Brazil, Chapter 6: In which I Post Yesterday's Activities Today

Fridays are our off days, and I certainly needed it yesterday. Teaching is hard! This morning we wandered around downtown, looking for very cheap, local-use only, pay-per-use cell phones, which is a difficult thing to ask for in another language. No luck on the cell phone front, so we window shopped and then went home for lunch.

After lunch, we wanted to go to a river that's about 15 kilometers from Lins. But we can't figure out the bus system and nobody will tell us how to get there by foot--some people don't even know what river we're talking about.

Maybe I should trust the people who live here more than Google maps, but I want to find that river!

One way or another, we ended up staying in the city and going to Valeria's house. She was very hospitable: we used her internet, her motorcycle, her perfume, her coke, and her ham sandwiches. We even used up her missionary time. Valeria took Diane on a motorcycle ride to the movie theater to check the times, and I stayed home and tried to talk to Valeria's mom in Portuglish. While they were gone, the missionaries came by. It was fun to talk to some other Americans and nice to have them translate for us. Poor Diane came back and was accosted by Mormons, and Valeria was accosted by Americans, and the missionaries were accosted by girls wearing shorts. I was the only one who should have felt at home, being a member of all three of those groups, but I just kept thinking about what a weird mixture of people were there.

We went home to dinner and then went back out again to catch a movie. Listen, there is only one movie theater in Lins. And it offers only two movies at a time. And those two movies are currently Shrek and Eclipse. Diane and I agreed that Eclipse would probably have a less advanced plot than Shrek, so yes, we watched it in Portuguese. Word to the wise: If you ever want to watch a movie with a heartthrob in it, but you want to know the plot, do not see that movie in Brazil. I've never heard such persistent shrieking, not even for Johnny Depp when it was me yelling.

Oh! I can't forget: we also garnered an invitation to a wedding. Only one week in Lins and people are inviting us to weddings! We're just so cool and popular, you don't even know. We stopped by the church that we accidentally went to last Sunday, and the piano player was getting married the next day, and he invited us! Ok, so we shamelessly hinted, but still.