So these oysters are in fact completely raw?......good

Having spent the last 15 minutes deliberating over what to write in my first sentence, i'm a little dissapointed that this was the best I could come up with. Oh well, it can only get better.

With an entire month in Floripa under my belt, my portuguese is still iffy at best, but otherwise I feel I am having an enjoyable and productive time here. Given that my primary reason for being here is to improve my portuguese, you may disagree with me but my overriding emotion is one of happiness that I am settling into Brazilian life a bit more. Whilst there may still be an invisible sign saying 'gringo' above my head I have made several key steps forward.

1. I am now able to do the shopping in under 2 hours. (I am also a little more aware that being adventurous is not always a good plan if you plan on leaving the toilet the following day)

2. We have made friends with a taxi driver. Carlos Max is a bit of a hero, its just a shame he keeps trying to rip us off by turning off the meter. Carlos if your reading this, I want to let you know that its a very mean thing to do, and if you insist on behaving in this way we won't be giving you any more english lessons.

3. I have managed to locate two of the seven parcels my mum has sent me from the UK. Thanks mum, i'm eating the percy pigs as we speak.

4. We've got a local called CSC. And we're mates with the guys that work there. And they're Brazilian...cash back. The Centro Social de Cerveja is located a mere 3 minutes walk from my house and is nothing short of awesome. They have live music 5 nights a week, barbecued meats and fish served tapas-style, as well as copious amounts of beer and cocktails, all at suprisingly, bordering on alarmingly cheap prices. Definitely worth a visit if your not put off by the 15 hour plane journey.

On the subject of good bars, we spent the friday night at a mexican style joint with the obligatory sombreros, fajitas and festive music in the background. This was a personal favourite. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh9BbalDxRE. The highlight of the bar was without doubt the 'special shot' served by a lively mejicano who forced one of my unsuspecting mates to down a triple measure of tequila before grabbing his head and shaking it vigourously, leaving him dazed, confused and with an extra 17 reais on his bill. Magic.

Aside from visiting the aforementioned bars, the highlight of my second week of classes was missing some classes to go on a trip around the island with a big group of foreign students *note to self, if you want to get a good idea of the geography of the island choose a coach with seats less ideally suited for sleeping. We visited 4 beaches in total, including the beautiful but windy Praia Joaquina, where we sipped beer and ate a meal of freshly caught fish overlooking the sea. We also stopped off at 'Project Tamar', a turtle charity whose bizarre aim seemed to be to 'save' the turtles by 'rescuing' them from the sea and putting them in what can only be described as an oversized paddling pool. I was thinking of pointing out to one of the members of staff that the turtles might actually prefer the sea, given that it is, after all, their natural habitat. A mixture of hope that i had simply misunderstood the portuguese and fear that i would cause a fight, dissuaded me.

The trip was also a good chance to get to know some other people, and speak some broken portuguese/french/spanish/english. It was nice to meet some portuguese people in particular. I view speaking with them as a sort of Sainsbury's basics version of speaking with brazilians, its more or less the same but you know in your heart of hearts its  not the real thing. There are about 80 portuguese at the university but they have a bit of a reputation amongst the brazilians for keeping themselves to themselves and not socialising with people from other countries. I found that this wasn't the case however, and in fact we were invited to have dinner and drinks with some of them later in the week. Admittedly when we went everyone else was portuguese but at least it was a step in the right direction.

A chance to speak  our tesco's finest brazilian (if you will allow me to continue with the slightly bizarre supermarket metaphor) presented itself on sunday night when we invited my first brazilian friend Ronaldo and his girlfriend out for a drink as a sort of 'thanks for not kidnapping, drugging or selling us into the sex trade' gesture. As it happened, they suggested that we went to a little village near by called S.Antonio de Lisboa to sample some local delicacies. I was relaxing with some delicious crab and prawn stuffed bread washed down with cold beer, when a tray of oysters was brought out. Not wanting to offend our brazilian friends, who had after all taken us out for dinner, I tried one, realising only as it slid down my throat that it was completely raw. I confirmed my suspicion with Ronaldo, who chuckled and compared the texture to snot before tucking into another. I do not pretend to be a master chef but it seems to me a bit of cooking wouldn't do any harm.
That being said, it was still a fun night and very kind of them to take us, especially given that the length of our friendship was the 1hr 10 transfer to Floripa airport. They dropped us back home and we went pretty much straight to bed.

I love 8.20am  mondays.


On another note

As you may have realised, I am still about two weeks behind in my blogging. I am trying to get up to date, but writing a weekly blog is almost as hard to keep up with as a cross between the roadrunner cartoon and Usain Bolt.

I'll leave you with that image...