One week in

Wow what an amazing couple of days. I've spent 30 minutes speaking nothing but Portuguese with Fernanda (she´s kind of an organizer in the lab) and I was actually able to express myself! It´s such a great feeling! I still prefer to speak in English because it´s so much easier, but it´s good to know that if I´m forced to, I can speak Portuguese.

Other things are going really well too. I´ve been doing things in lab, though the pace in the lab seems to be much slower down here in general. I guess I´m not too surprised by this, but it takes some getting used to. Part of it could be that I´m just starting too. The other thing I wanted to mention about the lab here was the open air layout. It´s obviously much different that the US where everything is so enclosed. Here the entire ICB (the bio institute) is open air. It´s really nice, but a lot different than what I´m used to. The other thing is the cramped quarters. There is hardly any room in most of the labs and the entire institute, but even the people here think there is too little room. They´re building more so that all of the classes will be in a separate room from the research.

I'm definitely connecting with the people in that lab too. Maybe it´s just because of the situation in the lab and the university, but it has seemed that, in general, people in Brasil are much warmer. I went Thursday night with Jarina and Ramon to a local bar (´New Tastes´) and had my first capirina; gostoso! We sat around for a couple hours and we were treated really well. This seems to be a really nice lab and they are very excepting of me. Taking me to see things, explaining things, etc. And of course some Brasilian curse words :)

Last night I spent some time planning out a potential trip to Salvador for next week as there is a Holiday on Thursday. We'll see if it happens, there are some issues. This morning I went around my barrio and took some pictures; got down to the lake and saw the famous Oscar Niemeyer church. The pics will get up eventually. Then tomorrow I'm intending to take the bus down and see the 'Hippy Fair'. We'll see how my first solo attempt with public transit goes!

Not everything has been going smoothly though. To you pay phones down here you have to buy prepaid cards. I won't bog down with the details, but I ended up buying the wrong one. I was able to trade it in after looking sad and pathetic for a while. It ended up costing me more than it should have, but at least I didn't lose all my $$. On the plus side I ended up meeting a couple people while I tried to make a call to Santuza.

Ok off to finish the laundry (everything is more difficult in a foreign language).