...and the next day

After writing Saturday's blog post, I fell asleep for an hour and a half and then got up for church. They made me the pianist for sacrament meeting, so not only did I have to go, I had to go early. I was terrified of falling asleep on the keyboard or something, but actually I didn't sleep even once in the three hours! How righteous am I? And the playing went OK, although someone chose "Let Us All Press On" for the last hymn, which is hard, even though I told them in my best Portuguese that I'm not very good.

After church we went to Iruã's vó's (grandma's) house. She made us feijoada, a traditional Brazilian dish with beans and pork:

They eat it with some sort of crushed cracker flower stuff (in the white dishes on the left). I'm glad I finally ate some--everyone's been talking about it since I got here. Plus, I met some of Iruã's family. His grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousin were there. His 9 year old cousin, João, takes English classes at CCBEU. His English was really good, and I was impressed that he stuck around and talked to us. Over the course of the day, João and I discussed comic books, favorite animals, favorite foods, soccer, and dogs.

I also, thank goodness, fell asleep after lunch and probably drooled all over the couch.

After my nap, we drove to Iruã's family's farm. It's a sugar cane farm, and his aunt and uncle have an "orchid house" there. It's really cool: they have a sort of open-sided tent with hanging baskets of orchids underneath.

The rest of the farm was beautiful, too. It's mango season, and there are mangoes littering the ground--so many that we were slipping on rotting mango corpses and feeding them to the pigs:

and the cow:

To get fresh mangoes for ourselves, we threw rotten mangoes at the tree.

Now, I love mangoes, but they're always kind of a pain to eat. Who knew you could peel them with your teeth?

We wandered around and enjoyed the view: