It's been a long time coming

We’ve just passed our five month mark of being here and to me it certainly feels like it’s been that long. So much has happened that when I think back to our first months here, I feel like that was ages and ages ago and I’m already a different person than I was at the beginning of the year. I realize that I’ve done an absolutely terrible job of keeping all of you up-to-date, so I’m going to attempt making up for that now. Get ready for a good, long, post. :)

It’s been so wonderful to have our own place, and be located close to the school. In fact, we’re close to everything we need. Close being a relative word. I guess what I really mean is that we’re within walking distance of everything we might need – school, a park to run in, a mall, a few grocery stores, downtown, friends etc. Walking distance is also a relative term. We’ve wound up walking really far with really, really heavy bags - something we would never do if we had the option of a car. But when you don’t have options, you find that difficult things aren’t impossible! So yes, we’re walkers and we enjoy it. It slows life down, but there’s something lovely about not having the ability to rush around the city frantically doing all the things that “need” to be done every day.

It’s taken this long for us to get certain things under control. Sleep for example. We wake up every morning at 5:47, and one of us goes in the shower while the other gets breakfast ready. We eat and get ready and make it out the door about an hour later, rush to school (which sometimes consists of me running beside Jess’ long strides when we are exceptionally late) to get there by 7am. The days are packed with kids and noise and papers and activities and lunch and snacks and problem-solving until we leave again at 4pm to get home and really live. Between fixing dinner, taking care of house responsibilities, paying bills, getting bank accounts and grocery shopping, there isn’t all that much time to do things simply for pleasure.

So we got ourselves into a bad habit of staying up late night after night. Not only that, but our weekends have been absolutely packed. I recently took out a calendar to find out why I feel like we never seem to get to relax, and discovered that it’s because we rarely do. Since we moved into the apartment (about three and a half months ago) we’ve had a total of two weekends that we were here at home with nothing to do. Once a month we have a Special Saturday at the school where there are activities for the students and their families, and all the rest of the weekends we’ve either had visitors, or travelled to visit friends. What this all led to was a point where I was completely and utterly exhausted. It was a Friday night and one of the teacher’s had kindly invited us over to her mother’s house for typical food from this region of the country. We were there for so long, and I wanted my bed so badly, that eventually I excused myself to go the bathroom just to cry because I was so tired.

So we started going to bed early. Really, really early at first, and then just normally early. It took a solid two weeks before I started feeling like myself again. I must say, getting the right amount of sleep does wonders for your quality of life.

Grocery shopping is always an experience. We live within walking distance, but it’s between 15 minutes and half an hour walking distance – not, say, 5 minutes. So we try to do one big grocery shopping every month to stock up on all the non-perishables. It’s taken us up until this month to sort through all the brands and prices and ingredients of things to know what we really want. We’re finally getting to that stage where we can walk in and know where we want and where to get it. The first two times we went we bought reasonable amounts of things and carried them home. But since then we’ve been getting too much to be able to carry home, and have to take the bus home. Two months ago we had a lot of stuff - so much that my backpack got stuck as I tried to make my way off the bus, causing me to drop the bag of 24 rolls of toilet paper I was trying to hold onto along with the other grocery bags banging against my side. Both Jess and I had a good laugh about it all when I finally managed to collect all my belongings and get myself off the bus (avoiding eye contact with all the people I knew were staring at me). This last trip we got even too much to take on the bus, but we did it anyway. We’d forgotten our backpacks and had so, so much weight in our hands that it was quite a painful experience. Not to mention, that you can’t just get on a bus and sit down here in Brasil. There’s the little turn-style you have to walk through after you pay the cobrador. He had to help us and our bags through the turn-style this month. By the time we got home all the handles of the grocery bags were stretched out by all the weight and looked so funny. Needless to say, none of the difficulties have taken away the joy of grocery shopping for me – I still love to do it for some reason. I wonder if I always will . . .

Well talk about groceries leads nicely into the food we eat. Lots of you from home ask what we eat (people here are more likely to ask if we cook for ourselves and I always feel a bit confused by that question for some reason). Our breakfasts for a long while were yogurt, granola and fruit every day. We were going through tons of yogurt, because you can only get yogurt in cups – there aren’t big containers of thick yogurt here for some reason. So we started making our own yogurt. That’s been interesting. The first batch was good, the second was absolutely disgusting and had to be disguised in various milk-shakes and such, and since then we’ve got a perfect formula going that makes the most delicious homemade yogurt. And it’s so easy, that I’m always on the lookout for people that might be interested in trying it themselves. It’s incredible to me that just bringing milk to certain temperatures and mixing it with a bit of yogurt and letting it sit creates new yogurt. As my mom says, it’s a little miracle! So now we eat even more yogurt than we used to, but we’ve also started to eat other things for breakfast, especially since the weather’s gotten colder. We’ve done oatmeal, cornmeal, milkshakes, eggs and toast, muffins (which are a big deal – more on that later), muesli, fruit salad, and once we got pão de quiejo (cheese bread) on the run at a bakery for breakfast.

