We are officially through the halfway point. It is a very
bitter sweet feeling. Part of me is finally realizing that I am actually living
and working everyday here in Rio. I am interacting in the outside world in
Portuguese for the most part. By the way, I can now speak more than one full
sentence. We are working very hard to get better and better every time we go
out to eat.
Each day I am more and more comfortable with my students and
they are also more comfortable with me. I am now in control of the full day.
(crazy right?) They took their first quiz for me last week in Math and they did
very well, which make me feel good. This week are started multiplication.
Generally speaking my students are very quick to catch on in math allowing me
more time to help them with their weak point, word problems. In English we
started out unit on folk tales, drawing conclusions and determining lessons
from text. They are very excited because they will conclude the unit by writing
their own to share. One thing that is very interesting to me, and a challenge,
is that they are learning American history. Therefore I have to teach them
about exploration of the New World when they do not even know this about
Brazil. We are working (my teacher and I) to make it as relavant as possible.
We have traveled to another part of the state of Rio where
Erin has a friend living. We stayed with her for a night in her apartment. She
and her fiancé took us to their friends house. They were making pizza in their
brick over…it was so good. This for me was one of the coolest experiences yet
because some of them were musicians. (one of them played in a huge musical
festival in brazil) Most of these friends spoke very little English but it didn’t
matter because they were just playing music and enjoying the Saturday night. We
didn’t need to use language. We ate, drank and enjoyed the music. On Sunday her
friend took us to her favorite beach but we went on a hike just to the side of
the beach because it was a bit chilly for the beach.
Last weekend we had another three-day weekend and went to
Buzios, which is about 3 hours from the city of Rio. This was a typical tourist
spot but still absolutely beautiful. We had a lot of fun! We stayed in a bed
and breakfast. The home was breathtaking. We spent most of our time on the
beach but also enjoyed a lot of little shops with a large range of items. Our
favorite food on this adventure was crepes. We went to restaurant selling
crepes with fillings of all kinds, dessert to breakfast. I had a ham, pineapple
and cheese one.
I am looking forward to working more with my students and
learning more Portuguese. J
This is the classroom.
The very from the hike we did. On the other side of the beach is the city of Rio.
The view from out B&B.
There was a guy who built this on the beach. He was telling us that he has to fix slightly every day and he changes the castle once a week.
