Day 11: Rain rain, go away

 So it has been raining here a ton yesterday and today, though it cleared up for our little party we had out at CCJ with the kids.  Here are some photos of a bus going through it.  It only floods certain parts of the street though, but it was fun.
     Speaking of busses, yesterday they had a bus strike and they were demanding like a 25 or 27% raise.  Luckily it was only a 24 hour strike so they were up and running again today, but they are supposed to find out today what the government will give them, and if it is not enough then they might go on another strike, this one for an indefinite amount of time, and last I heard the government was only offering them a 4% raise, so it will be interesting to see what happens.  Apparently strikes are pretty common things here though, if it is not the busses, then it is the taxi drivers, the subways, the guys selling icecream on the beach...it apperently happens alot, but is quite an inconvinience.  That would be hard though if you are the government, I mean, you

can´t just give in and give them what they want right away or everyone will think they can get away with whatever they want.  Then again, you have to give in somewhat because busses and other things are necessary to the city, so what do you do?  Tough choices.



Then we went to our little party, it was fun, there were a ton of kids there and they were having so much fun.  Here are a few photos.

 This is Joe doing a magic trick for the kids, you know the one where your finger gets `cut off`that dad used to do to us.  They loved it and had a ball trying to figure out how to do it!

 These next two photos come from us teaching them a game.  It is the one where you have your right hand on top and your left hand below your neighbors hands, and then one person starts by using their right hand to reach over and clap the upturned hand of their neighbor and then it is like a chain reaction, they take that hand over and clap their neighbors.... You go on for a little bit and then whoever it lands on is out of the game.  It usually goes to `Down by the banks`but today we did it just counting down, first in Portuguese, then we started doing it in English to try and help them learn it.

This picture was taken during the quadrilha, it is a kind of line-ish dance that they do here.  I might have mentioned it in another post, but there is one person that calls out directions and everyone else dancing according to those directions.  In this one I think they did it more as a skit, that all the dancers were at the wedding of these two, cause in the middle of it they had them come forward and then someone acting like the brides dad kind of gave her away, and then a kid acting like he was drunk came out and was the pastor guy that married them, it was really cute.  Another fun part of the dance that I haven´t seen before was when the announcer called out `snake!`and all the girls scream and jump into the arms of the guys they were dancing with.  Only if you can´t tell in this picture, the bride is a little bit bigger than the groom, so he jumped in her arms, and it was hillarious!  Fun times, dances here are great!

Day 9: Graffiti-caught blue handed!

Soooo, today we got to paint and practice our graffiti skills on the walls in our classroom because on Saturday we actually get to go out and graffiti on real walls here in Brazil, holla!  The coolest part is that we will be doing it in some of the favellas around here and so it is to help make them look prettier (so I don´t know why they want my help with that, I am not very good at the whole drawing and painting thing, but it will be cool).

Other than helping Trent out with a shirt or two this was my very first time getting to use spary paint and it was a lot of fun.  The word in the middle is esperança which means hope, and the letters at the bottom stand for the place that we are doing the internship.  The circle has hands all around it and some holding it up, together we have hope and we can do anything.  I definitely did the last set of blue hands at the bottom of the circle and sprayed on the yellow around the J and around all of the letters in Recife, I am good right!  So like I said before one of the focuses of this group is to teach people art skills, then they send them back to their community to teach others and beautify the area.  Not only do we get to go and do that in one of the poorer areas, but we also are going to help paint at this place and make it look nicer.  And all the while we get to teach them English words and phrases, wahoo!

Not to make anyone jealous or anything, but kind of-this is my view on the way home from our internship.  Brazil is so beautiful!

 We got some time to go to the beach on Saturday, this might recall to your minds a rather stunning speedo that I posted yesterday, yes, this picture was taken on the same day, no, I am not going to post that picture again no matter how much you beg, you will just have to refer back to the original post to see that masterpiece!
    However, this will prove that other eventful things did happen that day, though they are not quite up to the same standards ;)
     We had coconut water, out of real live Brazilian coconuts, yummy!  Sara is on the far right and Berkley is in the middle, I love these girls, they are two of my best friends out here and we just love hanging out.  I stayed with Sara´s host family my first night here since neither of our roomates had made it yet and she is just a fantastic person!

Yeah, they finally caught me, this brings to mind a song...

♫

Oh Mama, I'm in fear for my life from the long arm of the law
Law man has put an end to my running and I'm so far from my home.

