so, as my darling mother requested, i just posted a bunch of pictures below, which i hope you enjoy. blogger only lets you upload one at a time, so it took forever. i should also say that i put pictures up on facebook.

anyways...

i have now officially fallen in love with brasil. i got back yesterday from a week in belo horizonte (called bay aga in portuguese, which actually just how you would say bh in portuguese) for the first rotary meeting. rotary here is much different from in the u.s., but i don´t care, because i LOVE the other exchange students. my district has about eighteen, but the cool thing about bh is that it has two rotary districts, so i met about thirty exchange students from all over the place. and with other exchange students, all you need is an introduction, and you´re friends. it was such a blast hanging out with them everyday, i miss them all already.

basically, everyday i´d wake up (a perk in brasil is that they don´t use alarm clocks, someone always wakes you up, either your parents or maids, so it´s much calmer) and go to my ridiculously easy portuguese class (i learned nothing i didn´t already know, but i did help people out, so it wasn´t a total waste), then returned home, ate lunch, took a nap, then met exchange students around three or four at savassi, and we´d just hang out, doing different things. tuesday, we went to praça liberdade and to patio savassi, wednesday we went to a bar, thursday we went to a different neighborhood, etc. it was so much fun. i also learned swear words in like...five rather obscure languages: croatian, greendlandic, danish, indonesian, and hungarian

saturday was also especially fun, since it was the last day we could all hang out (a lot of people don´t live in bh, like me). we had this really boring rotary meeting, but after, we had a farrol class, and after that, we had all met around nine (but in brazillian time, that´s ten, because they´re always late) at kayote, which is ¨the exchange bar¨ in savassi, meaning that every year, exchange students end up using koyote as a hang out spot. i had some ¨caprivodca¨which is a brazillian cocktail, and which is also delicious (vodka and lime with lots of ice), and we all were just goofing off for a long time. it was so much fun.

i also did some shopping here, since bh is so much cheaper then timoteo, and i didn´t bring enough shorts and skirts (like..three, and clothes here disappear for a long time when you put them in the laundry), and so now i have that out of the way. the cool thing about the shopping experience is that i went to this really cheap and famous sort of street bazaar called ¨fera hippy¨, which sells homemade crafts and also just a lot of stuff for very cheap. i spent fifty reias, and got a skirt, two pairs of shorts, a dress and some jewelry. plus, it´s just an experience to go, because there´s so many people, and there´s all these smells and street performers and stuff. i even saw those people who paint themselves silver, and pretend to be robot statues, but i forgot to take pictures.

the single greatest thing about bh is that it really has inspired me to push myself even more to make my exchange fantastic. my portuguese also improved a lot over the last week, which is really strange because i rarely spoke portuguese, since all the exchangers speak english. but really, i had such a fun time that i just want to keep that going, and make it even better.

and now that we´re getting into spring here, brasil is turning more into what i thought it would be climate-wise. when i got here, it was basically like may or june in milwaukee, and it was surprisingly cold at nights (i even used a sweater a couple of times!) but now it´s getting warmer in the day, so also still quite warm at night. it makes me so lazy, but i can´t do that, or else i will gain far too much weight! and more and more bugs are showing up, today there was this HUGE spider on the doormat outside, it was like bigger then a quarter, and scared the shit out of me.

anyhow, that´s it for news from brasil for now.

BEIJOS (kisses!)

mary