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.
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
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