Oh Mama, I've been years on the lam and had a high price on my head
Lawman said 'Get him dead or alive' and it's for sure he'll see me dead
Dear Mama I can hear you cryin', you're so scared and all alone
Hangman is comin' down from the gallows and I don't have very long

Oh Mama, I'm in fear for my life from the long arm of the law
Law man has put an end to my running and I'm so far from my home

The jig is up, the news is out
They finally found me
The renegade who had it made
Retrieved for a bounty
Never more to go astray
This'll be the end today
Of the wanted man

♪

 This is a member family that lives in Piedade, they are fantastic.  Sara´s brother Jonathan is living with them along with Brady.  We have gone to a lot of church activites and dances with them and they treated us to açai a few nights ago, which was fantastic.  In this picture they are making food...out of corn of course!  The lady in pink and an apron is actually American, her family is living there, the husband is the bishop of this ward.

 These other two pictures go along with the parties and the celebration of Festa de Juninos.  Here is a band that was just walking through Casa da Cultura, a shopping place that we went to, and people were just dancing along with the music.  The accordion is very popular with the kind of music they listen to and dance to down here, the forró and the other kinds.  The whole place was decked out and they had all sorts of fun places to take pictures besides the jail one, here they had two hats hanging from the roof.  For these parties people draw on freckles, braid their hair in pigtails, wear plaid shirts and straw hats and pretty much dress like hicks, it is a lot of fun!

Day 8: Smoking hot

K, I don´t really feel like anything else I say can compete with this.  This is the flower speedo I was telling you about.  I hope you can zoom in because it is fantastic, and it is even a tiny bit more modest than some of the other speedos I have seen in my day.  So, todays entry is not long, because really, I am pretty sure I have already lost your attention and you can barely pull your eyes away from this amazing creation of man known as the ´enhance your booty with flowers and be a real man´speedo that we have here! 
  But just a PS, we drew some pictures today of our first impressions of Recife, and we might get to spray paint it and do some graffiti-only here it is not considered defacing public property so much as art-fun!

Day 7: Recife!!

      So today I wanted to show you around Recife and the beautiful things that I have been seeing so there are going to be a lot of really beautiful scenic pictures, I hope you love them like I do, it is breathtaking here!
      Recife means reef and the city is named after the reefs that are all along the coastline as you can see in this picture.  There are a lot of sharks and shark attacks in this area if you go past the reefs, but when the tide is low and the reefs are showing they act as a natural barrier.
   The entire area by where I lives runs along the beach.  I am a few streets away and can´t see it out my window but it is super close and doesn´t take long to walk there. 
    We spent time at the beach yesterday and the highlight of the day was seeing a man in a speedo...k that sounds weird and tons of men wear them here, but this one was special.  One might ask, what makes a speedo special, or, how could anyone have a speedo be the highlight of their day?  Well let me just tell you that it was a floral print speedo and it was pretty legit, my friend Berkley and I were very impressed, it was funny, I will try to get a picture of him on one of my blogs, because yes, I took a picture, bahahaha, I knew you would all want to be amazed by the floral speedo!  But not today, I am going to keep you in suspense for now.

     

 These pictures are awesome are they not?  On the right we have one of the gorgeous views out over the city of Olinda, there are about 50 billion churches in Olinda and they were built in like, the 1500´s so they are old!  The other one is a little more into the city of Recife and what it looks like whey you are not right along the coastline.  In this picture the roads actually have lines and lanes and stuff on them, there some roads here I have seen that don´t, because people just dive wherever they want to anyway, it is really funny.  Like it was in Mexico, they could take a three lane road and turn it into four or five lanes when they wanted to, it is just like that here and it cracks me up!

 Here is another view of the beautiful coast and the really cool reefs, it is fun when the tide is out because you can go and walk on them and play around.

    So I am sure that you have heard about favelas, or what are known as the ´slums´of Brazil.  From what I have seen they do not have any around here that look like the ones in Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo, but this might be as close as it gets.  They are just a bunch of homes really close together, poorly constructed and run down where people who can´t afford an actual house or appartment go to live.

 These are two more pictures of just the outside of the museum that we went to the other day, this gate may look like the entrance, but it isn´t, it is just there to look pretty.  It doesn´t open that I know of, and the entrance is to the left of it.  The driveway is super long though to get to this place, we actually took this cart thing attached to a fourwheeler and had the guy drive us up to it!   After you get through the gate is when you get to see the scene below.  The gazebo over the water looks super nice, but you are not allowed to walk on the grass at this place so you can´t get to it, and even if you break the rules (which we may or may not have done in a different grassy area here, cough, cough) the bridge is blocked off so you can´t get out to it anyway, again they are obviously big on the whole, look but don´t touch thing here!

