Moving On

Well eventually I had to leave the safety of Thiago~s flat in Salvador and make it out on my own again. Thiago was a complete sweetie, he was sweet in London and even better in Brazil. I must say that Brazil suits him, he looks much healthier and happier- maybe it is the sun or the fact that he spends half of his day in bed (hi Thiago!). We went and met various friends of his with all differing levels of English- ranging from none to better than mine.

It is so interesting to meet my ex students in their natural environments and gives a weird change to the student-teacher dynamic- where suddenly I am the one with all the questions. Like, had I understood it correctly, that Brazilians use LEGAL to mean cool and DROGA (drugs) to mean like DAMN! Turns out that I was right! And we laughed about that and my misunderstanding of what a borrachareria was (borrachar -or er, cant remember- means drunk in Spanish so I thought that itwas a very honest way of advertising the places where you get drunk. Turns out that it is something to do with tyres instead)- and if you want a proper laugh, ask the nearest Brazilian what the Portuguese for KNIFE is!

For the last few nights we havent gone to bed until after the sun has come up so when I booked a flight for 6 am today it just seemed easier to stay up all night so Thiago could drive me to the airport.

We watched ~The Mummy Returns~ in Portuguese with Portuguese subtitles, turns out that it is enough like Spanish for me to basically follow films but I get completely lost when people start speaking it to me. Not least because whenever I heard Portuguese in London I had to tell people to speak in English- that doesn~t go down so well when you are in Brazil.

Thiago was very informative about Brazil and the history of Salvador= anything that he didnt know he just lied about! Though he did admit that the samba was created when a group of Brazilians came off the beach and tried to get the sand out of their Havaianas (fancy flip flops which are pretty much compulsory here- so much so that my ordinary sandals set off the security bleepers in two airports today- the immigration official looked at my shoes in digust but waved me through despite his better judgement).

So I am on my own again- I have had to dust off my Portuguese dictionary and start trying to understand stuff again. It is amazing how difficult people think that my life is going to be without the language- the tourist information guy at the airport today was in shock that I would think that I could catch a bus without some kind of crash course in the language.

Apparantely Cuiaba is famous for being hot- unlike the rest of Brazil which more resembles the Artic. At least everyone keeps telling me how hot it is and the guy at the airport, him again, wished me luck dealing with the heat! I think that it is like the Koreans thinking that their food is too hot for anyone else to handle, Brazilians think that no one can cope with the heat like them.

Given that I had been awake most of the night, I arrived in the hostel and went to sleep. Then I went out looking for a supermarket - no luck! This town seems to be mostly furniture shops which just dont make such a healthy meal option- not with the state of my teeth! But Thiago forced some biscuits upon me before I left this morning so I have something to fall back on.

I am in a very weird place writing this, by the way. I am in the corner of a classroom where some of the people are having a class and others are just updating their orkut accounts. The place also houses English and Spanish classes- weird! The teacher appears to just be talking to one person at the moment, does that mean that I can leave the room without asking permission? Very odd indeed!