Playing Catch-Up

It´s been well over a week already since I last wrote because we´ve been on the road again. I´m sorry to keep everyone waiting so long.
I´ll try to catch up to the present as quickly as possible. . .

The Woodfords alerted me to the fact that I failed to communicate properly about the job Jess and I accepted back in October. After re-reading what I wrote, I could see why you were confused, so thanks for letting me know! What I forgot to say was that the job we accepted begins in January, and goes for the duration of 2009, which means that we still have about 2 months of free time, which we´re using to travel around and visit friends in various parts of the country.

We stayed in Brasilia from Saturday morning until Monday afternoon. On Saturday we went out for lunch and had salad. It was wonderful. I hate using superlatives like ´best´too freely, but it´s been a long time since I´ve had the kind of salad that is packed with goodies like this one was. I saved the sheet we used to choose our ingredients, so that sometime in the future we can recreate in similar fashion. After the meeting on Saturday night we headed out with quite a crowd to eat pastels. Mmmmm!

On Sunday, Lu made us a wonderful salmon and spaghetti lunch and invited Francy Anne and Francoise over too, so we had a nice time all together. After the meeting at night,Lu made popcorn in their pipoqueira and we watched Mary Poppins together. Such fun! I didn’t realize how antiquated the movie’s language is until this time, when we watched it with the English subtitles. As Jess put it, we somehow always get the gist of it without actually realizing exactly what they are saying.

I was awoken with a start Monday morning, by Jess, who had awoken with a start to the sound of Carlão calling up from the ground below outside the apartment building. We met Carlão and his family (his wife is Carmen and two daughters) last year during our travels in Africa. They have been in Africa for two years, and now they are moving back to Brazil for a little while, but so far only Carlão is here because his daughter is finishing up her school year in Joburg. Neither we nor he knew we would reunite here in Brazil, and so it was a nice surprise on all sides when we each discovered the other party was here . . . now! Since we arrived in Brazil we’ve met up with almost all of the people we were together with in Africa last year. It’s been kind of a strange sensation for everyone – for us to be with them all again, and for them to see us in their homeland. You go to a little corner of the earth and make friends with people you never knew, and when you leave you don’t know if you’ll ever see them again. It makes the world seem so small.

We’d arranged to spend Monday with Carlão and James, another friend that Jessica spent a lot of time with when she lived in Botswana. When we arranged to get together, however, we didn’t except Carlão to show up outside our doorstep before we were out of bed. Needless to say, it was the quickest out-of-bed-experience we’ve had since we arrived. After a quick breakfast we dropped Lu off at work and then picked James up - Carlão had called him at 6am to make sure he’d be ready bright and early. We had a great time together, walking in the Parque da Cidade (City Park), sitting and drinking agua de coco (they drill a hole in the top of a coconut and you stick a straw in and drink the coconut water out of it), all the while catching up on the last 10 months of life. We had lunch at a Churrascaria (a restaurant where waiters come with different kinds and cuts of meat on big metal spits and serve you whatever you’d like to eat until you cannot eat anymore). It was delicious. My favourite things there were barbequed cheese (I always think of Aeden, my dear little cheese fanatic, every time I eat good cheese), barbequed banana (covered in sugar and cinnamon), and quail eggs (not barbequed - they’re tiny little eggs that are common here, but I’d never had the chance to try them). I always feel kind of guilty about the way I enjoy churrascos here. It’s not that I dislike meat, but besides chicken hearts, I don’t get excited about meat the way I’m supposed to (ie. the way Brazilians do). It’s all the ‘extras’ that make me really happy.

In the afternoon Carlão dropped us off at the bus station with our luggage, and we headed off to Anápolis where Márcio and his parents were waiting to pick us up in the pickup truck that would soon become very familiar to us. More to come on that, and more pictures to come soon.

One last thing before I go is that Luciana gave us a cell phone (thanks again!) so now we’ve got a number if you need/want to reach us. If you want the number, send me an email and I’ll send it to you.