This is one of the old churches down in Old Recife, the part where things first got started

This is one of the fancy, very ornate and beautiful churches in Olinda, we didn´t get to go all the way inside but we got to look and it is very beautiful.

And here we have a building that might look a little more familiar to you, around here it is known as the temple of the Mormons and is actually one of the few things that is on the map we got from the airport!  It doesn´t have the area where a bunch of us are staying, but it has the temple so that is all that matters!  We went and did a session on Friday and it was wonderful and so peaceful there.  I love the church, it is true no matter where you go.  It was a little difficult to do it in Portuguese though, especially when I couldn´t understand some of the words that I was supposed to be saying, but I made it through, no worries!

 These, ruins I guess you could call them are near where we will do part of our internship, it is over here that we met up with the children and played games with them.  Some of the buildings here were originally used to slaughter cattle and they have little ditches that would take the blood under the building, when they slaughtered a cow it was like a river of blood, they said, going out.

 This is another view of Recife, in the distance you can see the big buildings along the coastline where I am living, we travel a lot, and pretty far away from where we live, Recife is a huge city and it seems even bigger when you are getting around on the public transportation!  Some of the busses hurtle along, kind of like the Harry Potter bus, at a break neck speed, barely avoiding cars, pedestrians and other vehicles and not stopping until it is absolutely necessary and then they slam on the breaks and only remain stopped until the person is either off or on the bus, barely, and then they are off again!  That was a fun first day learning to ride the bus here.

These are two more of the kids that we might possibly be working with for the internship, we just all love this picture because it shows how beautiful the people are here and how, even in their difficult situations they can find something to smile about.
     And lastly I wanted to put in here a picture of one plate of food that they have here.  Where we have Italian food, Mexica, Chinese, Indian, Korean and every other type of food, here they mainly just have good old Brazilian food and boy is it delicious.  Like I was telling you before during June they celebrate the harvesting of the corn and they make every dish imagineable with corn.  I have no idea who keeps coming up with these recipes but I have eaten so much corn this last week it is not even funny!  Corn bread, corn cakes, corn on the cob, corn in this sweet milky stuff, corn this and corn that, I didn´t think it was possible to do it, but they sure know how to utilize their corn around here!
    Love you all, you are amazing!

Day 6: A little bout what we do, and a little fun!

So on the left here we have a picture of us in front of our school, it is a place where they actually teach English, but we break all the rules and study Portuguese there, yeah!
The picture to the right is of us going to our internship, we will be working with a group that does a lot of different things, from giving people the opportunity to study art- design, photography, and graffiti, to helping clean up by the rivers, giving children that don´t have very good home lives a place to go and play and learn and have fun, and also they are very big on recycling.

 Here are a few more from the museum that we went to.  The story with the museum is Ricardo Bernand made a ton of money off of sugar, he used that money to buy a lot of artifacts and really cool things and built a museum that was open to the public.  There is so much stuff there.  I felt a little selfish when I was talking with a couple friends, we were asking each other what we would do if we made that much money, and my first response is that I would pay off my student loans and then travel-how easy is it to just think of ourselves all the time, and how cool is it that

 there are people who don´t, people like Ricardo who use their money to preserve history and benefit others!
     My first reaction when walking up to the museum was, what the heck, David is in Brazil!!!  Because this statue of David is right up front, he walked a long way ☺

This is the hammock with the amazing view of the ocean and an awesome breeze!

These are a few more pictures from the internship, the people we will be working with.  Above are a group of the kids that they help, I´m not sure what all they do, but I know that have all sorts of games and activities that the kids can do, they have a slackline, they have juggling, they have one of those...bogo boards...the board that we used to have, Jim and Jen have one, it has that circular piece that goes under it and you try to balance on it-which Jessiny can do while singing and playing the guitar behind her back!!!  Anyway, it was a lot of fun to meet them and play with them for awhile.  To the right is Carbonel, he is the one our director has been talking to and working with to get this going for us.  Then on the right is a demonstration of one of their photographers, but it is also pictures of projects they have done to help clean up rivers and other humanitarian type work and it shows somewhat how they use recycled objects to make other things, like the bottles in the picture, or they were using the empty pop bottles to make something when we came in, it is really cool!

Day 5: Umm, chastity belts?

