Welcome to Brazil!

This is day 4 in brazil. We miraculously made it here after having our Cville-Atlanta flight delayed by an hour and were literally the last ones to sprint onto our Fortaleza flight. Imagine our surprise when not only did we make it to Fortaleza without further adventures but our luggage was waiting for us by the time we got out of customs.

Brazil where we are staying is very residential and NOT AT ALL white beaches and cute poolside restaurants. Stupid google images are a lie! Our host family is awesome and we have an amazing new adopted grandmother. She keeps feeding us, hugs us when we leave and gets upset with us for walking outside after dark. In 2 days we had 3 meals that consisted of red meat. Joana and I both do not eat red meat or pork but we felt it would be impolite to turn it down. Sorry, cow.


We took a bus out to the center on Thursday, which was crowded and sketch. I guess our idea of Brazil was a nice beach with cute waiters bringing you caipirinhas, instead we walked past the center and encountered a sketchy half-naked (seemingly homeless) man who told us leave because the area is full of thieves. So we went back to the center. Overall we saw the beach from a distance but still don't know how to get there without walking thru the sketchy areas. Kai and David have been helpful, tho and I think we'll try to figure it out again next monday. Until then our host family has big plans for us, shopping on saturday and beach on sunday.

Our mentor, Monica, asked us to sit thru a 2-day class on the research methods that we are using in this research. Obviously, its all in Portuguese so you can guess how much I´m getting out of it. But from what I can gather from reading the power point (Portuguese looks a lot like Spanish in writing), its pretty common sense. At the end of the second day, we got certificates recognizing our successful completion of the class. I am planning to frame it as a reminder of the class I understood the least in all my 17 years of school.

G