Three Weeks...

Good Evening Everbody!!
How is life in the mother land??

So I didn’t send out an update last week, because I figured if I waited another week I would have more to write!
As of today, I have been here a mere 3 weeks of my 10 month exchange…but it already feels like time is flying by! To all the teachers I have to apologize in advance for my English, it´s fading fast…and this letters bound to be full of grammatical errors!
So Last email I sent a few people asked about the food and fashion down here…so let me go into some sort of detail about things…
FOOD:
The food down here consist of...Meat, fried meat, fried fruit, fried veggies, beans, rice, fresh fruit, cooked veggies, coca-cola, fruit juice, and assortment of breads.

On the Average day my meals go something along the lines of this

Breakfast: Juice or aqua, Some sort of wheat’s you put in your milk that make it a cold pourage (I FOUND SOY MILK DOWN HERE!!!! :D ) Bannana, weird hard beagle things, or little mini hotdog buns things….
Snack Time at School: Coconut popsicle.
Lunch: Beans and Rice…sometimes with some veggies, or Pasta. Lots of fruit juice.
Dinner: Beans and Rice…some sort of baked potato, or veggie.

Most people probably would be sick of eating beans and rice every day, twice a day, for 3 weeks….but man oh man….I can´t get enough of them! (like I said before) I eat so much every meal, I have to take a nap after so I can skip to pain of being Really really really full.

As for the fashion…

MODA:
Now…before I left I heard a lot about the fashion being ahead of us down here, that things would be cheaper and all that Jazz…well let me tell you something different. :D
I don´t have a problem with the Moda down here….it´s just…different. The shirts look like somewome has taken succors to them, and cut out all the places that don´t reaaalllyy need to be covered. I think one of the funniest moments for me was when I was at church and one of the girls was wearing a belly shirt, which was see threw and you could see her bra. I silently laughed at the fact, that if you even wore that to school in the states you´d be booted out in a heart beat…let alone in the house of god. Huahhaa. I´m still not used to showing my belly, and I tend to pull my shirts down to the best of my ability. Which isn’t that hard considering I´m so short, and my torso is short also.
On another note…It´s not cheap down here, at least not for clothing. I´m so used to picking up a shirt in the states for 5 bucks, or a pair of jeans on a bargan for 10 bucks!!! But ohhh no, not here. Huahah. The average jeans price is 75 american dollars…shirts about 30 to 50 bucks…I´m also in a small City though…things work alittel differently.
Oh and one more thing about the Fashion, a small side note. It´s all the rage to wear one big earing, and one small. Not sure why…but it is.

Onward with my Update!!!

So I´m going to start where my journal leaves off…We´ll start with Sept. 6th.

Marcela and I were invited to a country party, where everyone dressed up like they were from the boondocks, and danced the Fo-Ho(a dance where you take two steps to the right and two to the left ´with a partner´) I also got a little salsa in! Parties function a bit differently down here…You have to pay to get in(along with bringing food for the hosts), pay for the food, and they have this little prison they take you two, and make your friends pay to get you out!
So that night we played some games. One consisted of all the girls linning up on one side, and all the guys on the other. You hold hands with the person across from you and it makes the type of tunnel. So one girl with left without anyone hand to hold, and she runs through and steals a guy from another girl, then that girl runs through and steals a guy form another girl! So the pattern repeats, and eventually like 5 people are going through at once. Well while I had my guy stolen from me I started down the line, while at the same time my friend Anna started down the line also…and we made a head to head collision! Man it hurt like none other, ahuaha…she and I both took a minute break then headed back into the game. :D
The next day, Marcela and I made our way out into the country with a group of kids and a photographer…He took some beeeautiful photo´s of everyone, I didn´t model because…well i´m not quite so sure why I didn´t, I think I thought it was more hoity toity than it actually was. But anyway..the photos were for some propaganda for a modeling crew that are coimg through town in a few weeks to scout, and teach kids how to model. The photo´s are now hanging all over town, it´s awesome!
Then the next day I went out to the João Pinheiro Airport with my Father and brother!!! They are both students in learning how to fly small airplanes! Their instructor offered to take me up, and of course I agreed!!! I have to admit, at first I thought we were going to crash. The aeroplane was SOOO light in the sky, that the small wind gusts tossed us around a bit! (I had watched the people before us come in, the lady steped out a little freaked out..and I understood here say it was really bumpy up there…ahauha) So we flew out over the city, and I caught a few fotos of my house…then we made our way out to the Rio…beautiful Beeeaufil. Then we turned around and made our way back. When looking out at the Dry glassy field below I kept imagining I was in Africa, and I kept expecting to see antelope bounding below me…but I never did see any.
In other news, I went to my Rotary club and was introduced. I sang for them my song ´Dust´ and everything went well!
One morning we had no school so that everyone could go to the school Olympic basket ball games. Marcela and I headed up there in the morning, but left after the first few games. Then later that day Natalia (my younger sister) came home telling me that My exchange student friend Zach had fallen down and broken his ankle!!! I was so worried all night for him, thinking he would get sent home…until I talked with him over Orkut the next day…and he told me it was only a light sprain…Infact I went with him yesterday to get to cast off!! And we walked home today. :D )
This past weekend, Macerla, Natalia, Mãe .C. , and I headed out on a two day vacation to the City Patos Minias. The City where all of Mãe C. sisters and brothers live! (4 sisters, and 1 brother.) We went to the mall(yes, they actually had a mall in that city!!! There are 200,000 people) Marcela bought a darling pair of jeans, and her mother 4 pairs of shoes. That night we went out for Chinese food…because I was really craving for some. But to my Dismay, it´s nothing like the Chinese food at home, or real Chinese food. The place had a Sushi bar (which is Japenese) and some Thai things on the menu. I couldn’t find anything I recognize, and they only had Jasmine tea!! Huaha….Ayyye aye aye…oh well!
The next day…Natalia, Marcela, a aunt, and 3 other little girls and I headed out to see Rattatui (or however you spell that!) It was all in Portuguese, and had no subtitles…but I get the basic plot of the movie! IT WAS SO DARN CUTE!
Right before we left to come back home, the grandmother cooked up like 10 bags full of Bakery sweets. It was so awesome.
It was an eventful weekend.
The last small event I have to add in is a funny little story.
So one of my friends Paula is Dating this Boy named Tales (he was an exchange student to South Dakoda last year) well the broke up the other day…and from the looks of it, Paula was really upset. So I asked Marcela if we could head to the super market after school so I could buy her some chocolate! Macela agreed and we went and did so. That night I wraped it up in some magazine pages and since my family didn´t have time I used some ´Sew no more´ glue my grandmother gave me in an emergency kit before I left! I wrote her a little note in Portuguese explaing that whenever one of my friends in the US had a bad day, we would all get together and have a junk food fest to make the person feel better! So At break time I gave her the Chocolate and the note and she was super happy and thanked me a lot. Then About 15 minutes later I heard news that her and tales were back together!!!!!
Huahaha, funny how things work out like that. Well she will just have to eat to chocolate next time she is sad!!
So that´s the quickest recap of my past two weeks for you all!
So I heard school has started again down there, and I want to hear from all you Students and teachers how everything is going! Are classes hard yet? Who are the new teachers? Is everything going smoothly?
Wishing you all the best of health and life!!!
Lovin you all
Angie.