Monday, 30, 23:49 hours

Blog readers, meet my new best friend:

I know what it’s like to be in this hot, brazilian weather with out air conditioning, two years in Rio de Janeiro left me with plenty of memories. I can’t begin to describe how thankful I am for such nice living conditions we have here – air conditioning being the nicest commodity.

Today didn’t get too hot, but for the short time I was outside walking from the hotel to lunch, or the grocery store, or the church, I couldn’t help but long for the cool, fresh air of my new best friend.

Unfortunately, most people in Brazil don’t have air conditioning. Well, let me rephrase that. Most people where I lived in Rio de Janeiro and Espirito Santo didn’t have air conditioning; I haven’t been inside enough houses here to give an accurate description.

Our place is so nice that I almost feel embarrassed when people at church ask us where we’re living. I try to quickly say, “oh, an apartment near by.” But somehow it always comes out that we’re living in a hotel. “For your whole stay?” They usually ask, and then I try to explain how we were told that since it was tourist season here, apartments for our short stay were hard to find. Plus, since we are volunteers, we are paying for our stay – which is partly true. The program says they’re paying for our residency, but somehow the tuition went up significantly… so I think that’s where the money went. But I just worry about passing the wrong message that the church is spoiling us, or anything like that.

Here is our front room - notice the fridge, microwave, internet connection, couch/pull out bed.


Here's our view from our mini-patio. I believe the mountain on the right is the island of Florianópolis.


And from the other side, some Brazilian construction and another nice view.


After all the week of training in Salt Lake and the week of co-teaching in Porto Alegre, we finally started our first week in Florianópolis (well, São Jose… but it’s close enough). Dave and I have figured out that in order to get our studies taken care of, we need to study at least 4 hours a day, 6 days a week. The alarm rang at 8:30 am, but I was already alert – my sunburned back made for an uncomfortable nights rest. (By the way, I realized my face isn’t as red as the rest of my body because while I napped on the beach I put my t-shirt over my head to keep it from burning.) The cool water from the shower helped sooth my irritated epidermis (for all the Simpson’s fans out there, this word had to be used). By 10 pm I was fed, groomed and on our micro-patio, reading about Brazil’s history. In the few hours of studying I managed to knock a good junk out of my Sociology and Portuguese reading, and well as write a short paper.

The 2:30 pm sun was our companion as we meandered around town, looking for a place to eat. We had forgotten the Brazilian ways of having lunch over by 2:30 and by the time we found a place to eat, it was 3:00 pm and lunch was shut down. We opted for a ‘Sub’ shop, but were disappointed with the results. Just a quick visual image… a whole was burrowed out from the center of my sandwich to make space for the few toppings they put on it. They then threw the burrowed out bread away – different I guess. But we did get a great class of Caldo de Cana at a little joint near the hotel. (Caldo de Cana is a drink made purely by a machine squeezing the juices out of a few stalks of sugar – the plant. Makes for a great juice.)

We were inside the church, ready to put in some hours towards our volunteer work with the Employment Service center by 4:00 pm and were surprised to see the local missionaries were having their weekly zone meeting. For a few hours we began organizing and planning – I made a calendar for the all year and we began planning which areas we would contact first to begin marking dates to teach the CASP course. I felt really stupid when a woman called and wanted information about when the next course would be taught locally and if there were any job openings I could pass on to her. If I were in Porto Alegre I would know exactly where to look in their office for that information, but here… we’re in charge, and we don’t know much about the area or what’s going on yet. I’m sure I sounded very professional on the phone. I also started typing out a packet of names that Elder Natchingall had written out, alphabetically, of all the people who took his course in 2005 – Humberto requested we digitalize it.

By nearly 8:00 pm we locked up and went across the street for a bite to eat – a “X 1 Hamburger.” It came with a burger, egg, chicken breast, bacon, lettuce, tomato, peas and corn. What a burger! Let me tell ya, it’s good, but hard to eat straight through. French fries need to be invested next time to kinda get a new taste in your mouth (French fries were not offered at the little lunch stand by the way. They are usually only offered at real restaurants, not lunch trailers on the side of the road, like where we were eating.)

Finished the night off with an episode of “Jail Break”, a Fox show. Pretty good actually.