Christmas

Merry Christmas/ Feliz Natal

I've been working on another post for a long time now, but procrastination hs got the best of me. So, I figured I should at least send a Merry Christmas to my friends and family who read this.

It sure is weird being December 24th, and wearing shorts. The Christmas traditions here are quite similar, but I'll get into more details another day. I just finished an enormous batch of gingerbread, thanks to mom sending molasses, and am going to make gingerbread houses today :)

I miss home, and all my family and friends, and snow and traditions like crazy, but I'll be there next year, and will sure be thinking of everyone.

Its only kind of beginning to look alot like Christmas

The weekend before last was Black Awareness Day, or something along the lines of that. Anyways, because capoeira came from the African slaves when they were brought here a long time ago, the capoeira group that I am with did a bunch of demonstrations in the city here. It was really fun to spend time with the capoeira people, and super interesting to learn some of the history, although I’ll admit I didn’t understand all of it. As we did the demonstrations, the capoeira master would sing call and repeat songs about the history of capoeira, and then tell the story of how it evolved to be what it is today. By the end of the 3^rd demonstration, I think that I understand quite a bit of the history and origins.

On Thursday night, we did a demonstration at the university in town here. First an African drumming group did some drumming show, and then we did a capoeira ‘roda’, what it’s called when you make a circle, play berimbau( the main instrument, which looks like a bow for a bow and arrow, and you play it by hitting the wire with a thin stick of bamboo) , drums and tambourines, and play capoiera in the middle. They used me as an example of an awesome student who has learnt a lot in a month, which I have to say, I was super nervous to do capoeira in front of a huge crowd, but it made me happy that they let me play, and weren’t just embarrassed that I went there with them. I guess one of the things that I like best about my capoeira group is that they are really accepting of everyone, and don’t have any problems letting people of all levels perform and play.

Friday, we did another demonstration at a church outside of town. There was a special mass at night for Black awareness day, and there was also African drumming there. We performed after the mass, and then Livia, a girl who is really good at capoeira, invited me to go to samba night with her. So, as Brazilians normally do, we went out around 12:30, and had a good time dancing, well, in my case, trying to dance samba, with a live band. There is pretty much always live music where people go out, I will definitely miss that when I go back to Canada; here people expect live music whenever they go out, even most restaurants have live music on weekends.

Saturday morning, another demonstration at the big church downtown here. It was really hot out, as normal, but still enjoyable to do capoeira. In the afternoon, the people from the African drumming, and the capoeira group were invited to a free Jongo class, which is African dancing. So, I went there, and learned how to jongo! It was really fun, and not even that difficult. One thing that I really enjoy about capoeira and jongo, is that with just a few instruments, the entire music and rhythm base for them is created, and then vocals usually tell a story as people are dancing to it. It’s really neat how this type of music is such a part of the culture here. Saturday night, the capoeira people had a churrasco (barbeque) and it was really interesting to go there. Basically, when they get together, they cook a bunch of meat, and typical churrasco food, like bread with creamy tomato sauce, and rice with farofa, and play capoeira music all night. I learned how to play an instrument with is kind of like cowbells, and I kind of learned how to play the berimbau, but I will definitely need some more practice. The simplicity of playing music all night with a bunch of fun people was really neat, and for me showed a lot about the culture of the medium to lower class people of Brazil, who do not need to spend a lot of money, or go out to have a good time.

Sunday, I went to the city to watch Harry Potter with Erin, my friend from LA. It was awesome, and also, great to hang out with someone who understands, and speaks English.

During the week, I’ve been going to the farm with Vinicius quite often, and still doing ballroom dance twice a week. As of this week, I’m officially done school until February or March, so summer holidays are here. I don’t know if this is totally good, because at least with school, I had something to do each day. However, I think that I will be able to find things to do. Going to the club to swim, or window shopping always seem to occupy my time well. It’s getting a lot more hot here, and humid too. It’s getting up past 30 degrees often, the heat is quite unbearable at times, making me want to just hidein my air conditioning.

Renata and I put up a Christmas tree (fake, of course) here the other day. I have to say, it was the weirdest thing to be decorating a Christmas tree with shorts on, in heat like this. Christmas here is pretty much a copy of North American Christmas, people like to coordinate all their decorations, and all the stores have decorations in their windows now. I can’t imagine how different Christmas is going to be without snow, and no cold.

Outside my Classroom at School

Common Area at School

My Class at School

Jongo Dance Lesson

Capoeira Music Making

Santa in the shopping centre, looks kind of like a slug

Renatas Nativity Scene

Decorating the tree

Unfolding the tree- strange concept for me

Churrasco :)

I'm pretty much a professional cattle musterer...

So, my life here consists quite simply of baking/cooking, complaining about the heat (in Portuguese) of course, and forcing myself to go to the gym, to compensate for the baking and delicious Brazilian food that I eat.

