I politely excused myself at the first chance I got. Turns out that this same guy is in my institute class, and tried to get my number afterwards so he can practice his English, I told him we don’t have a phone or internet at home…I hope he got the point! Nice guy and all, but I can’t date here and he’s not my type. Camila was telling me that the boys here like girls from America, lol…too bad. The CrAzY dance floor...cool decorations huh?
Saturday we slept in until 11 since we didn’t go to bed until like 3 am, and then studied for a long time. I’m working mostly on my Latin American History, trying to get that done so that I can focus on the other 2 classes. Right now I’m studying the beginnings of the Brazilian empire, and the 19th century politics of Brazil. The people from institute, if your wondering I was telling the person to hold down the button longer, they obviously got the message. Mr. "meet my family" is the one to the left of me...lol.
Even though I studied that over the summer as well, I’m learning lots of new things and it’s really interesting to me to read about how the government was set up and the point of view the author has about the emperor of Brazil Dom Pedro II…but I wont get into all that now. This was the dress I wore...it got good reviews.
Also on Saturday since we were studying it was super quiet in our apartment, and we have some crazy neighbors that live up stairs. I mean we can hear them super drunk at like 2 am on a regular basis or they love to play some Pagode (annoying music akin to Forro for those that know Brazilian music) really loud at any given time. But this time when we heard them it was something brand new and made them even weirder…they were doing a macumba ritual. There were probably like 10 voices chanting something over and over and someone playing some maraca sounding thing, needless to say Camila and I thought it was funny and very fitting that they would do that. I’m very curious as to what these people look like, if I ever find out I’ll let you know. Me, Kellen, Her sister, and her sisters boyfriend.
Institute was good; the teacher is really good and keeps the class energized for the 2 hours that we spend there. The people in the class are really fun and nice, I’m glad that they are a fun group of people, we should have some good times in the months to come. I’m excited to be learning more gospel vocabulary and everything here, its nice because by the time December gets here I’ll have a church vocabulary, business vocabulary, cooking vocabulary, and of course just regular words too. Me and my first pot of Feijoada...
After institute I did some more homework by having Camila teach me how to make feijoada from scratch….I started with just some dry beans, bacon, Linguica (sausage), onion, garlic, and salt. By the end it was feijoada, and Camila told me “ja pode casar” which is a saying for its really good…so I suppose it turned out pretty well! I was surprised at how simple it was to make and I had fun doing it too. Now I just need to write my papers about the dance and cooking for my Brazilian culture class and I’ll only have 12 more papers to go (ahhh!).

The view down to the dance floor from the 2nd story, there were 3 levels to the club...it was really cool!

Sunday was fast and testimony in our ward and it was a really good meeting, our ward is small but friendly, and so I’m excited to be there. All the kids in the ward are so cute, I’m glad to have kids in my ward again, something I missed while at BYU. I still don’t like to speak up too much during the classes or anything because I’m too embarrassed of my Portuguese but I think that will go away as I get a better handle on the language. After that we went to eat in Camila’s aunts house with her parents. Camila’s Grandma is from Japan so she made us all Sushi and it took her 5 ½ hours to do. Doug would have been in heaven! I ate it and liked it, none of it was raw…just veggie rolls and crab so nothing I couldn’t handle!
As for the coming week, Camila and I are teaching the CASP course again but this time in the afternoon Tuesday through Thursday and then Friday and Saturday were teaching an intensive course. I hope I do better this week than last, not that last week was horrible, but there is definitely room for improvement. We also found a place really close to the apartment to go running in the mornings so we are hoping to start that. Somehow walking for an hour everyday just isn’t enough exercise for us lol. I’m glad Curitiba is safe enough you can go out and run without having problems with people…hahaha, imagine going for a run in Sao Paulo, yeah right.