Registering with the Federal Police and other fun things.
Hello! I'm going to try to keep this blog a bit shorter (I probably won't succeed), so let's hop right in. On Sunday, Gisele, one of our housemates I really like, invited her brother, his wife, and their two kids over for a barbecue. Her brother brought all of the meat and some of the other girls made sides. I can't cook, so I just cleaned up everything and did the dishes afterwards. Brenda, another one of my favorite housemates, helped me as well. We spent the day eating in stages as different meats were cooked and then finally around 3, we sat down and ate the sides and the rest of the meat. One of the boys knows Spanish and English as well as Portuguese, so we spent the time after dinner talking and playing with him. His brother also played with us, but he can only speak Portuguese so I couldn't communicate with him as well. The family invited us all over to their house for the next barbecue sometime and I can't wait to take them up on their offer.
We taught the first year students again on Monday. We planned in four activities, but only had time for two. They read an article on March Madness and discussed it. My favorite part was going over words they didn't know because it was a challenge for me to define English words in a way the students would understand and it was a great way to interact with the students as well as look at English from a different point of view. We also listened to Nancy Mulligan by Ed Sheeran and gave the students papers that had the lyrics on it, but with blanks to fill in. They really seemed to enjoy the activity and I want to do it with them again in the future.
Tuesday was a very long day. In the morning, we went to the bank and paid to register with the federal police. That took a long time and we were worried about getting to our meeting with the Police on time, but we ended up being a half hour early. Alexa met with one of the immigration people first and finally I got to meet with the other guy to get registered. He looked over all of my documents, entered all of my information on his computer, fingerprinted me, and then finally printed out my temporary ID. This is different than the CPF because this is printed by the police and shows that I am here legally and it has all of my information on it. I get to pick up the laminated card in two months.
Once we got home, we went to get manicures. I got made fun of a little bit for not knowing Portuguese as some of the ladies couldn't understand how I could be in Brazil and not know the language. I was already tired and wanted to go home and sleep, so I just pretended I couldn't understand that they were talking about me in Portuguese so I wouldn't have to try to explain myself. My nails turned out great though. We didn't realize that it was a school and everyone doing nails were students, so we were pleasantly surprised when they said our manicures were free because we were basically models to practice on. We finally made it home after walking home in the rain, and I showered and went to bed.
Wednesday we had a meeting with our host professor, Juliane, and another English professor, Raquel, who has been helping us out a lot. We talked about how things were going so far and what the next few weeks look like. I think we are going to start having classes with professors at the start of April. I'm looking forward to working with the professors here and helping in their classes. I also had my first conversation club! I thought it went alright, but I'm hoping the next one is more fun for the participants. We talked about expectations and rules for the class and then we played three different games to get everyone speaking. They all seemed a little nervous, but I'm working with the advanced group, so their English was better than they thought it was.
Thursday and Friday we taught 2nd and 3rd year English. We worked with family vocabulary and also hobbies. We did many of the same activities we did with the first year except first year will get to the hobby vocabulary on Monday since we didn't have time for it last class. We also presented pictures of our family to demonstrate how to use the family vocab, but most of my slides didn't download, so I only got to show about four pictures. I think the students are enjoying having us teach them and I have had a lot of fun so far as well.
Cidy, the woman that comes to clean our house twice a week, saw the electrical box or something smoking on Friday, so she shut off electricity to the whole house and called an electrician. She only speaks Portuguese so I wasn't really sure what had happened. We didn't have wifi or hot water for the shower and we had to start the stove with a lighter. The electrician finally came, but it took him hours to fix it. It also rained all day so I think that may have had something to do with it. Everything was finally working when we got home from class. We missed our bus home by about 5 minutes so we had to wait an hour for the next one to come and ended up getting home around 10:15pm. Then we had a little surprise party for one of our housemates because it was her birthday. We had key-lime pie and coke and just chatted until I went to bed around midnight.
Saturday was a lazy day for me. I didn't leave the house and just hung out with my housemates. One of them made lunch for the four of us who were home and it was very good. The rest of the day I watched Netflix and hung out.
Today will hopefully be a day for errands, but it rained a little bit this morning and looks like it will rain again. It may just be another lazy day for me as well.
Thanks for reading and keeping up with me! Feel free to email, Facebook, or WhatsApp me whenever!