Since the last post, I have introduced my host parents, and the entire extended family, which is fairly large, to pancakes, with peanut butter and homemade apple sauce (as my Canadian family eats them), more cookies, devilled eggs, more banana bread, and chocolate cake with coconut frosting. Tomorrow, I plan on making French toast!

This past weekend was pretty exciting- Saturday, we went to a huge Italian feast, and had super yummy eggplant, baguettes, mangos, and of course piles of pasta. Sunday, the extended family of my host mom all went to Olimpia, a town about 2 hours away, because there is a hot springs there, and it was my host mom’s mom’s 70^th birthday. We left here at 6, and spent the whole day there. Here, they turn hot springs into huge water parks, so there were like 15 different water slides, 2 wave pools, 3 hot pools, swings, obstacle courses, huge plastic bubbles filled with air to climb on, and a fake beach. It was super nice weather, so I had to put sunscreen on like 15 times during the day. There were people walking around with big sunscreen jugs strapped onto their backs giving out free sunblock, which I took advantage of. It was an awesome day, and lots of fun.

Yesterday, I went to Vinicius’ Cattle Farm with him, and we rounded up some bulls for getting sold. I love chasing cows, it was so much fun. We first rounded them up and chased them down to a paddock, and then loaded them into trucks to get sold. After that, we went and had the trucks weighed, and then saw them off to the abattoir. Then, we went back, and gave some other bulls some shots, and then herded them back to their corral. I really hope that I get to spend more time at the farm, and spend more time herding cows!

Today, back to school as normal, but I don’t have school tomorrow or Thursday, cause its exams for everyone else.

My Portuguese is getting a lot better, I watched Como Treinar o seu Dragao(How to train your Dragon), the other day, in only Portuguese, and understood it, which was exciting. However, I definitely make some crazy mistakes sometimes though. The words ‘Pronto, Preto, and Perto’, I mix up all the time, Pronto being ready, Preto means black, and Perto is close. So, The other day, when Renata and I were pasteurizing milk from Vinicius’ farm, I asked her if it was black yet, instead of if it was ready yet. Also, a different day, I was trying to tell Renata that at home I can be lazy doing dishes, but instead I told her I was dangerous when I do dishes. She was definitely slightly confused until I figured out that I had said the wrong word.

Lastly, until recently, I believed that it was normal here in Brazil to not have hot water for showers. So, I had been having cold showers for the last month and a half, which I have to say, is really unpleasant, especially at 6:00 in the morning before school. A couple of days ago however, my shower kind of exploded, and I told Renata this. Then, she mentioned that my host sister had noticed that it hadn’t had hot water when she used it last too. Then, I realized that I guess there was supposed to be hot water, and that my shower had just been broken the whole time, and was too ignorant to ask or question the lack of warm water. Anyways, I have hot water in my shower now, and have to say, I’ve never appreciated warm showers as much as I do now.

At the Club where I go to swim

My Pancake Party :)

Ula Ula- a half pineapple with tons of ice cream, sauces, fruit and a pile of icing.

Love Ice Cream!

My cow herding mount

Suspicious kitty, at Vinicius' neighbours farm

Host Grandfather and I, who loves to try to speak english/french with me

Waiting for super fun water slide

Host Dad, Mom and I

Me, going really fast down a slide

Renata and one of the wave pools

Agua de Coco, Coconut Water- really refreshing, and I feel quite tropical drinking out of a coconut

Cows do not like getting shots- therefore, they either climb out of the chute, or climb on top of each other

The cow truck

A sort of berry thing, kind of like blueberries, but you dont eat the skin

The cows that I helped herd

Monkeys!

So, sorry its been so long since the last post, things are going to have to be more brief now.

Brazil is home to huge frogs; I went to a friend’s country house, and we saw the biggest frog that I have ever seen. It also was venomous, and my friend’s brother squeezed some venom out, and it shot really far… I don’t think I will be catching frogs myself here. We watched it eat bugs, and I tried to get a picture of its tongue grabbing things, but it was way too fast. Marina’s (who’s country house it was) brother and his friends are studying biology, and they also spend the night there. In the morning, I went into the forest with them, and we collected bugs for a couple hours. We found a beetle that was like 3 inches long.

2 weekends ago, I went to another town called Ibitinga, for a kind of trek through farms and forests with a bunch of other exchange students in my rotary district. It was a lot of fun to see the other students again, and the hike thing, was 2 hours in blazing hot weather, but it was really fun to navigate ourselves through the forests and the around the farmland. After the trek, we had a huge lunch, and then went and fed bananas to some monkeys!

