Over the Hump

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.