Hola people! Long time no talk, sorry about that, I hope that you didn´t go through withdrawls on my one day away.  If you did, never fear, I have returned to give you another dose of amazing Brazilian-ness, be prepared to be wow-ed.
     I didn´t write yesterday because we were going to the temple today, we had to leave super early so I went to bed...kind of early!  The temple is beautiful here, and you can buy some very important stuff for extremely cheap at the distribution center here, I am talking like, 60 cents for stuff that other people don´t even see.  Now that is a bargain and a half!
    Yesterday we went to an awesome museum that is located in a castle and has everything from paintings, old books, sculptures, vases and creepy life-like figurines, but it also has knives, guns, ginormous pocket knives,  suits of armor and daily beheadings .  Unfortunately we missed the live show, but we did get to see the body wheeled out on an ambulance so it was almost as good as the real thing.  That is all you are going to get from me on that subject for now so just let your little...um, big, beautiful and fully working minds ponder over that ;)

Weird, creepy human-esc figures, I do like the jester with his tongue out though.

Young woman, pure and beautiful

   

Woman of the world, admiring here jewels and dressed to kill!

Those are some great pictures from the museum, the last one I am going to post from there is phenominal, the detail is so great, it is almost as though you could walk up and touch the lady and she would move, isn´t art amazing?  Sorry, before you go any further just know that she is naked...my bad, I will make it smaller so if you want to skip over it then it will be easier to do so.

Oh, and actually, this will not be the last one or else the title of my blog for the day would not make any sense, I need to talk a little bit about the chastity belts.  No, contrary to popular belief these are not something that only make an appearance in the movie `Men in Tights`, oh no, these little babies were real and they actually look quite comfortable, I am thinking of purchasing one myself so that my mom will stop staying up all night worrying about me ;)

I mean, come on, they even come in different varieties, shapes, sizes, designs, who wouldn´t want one of these babies?  I´ve heard that metal wegies are the best anyway, I guess you could call it Merbie, the cousin of Herby (that was a joke for the Porritts, bahaha!).  Remember, abstinance is the best way...the best way to...not, abstinance is the best way to not...abstinance is key!

I will write more tomorrow, I love you all and hope you are having as much fun as I am, doubtful because you don´t have yours truly in your lives right now, but try!  Ok, now you made me sound full of myself, which I definitely am not, but Jimmy knows, his theme song just came to mind.  I will give you a little refresher for those of you who may not know what I am talking about...hmm, humm, ♫meeemeemee mee♪

I´m sexy and I know it!

Haha, jk, estou brincando com a gente.  Ate logo!



Day 3: Corn Flavored Icecream?!?!

Yes!  We found the right bus today and instead of taking 50 minutes to get to school, it only took 20 minutes today, holy cow! Kevin, I have no idea how you walked around all day and had energy to talk to people and keep going, especially in pants and shoes, yuck!  It is so hot here and everyone is just sweating buckets all the time, I think the pores on my face are tired from all of it already ;)
    

Danilo with his corn flavored icecream wrapper.

 But about the corn flavored ice cream.  We had this little man with his orange ice cream truck following us around Olinda today where we took a tour of the city, it is super full of history and has a billion really old churches.  Finally our director took pity on him, or maybe she got tired of the rumblings coming from Danilo´s stomach (he is ALWAYS hungry) and so she bought him an ice cream bar which he quickly figured out tasted like corn, bahahaha!  Right now they are having their celebrations, Festa de Junina, which is to celebrate the harvesting of the corn.  They make all kinds of dishes out of corn and have parties basically throughout the whole month.  I guess that it even goes so far as to affect the flavor of their ice cream.  Here is a picture of the infamous ice cream man!

   I included this picture of the beach because I think that it is really cool, now I just need to get another one where we have our feet buried in the sand there and it looks like everything is emerging from the black lagoon.
 






  Brazil is fun, I think that everyone should come here and try it out sometime, hint hint!  We are starting to get the bus system down, they don´t stop at every bus stop, you have to waive them down like you do for a taxi if you want them to stop for you and then push a button or pull a chord to get off, but they only open the door in the very back to let you off unless it is super packed.  And by ´super packed´ I mean it has to be pretty extreme, that is why we missed our stop, or rather the stop after our stop yesterday was because we couldn´t get to the back of the bus so even though we had pulled the chord, it was no bueno.

     Everyone is super nice, I love the people in this group already, and it is fun because I haven´t noticed any real clicks forming, everyone is just friendly and accepting of everyone else so that makes it awesome!