Ficando sozinho na casa

All right, folks, sorry to not be producing anything. Classes started on Monday - it feels like a month - and handling different schedules and such has made it harder to blog...especially as I am trying to do it at school for free.

So what´s happening? Last weekend, I was supposed to go to the beach on Sunday. It was a beautiful day. I lazed around for a bit, waiting to ask my host brother if he wanted to go to the beach with me, but then I realized that the grandmother was getting released from the hospital. Before I knew it, I was invited to go visit with them to Petropolis, the nearby "Imperial City," where the grandparents live. I could have said no, but then I figured I was there to be around Brazilians and learn from them, so I decided to go with them.

After the whole hoopla with the decision to take the grandmother home (my senhora wanted her to stay at her apartment and was freaking out about her dad being hard-headed and all that), we went to the hospital to see what was up. The ambulance, which was supposed to take the gramma home, was like three hours late. So, since it was the grandfather´s birthday, we went and hung out in the hospital room and ate possibly the worst pasta I´ve had in my entire life. It made Pasta Pomodoro seem like divine ambrosia. So there we were, like 5 people squeezed into this room, eating and drinking.

The first thing the grandmother told me when she met me? "Isn´t my daughter nervous?" But the word "nervous" here means something more like "hysterical." I answered - "just a bit!" So after an hour and a half longer, the ambulance finally showed up and we got into the little car and got to Petropolis.

Petropolis is a beautiful colonial city built in the nineteenth century about an hour away from Rio. It´s up on mountain. We got there, and the ambulance got there before us, but we had the key. They were kind of annoyed. We get the old lady into her room, after much ado, and the moment that´s done: SE FUE LA LUZ! Everybody busted out laughing - it was hilarious. The doctor came up to me and said, "That doesn´t happen in your country!" And I was like, "yeah, it does!" (I still don´t understand why sometimes we have blackouts in CA in non-crisis times, but we do.) So after all that, the family would not let the ambulance team leave and made them sit down and eat dinner and all that. It was great! We all had a great time laughing it up. We had dinner, ate birthday cake, took pictures with the ambulance folks, made a video. Sound a little bit nuts? Sure, but very fun.

After that, classes began, and it´s basically five hours of Portuguese grammar and stuff. It gets a little bit nuts at about 9:50 when you have one more hour until the break but can´t stand to sit anymore. Ufa! I tried to go to the beach on Monday and Tuesday, but my plans were foiled both days! And then it began to rain. That´s right people, I still haven´t gone to the beach. It´s supposed to stop raining on Monday and hopefully Tuesday will be nice.

After Sunday, things with my host family are more homey. The senhora even offered to do the laundry with me. Of course later she made it a point to tell me she didn´t have to. I almost hit her. I was like, "I know, I can take it to the laundry!" If I knew portuguese better I´d tell her she didn´t have to remind me when she does me a favor. But overall, everything´s pretty nice. I understand more and more of their conversation, though the other the day I had to tell her: "calma! tranquila!" so she´d shut the hell up and let me finish responding to the question she was asking me (she was asking me why the credit card she sent me out to run an errand for her didn´t work - I was like, "look, the people at the store were not doing it"). Anyway her brother and her son, and her entire family really, always tell her that, so I just took my cue from them. Today she and her son are leaving to visit the grandparents for like 5 days, which is GREAT! I hate it when I´m watching t.v. and she turns the light off! I aways end up falling asleep, and I don´t want to mess with my schedule.

So life is just going on and chilling. Below are a couple of culture shock moments yall might like:

- Pizza. What do Brazilians do with pizza? When they receive it, they put ketchup and extra oil on it! Some even put mustard on it. But I´M the weird one! I almost freaked out.

- Road trippin'. When driving up and down extremely curvy highways in the mountains, Brazilians love to practice road slalom. In a road with two lanes, they go really fast in one lane and when they hit the curve, instead of slowing down or, say, turning the wheel, they allow themselves to drift over to the other lane. Yeah! When done with other aggressive cars, semis, and huge buses, it´s enough to make me rather nervous about dying and plummeting to my death!

Hope all is great with everyone!