Parlsey on Your Plate

Hmmm, I just finished spending like, 4 days in one of the most dangerous cities in the world, where just about anything could happen, I didn't have internet access to write any blogs or emails, but do I get any concerned emails from a caring family or friends?  Nope, not one single email or facebook message, boo hoo.  I feel like the Parsley on your plate so I think it appropriate to include this song in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AiNXGFjHiY

It's more of a love song, but I think it still applies to my situation :(

Just kidding, I know you are all busy and, what's that old saying? Out of sight, out of mind, hee hee!

Ok, so Salvador is beautiful.  It might be a really dangerous city, but it was stunning.  We went to see turtles, they have a project going to protect them and help them, to show some of what they do they have a park where you can go and see some of the types of turtles they work with and they were incredible!!!  There was one pool that even had stingrays in it, I named one of them Adolfo (I am, clap clap, Adolfo).  It was so cool because you could put your hand in and touch them.  Well some of the kids from our group were petting Adolfo and he was just chilling, unmoving and unfazed at the bottom of the pool.  So I went over with a girl named Shawndeen from the group and we both reached in to touch him and he totally lifted up his...fin...thingy and caressed our hands!  It frightened me so I screamed and jumped back and got water everywhere (as did she) and we made fools of ourselves and had everyone laugh at us, it was great!  Then he started doing tricks, popping his nose out of the water, swimming up along the ledge so that his fin thingy was partly out of the water and showing off kind of like a dolphin.  I got a great video of it, I will show it to you someday, it is incredible!  They had baby turtles, they were so small and adorable, medium sized ones and really big ones.  Also they had sharks and lots of different fish.  It was really super fun to go and see.  I will include pictures at a later date but right now I am feeling too downright lazy, and no one cares about me anyway, so why would they care about seeing the most amazing pictures ever???
   Fine, I will include some

Wow, pretty cool right!?  Yeah for turtles.  For the record, I feel really silly, but I totally didn't know or realize that not all turtles have feet that they walk around on.  These sea turtles just have their little fin things.  I am assuming the can get around on land with them since that is where they lay their eggs, but it surprised me when I noticed that.  So for anyone else out there who also didn't realize this, you have now had your first lesson!

So on top you have what the bathrooms look like at this place, pretty creative huh, shell bathrooms, genious!  Then you have some of the big bad turtle guys, me and some friends hatching from our shells, and little baby, not so big and bad, turtle guys, isn't he just the cutest!!!

  

     Next we have Shawndeen, Michelle (who for the record, is not my roommate and we just laugh super duper hard every single waking moment, quote movies like crazy and have a blast!) and Natalia (we have been watching musicals together at night, Mama Mia and Hairspray, I sure love those movies, watching them, singing along and laughing my little heart out when the guys dance on the dock in their flippers, bless their souls they are a funny lot! Oh, and to top off the day I wore my brand spankin new Brazilian soccer jersey that I bought in Salvador, isn't it so cute!  Just my color as well.  So all in all the day was a success!

Day 35-we´re dropping off like flies!

Everyone is gettting sick, slowly, one at a time.  They are picking us off like we are nothing.  We are running on a skeleton crew.  Mayday, mayday, please send reinforcements!  No, but really it has been crazy lately.  Luckily it hasn´t gotten to me, and it is going to stay that way.
    Friday night we were invited to BYU Prom...which was really a Stake Dance kind of thingamajiggy where they wanted us to come and teach them some line dances....and by ´they´ I really mean the leaders, the kids were all chanting for them to keep playing forró music all night, but it was still fun.  We spent our last day of class brushing up on the boot scootin boogy and the electric slide, and then we went all out and learned the hoedown-throwdown.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fds_vawxE2Y&feature=related
That should be the link for that song, as a warning it is from the Hannah Montana movie, so if you have anything against Miley Cyrus than avoid it at all costs, but the dance is kind of fun actually!
   Yesterday we went to a museum that was about the Northeast people.  There were all sorts of cool things in there, and really disturbing ones that they used on slaves, it is sad to think of how terribly they were treated.  My favorite part of the museum was this

This is a huge pot that they would boil sugar cane in, but I fondly refer to it as my people-cooker-pot and decided that if I ever decide to take up cannibalism (which is actually frowned upon in most societies in case you didn´t know, though when I was at BYU Hawaii mom sent me some girls scout cookies, some of which were the ever so tasty Samoas.  Needless to say I just so happened to have some friends from Samoa and when I gave them a taste they no longer wondered why Maori´s used to practice canabilism because they all suddenly knew exactly how good they tasted!).  Anyway, back to my story, if I ever take up cannibalism (cause anything is possible with the economy these days you know) I need to get me one of these.  Honestly, it would be a nice way to go, just like getting into a hot tub ;)
My song that goes with it is ♫ ´slide down my rainbow, into my peoplecookerpot, and we´ll be jolly friends forever more-more, shut the door, yackety yack and don´t ´bite´back!´ ♪

 I just told Erika that I would post this picture for her, it reminds me of her and of Heather and is a general shout out to any and all girls that enjoy showering and then getting ready before getting dressed, this is from the museum we went to weeks ago.  This is an actual painting, made me laugh, sorry if it offends anyone.  Just imagine that she is a baby, you look at naked baby bums all the time when you change them and when you look at their photo albums (for some reason people are obsessed with taking naked baby pictures, what to the evs is what I say!)




Back to the museum we went to yesterday, just a few more photos.

