I've been working working workin! And we had our first non-family visitor last week! So we've been busy, is what I'm saying. We went touring around all last week and hit up all the hotspots: Porto de Galinhas, Olinda, Recife Antigo, some really cute Mexican restaurant (they don't have sour cream in Brazil...every time we eat Mexican I cross my fingers for 'american style' sour cream... No luck so far), we went to....where else... well, we ate food on the beach, worked out at our Jiu Jitsu gym. Just our normal life mostly. ANyway, I'll try and put some of those pictures up in a post soon. But for now, the week before our friend came we tore down our back wall thing. There was a cinderblock grid thing before, and we've got the most amazing view out the back, so TOby and another guy took some sledgehammers and whittled out the thing. We have a window now (it's where our laundry hangs to dry, so we sort of had to have it closed off so that 1. Our undies don't go flying out the window down to the street, and 2. Our laundry doesn't get soaked when it rains).
SO here's the before and after! Pretty right? I know the second picture is of sunset, but during the day you look out over red clay shingled houses to the edge of the city line, where it changes into huge rolling hills of sugarcane. It's sooooo pretty!
Yaaayyoo! We're back in Brazil! And a day or two back we went to our first football game! It's really hard getting used to saying that, not soccer. Why does the US raise their children learning the wrong word for the sport!!! Doesn't the rest of the world say football? I'm pretty sure we're the only country that says soccer. So confusing. I guess it's because we have the other football. That is played without using your feet. Good excuse I guess.
So, the game! It was pretty fun! The stadium was interesting, sort of rustic with cool metal chairs with handpainted numbers (I hear they're tearing it down soon, I'm going after those seats!), clean bathrooms and a really cool workout area/facility/pool. Oh, I guess that's leading me into the names of the teams. Sport was the home team. Creative name, no? I think it's because they play/train at a sport club? My best guess. The grounds are very nice.
Anyway, they were playing Portuguesa, a team from Sao Paolo, I believe, and Sport won. The score was 2-1, so I was okay with that (I was worried I would be bored with such a low scoring sport). Now, I've only seen two forms of soccer: my brother's high school performances, and the Olympics on TV (which I'm super pumped about BTW). So I'm not sure if I was putting this professional team on a pedestal, but it seemed like they weren't super super great. The first goal (scored by Sport) honestly looked like an accident. The ball was on the other side of the field about 80% of the first half, so I think everyone was surprised when it happened. The second and third goals looked legit though. A good game overall, but the most exciting part was the 'youth' section!!!!
They were sooo good! Coordination and cheers like I have never seen in the states! I put a video up at the top of the post, but I don't think it does them justice (you'll have to come down here to see it in person). They cheered literally the whole game (90+ minutes, right?). At one point they all (like really almost all of them, I think it was mostly guys) took off their shirts at the same time and did a little dance with them. So neat.
Okay, I tried to capture the range of emotions we saw, by way of internet searching. I didn't find very great pictures. With the way people were yelling, I would have thought there would have been plenty of finds when I googled 'soccer fan yelling'. Oh well. Rage, horror, agony, shame.... Aren't football games supposed to be fun?
So with our Jiu Jitsu gym we get a lot of visitors. It's a pretty well known gym (I guess) and they have a few gyms around the world. So a long time ago there were some Frenchmen, like 10 of them, visiting the gym to train for a month or week or something. We invited them over to the pool, because they'd been just going to the gym and back to the place they were staying. One guy thought our underwater camera was the best thing ever, and he took probably 50 pictures like the one above. We got one group picture, but with the other guy's camera. He said he would email us, but never did. This guy here really wanted his underwater pictures too. Oh well, his loss I guess?
So this is the subject of foreigners. There really aren't many of them here. This week we met a Brit doing some post-graduate traveling, but mostly coming here to train at the gym (she goes twice a day, so that's what it seems like to me). So we've met her, the Frenchmen, and I met a guy at the Federal Police office (I'm almost all the way to a permanent visa!) from New Zealand...or Australia. I forget, sorry to both of those countries, I get them confused. There is one guy married to a Brazilian and they both go to our gym, he's from Hungary.
Oh, and Toby just reminded me of the last instance of foreigners. Cirque duSoleil was in town for about a month and I met some of them at our grocery store. We have two large, nice hotels near us. I was walking around and, not to stereotype, but Brazilians are sort of smaller, a little darker skinned and normally slight framed. Not too large people. So I saw a group of lighter skinned large folks (and one tiiiiiiny girl and one extremely muscular girl, who I decided must be in the crazy shows) and happened to be behind them in line and struck up a conversation. We never did get together though. Oh well.
So that was just an informative post. Recife=not many foreigners live here (that we've found).