First, a man started making chicka chicka noises, and then put some bananas on a branch to bait the monkeys, then suddenly there were monkeys screaming and screeching coming from every direction. There were probably 30 or so monkeys, some bigger and some smaller, but all sooooo cute. Well, some of them looked evil actually, I’m assuming there the males, cause they have big teeth and look mean. Reading that part again, I realize how sexist it sounds, but I’m not applying the generalization to anything but monkeys. Anyways, I held out a banana to one of the monkeys, and he scampered down the tree and grabbed it from my hand. Then, he ran back up in the tree, and ate the banana (opening it from the bottom) and then dropped the banana peel on someone’s head.

This past week , capoeira lessons have been even more fun, and Thursday I learned some moves that are acrobatic kind of things, which apparently I picked up more quickly than most people. Ballroom dance lessons are going well as well, I’ve learned some ‘Forro’style dance, and started learning ‘Samba’ last Wednesday.

Yesterday, I made pancakes for dinner, and I don’t know if it’s just because they taste like Canada, but they were the best pancakes I’ve ever eaten. My host family had never eaten them but think that they enjoyed them.

Halloween was a bit of a disappointment here, I figured, because Brazilians like to party so much, that for sure they would take another excuse to party, but I had no such luck. No costumes, no jack o lanterns, and no massive amounts of candy. However, it is a long weekend, because tomorrow is “Death Day” where everyone goes to the cemetery to visit graves of family. So, I have today and tomorrow off school, which I will never complain about days off.

Huge Frog

An Ant carrying a 'amora' which is the south american parallel of a blackberry that grows on a tree

Coffee Beans

Some sort of Arachnid

Big Beetle

With the other exchange students

Muddy river

Monkey!

Huge Tree

Semana de Saco Cheia

So keeping this blog up to date is getting harder, because there is almost always something more appealing than locking myself up in my room and writing. This is probably good, because it means I’m not bored much, but an extra hour a day to write would definitely be good.

Things have been settling down quite a bit here, but I still seem to find something to keep me occupied. Last week I made banana bread again, this time it was a lot better; I found whole wheat flour, and some nuts to put in it. My host mom fell in love with it, and told me that she needed to learn how to make it, and that she didn’t want to buy any normal bread anymore, just eat banana bread. Since then, she tells everyone how amazing of a cook I am. I hung out with Bia de Lucca on Friday, and she tried to teach me some of the nasal sounds that Portuguese language has, but I proved to be a poor student. I do not know how to make an L sound come out of my nose. Anyways, my efforts proved quite amusing.

Saturday, Renata, Vinicius and I went to Vinicius’ farms early morning. First we went to his ‘seringueira’ farm (rubber trees). There, we walked through the rubber forest, and I watched white rubber sap run down the trunks and drip into the rubber catching buckets. It’s quite similar to the maple trees in Canada, except you definitely don’t want to eat this sap… Vinicius pulled off a piece of dried up rubber sap, and it was way stronger than other elastic that I’ve ever seen. So I made a hair elastic out of it, and put my hair up. Tree Rubber is definitely better for the environment than petroleum or whatever based the synthetic stuff we use is too. After that, we went to his cow farm, and saddled up the horses. The saddles are a lot different than we use in North America, they are kind of a mix between English and Western saddles, and I was very happy that Vinicius strapped an extra blanket onto the seat, or else I would have been sitting on plain wood. Anyways, I won’t get into the horse stuff too much, to save those not horse savvy from boring comparisons. We trotted around the property, which is really big, and made all the cows get up to make sure there was nothing wrong with any of them. After a really long drought here, its rained a couple days, and things are starting to get green, but all the cows are kind of skinny cause the grass hasn’t been growing that well. Once we were done riding, we picked a bunch of mangos, with a really long pole and tried to catch them before they hit the ground. The farm was pretty much as I had imagined it, but a lot bigger. I really enjoyed getting out of the city and spending some time without traffic noises.

Termite Hill at the Farm

Vinicius and a Lake

Rubber sap on a rubber tree

my natural rubber rubber band

Cotton, which they feed to cows...

Typical view of the farm

Renata and I and horses

Urubu- in other words vulture

Pretty Camel Cow

That afternoon, a host cousin, Victoria, came from Sao Paulo, and her, Bia’s friend Ingrid, and I went out to the ‘Boate’. There was a band that played some old classic rock songs (in English) which was a nice change from all the Brazilian music that everyone but me knows the words to and sings along.

Pumpkin pie I made :)

Sunday night, I went out again with Ingrid, Victoria, and Bia de Lucca and Bia host sister. This time it was a samba band, so everyone was dancing samba, which is really cool to watch, but really hard to do. They tried to teach me, but I proved somewhat hopeless. Maybe I will learn one day, but its definitely going to be a challenge. I’m starting to get used to some of the cultural things about Brazilians, and I really like their way of partying. At barbeques, sometimes people bring guitars and sing, or play soccer. When samba music plays, everyone gets up and dances, even though not everyone can dance samba properly, most manage to follow along. The thing I like most though is how more or less everyone gets into the spirit of the party, and it doesn’t matter who you are, you can have a good time. After the band stopped, we went to the square and had sandwiches from a street vendor, who tries to copy Mcdonalds. I love how cheap food is here, I got a huge cheeseburger with veggies on it, for 5 reals, or $3 Canadian.