There were a lot of pictures and objects in the museum from slaves as I already mentioned and that leads into the culture that is super strong in Salvador.  We fly there tomorrow by the way, woot woot.  It is sad that our time in Recife is over, but we have so many exciting things coming up that it makes it worth it.  And besides, that means that I will be coming home to all of you sooner than you would think, bahahaha, you thought you were rid of me forever, well sorry to burst your bubble, but I will be back!  Anyway, there is still a huge African influence in Salvador.  There is a lot of Candumblé and Maracumba which are mixtures of African beliefs and the Catholic religion.  There are some scary things that go along with these religions, dark stuff.  Think along the lines of curses and voodoo and black magic.  We´ll be super careful, now worries, but I am excited!

 Just a little bit of fun at the park tonight.  The picture above is of us doing a thing, like a racing car or horse or something, where you move your lips really fast...the next ones are of us doing our chub faces.  Above you have Matt, Michelle and me, in the chub faces picture we have me, Michelle, Brady, Carla and Cristina, and below is me and Michelle again, we are too cool for school if you couldn´t tell!  And mom, are you so proud, look at my painted fingernails, will wonders never cease!  I have painted them more since coming here than ever before in my entire life!

This is a candid photo where you shake your head really fast and take a picture just so you look really deformed and exciting, I turned out aweseome right!  We had a goodbye party in the park tonight for Carbonel, he is one of the head honchos for CCJ, where we did most of our internship, you know, the one that helped us grafitti in the favelas!  I will post a picture later of him, his wife, and me with his hair as my hair.  Yes, actually I am growing out a big black afro, thank you for asking!  You will see what I mean...one day ;)

 These last photos are just a collage of pictures and memories from Recife, I am bidding a fond farewell to this beautiful place.  Not just Recife even, but all the places we have visited so far.  Some might be on other posts that I have already done, but I love them so you just get to see them again!

 This is from Catamarão, they had quite a few little things that you could take pictures with, one was a mermaid, one was really weird and this was the other one, the captain and his first mate, aren´t we cute!  The picture above is when Carla and I went to the beach.  We had gone the week before and could walk out to the reefs, we went the next week at the exact same time and the tide was completely in and there was no beach-what the heck!  But still beautiful.

 Just a little fisherman out earning a living while riding, or rather rowing, into the sunset.

Above we have flooding in the streets, we took a bus through this to get to CCJ, they just drove through like it was no big deal.  The picture to the right and the one below were taken on our boat ride at Catamarão where we just got to explore a lot of Recife by boat and the rivers.

Just some sights around Recife, it is a big city with tons of beautifl things to see.

This old, crumbly, beautiful building is donw in old Recife.  We went there on our first day of classes when we went out to meet them people from CCJ.  They showed us around this area and this is where we got to meet all the kids and just have fun.  Below is the Recife temple, I love how beautiful our temples are, no matter where you go there is just a feeling there.  Even just looking at a picture of a temple, it is peaceful.

This is a crafts store from Caramaru, they just had a bunch of these lined up and down the street with whatever you could ever wish for inside

Above is a picture of the sunset in the sertão, to the right is a picture inside of the Brenand museum and below is a picture in the favelas where we went to graffiti.

  Some figurines.  They have a weird fascination with making ones of pregnant women, it is kind of funny.  Some other funny ones that they have are the ones that show different professions, so there is a dentist pulling a tooth out of some persons face and there is blood, or a doctor sticking something up someones little behind...they choose the most random scenes for the people to be in.

 These were taken out in the sertão, Afogados I think is the name of the place.  The table above is a kind of game (mostly played when people are drunk I do believe).  From what I understand you flip a coin and whatever circle it lands on you have to do that, some of them are funny like, walk around like a monkey, and some were probably inappropriate, but I didn´t understand them anyway!  The monkeys below, they were living in a tree in the courtyard of our little inn, so cute.

 This is from Natal when we rode the doon buggies.  this is part of the track we went on, doesn´t it just look like so much fun?  Below we have, what I think I was told, sugar cane fields.  They are super pretty, super green and everywhere on the way to Porto de Galinhas

 Fish from Porto de Galinhas, they loved to nibble my hand and they totally freaked Berkely out when she tried it, she has a hard time with fish trying to eat her.  I don´t understand it myself but you just have to smile and nod!  Below is from our doon buggy ride as well at one of the stops we made to take pictures.

 The saibloats from Porto de Galinhas.  Below is some yummy pizza that we got when we went out to eat with our family-so tasty!

 These are just some of the local crafts, I am absolutely obsessed with the little figurines of the Bahian women like the ones to the right and also two pictures down.  These ones are big, super nice and more expensive, but I bought a few of the smaller, less expensive ones and they make me super happy!  Also below is a tray that has seeds, fruit, leaves and different things in it.  I bought a clock that is similar to this and I absolutely love it!

Aren´t they beautiful?!

 These are two more of the corn dishes that we got to eat all throughout the month of June.  In the picture above is corn on the cob and then the other thing is what I made, if you remember the picture of me with a hairnet on holding some weird stuff-well that is what came out of the weird stuff!

Above I have Gil on the left and Sílvia on the right.  I love these ladies and am sad to be leaving them, of course I will get to see them the day before I fly out of Recife so that will be great.  To the right is a picture of one of the awesome guys that work in Sílvia´s building.  They are security people and are in charge of opening the doors and the gate to the garage to let people into the building.  If you aint on the list then you aint getting in-luckily we were on the list.  He usually works in the morning and is always super friendly and nice.