Well hello again! I haven't written anything in awhile because I've been pretty busy, and yesterday Barbara and I got back to Eni's apartment and computer tower was gone. At first we thought she might have been robbed, but it turns out that a tech guy had taken it to do some repairs. It doesn't seem any different to me now, but I guess it's working better. The tech guy is also going to set up a wireless network tomorrow morning, so after that I should be blogging and posting photos more frequently.

Since I've written last, I've had a lot of Portuguese classes, which have been, as a whole, not challenging and actually pretty excrutiating. Phonetics in the morning would be ok, except for that what we're expected to learn can't really be taught. Consonants and nasalized vowels I understand, those have rules and I can memorize them, but we're also supposed to recognize open and closed vowels, which there aren't rules for, the professor just says we have to listen to Brazilians and figure it out. Today we were tested on them, and the teacher refused to read the words slowly, so we just had to guess and try to imagine in our head how the words should be properly pronounced. It was really frustrating, to say the least.

The Portuguese language class is dumb because all we do is go over the really easy homework and read really long texts out loud to each other. Today we were all suppposed to give a 5-10 minute presentation about a different Brazilian state (I did Pernambuco), which could have been a good assigment except for that there are 15 of us in the class, and after listening to that many people haltingly describe the climate and food of Rio Grande do Sul or Goias (or whatever), I was ready to jump into the Amazon. Our professor is really nice, but she doesn't know how to teach an engaging class. Part of the problem could also be that, even though I'm in the advanced class, there are people at all different levels, so I understand that it's probably hard to teach so that a majority of the people are comfortable.

In the afternoon we have culture class, which is my favorite part of the day because we sit in a huge auditorium and look at slides and discuss them. I like it because the people I'm sitting near and I can talk to each other and make jokes and the professor doesn't notice because the room is so big and the lights are off so we can see the slides. By that point in the day, we're all so tired of sitting in class that we get a little slap happy, and almost anything seems hilarious. We were looking at pictures and trying to guess what time period they represented, and there was one of a kid carrying a big sack of flour with a thought bubble of someone sitting in a classroom raising their hand. It was obviously representing the time before public schooling, but Lourdes said to me, "He wishes he knew the answer?" and I laughed almost until the slide was changed. It wasn't really that funny, now that I look back on it, but it just struck me as hilarious because I was so bored. So, the moral of the story is, I'll be glad when real classes start.

The good thing about the language class is that I'm meeting a lot of really great people, and we go on fun field trips. On Wednesday we went to Vale Verde in Betim. It's an ecological reserve/cachaça distillery, which is as odd of a mix as it sounds. First we looked at all the birds (there were a ton of them), and there was one cage that was classroom size, and we got to go in it and feed little parrots what looked like Jello shots. That was my favorite part of the trip, and I have a lot of cute pictures. After the birds, we saw the two horses and the llama that live there, and then we went to the cachaça museum, which was over 1,000 bottles of cachaça on bookshelves on all four walls of a really big room. After that, we saw how it was made and walked through the aging area. Later on, we had lunch at the restaurant there, which was pretty good, although it was the most expensive meal I've eaten yet, at 18 reais ($9). After lunch the people I was sitting with and I decided to go walk around the park, but the rest of the class stayed at the restaurant and sampled cachaça for the next hour or so. We were supposed to do an activity, but most of the class wasn't up for it, so that didn't happen. I've got to go, but I'll try to write more tomorrow!