This week is called Semana de Saco Cheia, in English, directly translates to Full Bag Week. It is the equivalent of spring break, so I have no school all week J

Monday morning, I woke up early to go to what I thought was a cow auction. Renata said it was they sell cows. So, ignorantly, I assumed it was an auction, because I’d seen Vinicius watching a lot of them on TV, and I thought I’d heard them say that. However, when we got there, I didn’t see any place for an auction, so I was really confused. We walked around the place, then up to a place where a bunch of cows were getting chased up a chute, and getting sprayed with water to wash them. Then I realized that it wasn’t an auction, it was an abattoir, and Vinicius had brought some cows here the day before to be sold. When farmers here take their cows to the butchery, apparently they like to see what the cows look like as they are being taken apart and weighed. So, Vinicius and I put on white special clothes so that we could go into the butchering area, and toured around, seeing all the parts of the process from beginning to end. I won’t get into the literally bloody details of it, but It was actually really interesting to see how it’s all done. However, it was a little weird seeing the cows run up the building, then seeing the same cows, cut in half hanging, stamped and being weighed to be sold. The whole process from live cow to leaving the factory cow takes about 10 minutes, which I thought was really fast. As much as it was interesting, I was happy to leave there, and come back to my city for lunch. I was also happy that we didn’t eat beef for lunch, because I don’t know if I would have been able to that soon. We did have it for dinner though, and I am happy that experience didn’t turn me off eating meat. I also had barbequed chicken hearts with dinner, which after deciding not to think about what they were, turned out to be quite enjoyable.

Cows waiting

Tuesday, I made thanksgiving lunch, Canadian Style. Here, lunch is the big meal, so I didn’t think it would be right to make a huge feast for dinner, cause no one would eat very much. It was a lot of work, but somewhat surprisingly, everything turned out yummy. I made 3 stuffed roast chickens, because I couldn’t find a turkey, Yam + Carrot Casserole, Garlic peas, literally enough mashed potatoes to feed an army, and lots of extra stuffing. For dessert, 4 pumpkin pies J. When I started planning to make thanksgiving dinner here, I thought that I’d be making food for 8 people or so, but because Brazilians like to invite friends and more friends, it turned out having about 20 people there. However, It’s a good thing that there were lots of people, cause I always end up making way too much food, and there was about half of everything leftover anyways. Everyone seemed to enjoy Canadian thanksgiving, but they missed having rice, because every lunch has rice here. Then, we ate the pumpkin pie, with whipped cream… and I think it was the best pumpkin pie I ever tasted, maybe because I had been craving it for so long, or maybe because cooking the pumpkin, pureeing it by hand, and making the pies took so long.

Renata's Sister and with one of the chickens

The meal

Family and Friends

Renata enjoying pumpkin pies!

After lunch, I played soccer with a host cousin (Junior). He is about 10 times better than me at soccer, but has only 8. He tried to teach me some fakes and things, which was really fun. He`s really good at teaching me things, and he likes to explain things, its nice cause he doesn’t care if he has to try 3 different ways of saying it to get me to understand.

Junior- my soccer coach

Wednesday, I learned a new game, which resembles cricket quite a bit. It involves 4 people, a tennis ball, two pop bottles with some water in them, and two pieces of wood. It’s hard to describe, but it’s a lot of fun. It’s usually played in the street, preferably one with little traffic.

Playing 'Bet'

Last night, I found a new sport that I love! Capoeira, as Wikipedia describes it is :

an Afro-Brazilian art form that combines elements of martial arts, music, and dance. It was created in Brazil by African slaves by mixing the many fighting styles from many of their tribes, sometime after the sixteenth century

If you look it up on youtube, you`ll see some good examples of video.

Anyways, the class starts with everyone running in a circle together, then stretching, and ab excercises. Then you do some basic moves, and after that, a couple people start playing instruments, tambourines and drums, and everyone and sings and claps in a circle, while two people `fight/play’ capoeira. It’s really fun to watch, and I picked up on some of the basics in the first class. It wasn’t too hard to understand the class, because mostly you just learn by example, and copy what other people do anyways. The class has people at every different level, so I didn’t even feel too out of place being there for the first time. I’m really excited to go again, but I have to wait until next Tuesday.

Anyways, Brazil is treating me really well, and I thoroughly enjoyed this last week off school, but won’t mind having school next week again.