We eat our lunches in the cafeteria at school. The food is good-tasting, and varied. There are always rice and beans, salad, vegetables, and some kind of meat or protein main course. This past month we had a special treat, though. The nutritionist has started putting on an international lunch every month, and she started with a Canadian lunch. We gave her recipes for Shepherd’s pie and brownies, gave pictures from home to post in the cafeteria, and a CD of Canadian music. It was on a Friday afternoon, and we happened to be very homesick at the time, and the taste of the Shepherd’s pie was completely authentic. It satisfied that home-cooked-meal spot on the inside. As the fiddle music played a mournful tune through the cafeteria, Jess and I both struggled to hold it together so as not to burst into tears in the cafeteria. It was tough. We both ended up crying, but held back from outright sobbing.

So, we do our main cooking for dinners and weekends. Although I guess you wouldn’t consider popcorn cooking, would you? Ha ha. We eat a lot of popcorn. It’s just that it’s such a great food. It’s good when you’re not so hungry for dinner, and it’s good when you’re a little hungry after having eaten dinner. Okay, so some of the real things we’ve made so far are: quiche, veggie-pita sandwiches, soups, sweet potatoes, crepes and pancakes (those are favourites), lasagna casserole (your dish, Susanna!), spaghetti, cream cheese and tomato sandwiches, pita pizzas, tacos (wow, that was delicious), lentils, chicken, and wraps (they have flour tortillas here!). As you can see, we eat lots of Canadian food made from our Brazilian groceries. There is no cheddar cheese or sour cream here, though. We make do but nothing really replaces either of those things.

There are two things that send both Jess and I into frantic, panicky homesickness without fail, and that is to either leaf through our Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, or to search for dessert recipes on the internet. The pictures and names of all the various pies and cookies and cakes and puddings and muffins can send us over the edge of calmness in mere minutes. We’ve made plenty of desserts - especially to take to our friends when we travel, or when they come and visit us – but we’ve had to make a weekend-only rule for desserts because we were getting a little carried away when we first got our own place. We’ve made chocolate chip cookies, ginger spice cookies (your recipe again Susanna), butter tart squares, banana bread, granola bars, brownies, chocolate pudding, carrot cake with cream cheese icing (Jess’birthday), cinnamon rolls, and recently, apple streusel muffins with a muffin tin we borrowed from our Canadian friend Melissa. We buy lots of butter on those monthly grocery trips!

It’s downright cold here lately. Recently I was talking to Aeden (my five-year-old neice) and I was telling her that I have to wear lots of layers and scarves these days because it’s so cold, and she said, “That doesn’t make any sense – you live in BRAZIL!” She’s right. There is something very wrong about how cold I feel every morning. My theme song for the weather these days is, “Baby, it’s cold inside”. My classroom has these big huge glass doors that lead directly outside, and don’t keep too much of the cold out. Some kids wear gloves and hats and scarves to keep warm. We’ve had a bit of a warm spell for the past few days which has felt like beautiful fall weather – it’s been amazing.

Speaking of school, I’ve had a project going on for the past two or three months to teach one of my six-year-old boys to read. I’ve never done this before, and am so thankful that Carolyn had already had success teaching Aeden to read using a phonics method she had recommended to her, because I would have been totally at a loss about how to go about teaching him. I’m actually not trained to teach the age-level I’m teaching here, and am completely clueless about taking kids through the literacy process. I don’t remember learning how to read at all. It amazes me that we can look at words and know what they say, especially since English is so irregular. Anyway, I knew that Carolyn had used a book called, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, and so the school ordered in through amazon.com and I started using it with my student. I was kind of nervous, because I had this huge fear that somehow I was going to fail and we’d make it through the 100 lessons with him still being unable to read. Just today we finished lesson number 39 and I have to say that I am truly amazed at how the literacy process happens – I don’t really feel like I’ve done anything because I just follow the book’s instructions, but it’s absolutely incredible – he’s reading! It has been one of the most satisfying and rewarding things I’ve got to be a part of this year. I think it is just amazing to watch him improve little by little. It’s kind of like yogurt-making . . . I want more kids to teach reading to now!

Well, I’ve left lots out, but that will always be the case. I think I’ll post this now and hopefully this will satisfy the emails I haven’t responded to as of yet asking for details. I would love to tell about the wonderful friends we have here – here in the city, and those we’ve visited with recently from out of town. I’m so thankful for them. It’s been so nice, too, to have spent time with families. Just this past weekend I was visiting our friend Priscila and it was so, so nice to be mommied by her mom and daddied by her dad. Homesickness has hit – not in a way that I sob myself to sleep or anything, but I miss home and all it entails. I’m so happy and so thankful for all we have been given here, but there really is no place like home. Which is why I’m looking forward to next weekend when Jessica’s parents come to stay with us for two weeks. It will be wonderful!

Goodbye for now, and I will write again. Thanks for following!