I was sitting here wondering what to share in the blog, thinking about how little has really been happening lately, especially since I closed the drinking fountain in my classroom. For those of you in the drinking from the bidet club, my friend has been much better behaved, but is also getting a little tired of my constant check ins while he is taking care of business. His new line when I ask why there is toilet paper spilling out under the curtain is an aggrieved, “I’m wiping my bum!”, which sounds as funny as you imagine it. Besides the normal school insanity, boredom might be the biggest change for us. We had a kind of regular old week or two. Went to school, girls did some sports, ran some errands, and just kind of hung out in Brasilia.
Not that everything is normal. Lila spent 24 hours away from the family on her own for the first time two weekends ago. She party hopped her way around town from the US Embassy swimming pool to a sleepover, back to the US Embassy for a morning swim, and then off to the Swedish Embassy for the afternoon. Yes, she was an absolute train wreck Sunday evening. Tired, hungry, and having spent every ounce of politeness with her friends, it was lovely. Oh yes, she was quite the treat to spend Sunday evening with. Quality father daughter bonding time that was.
I got my hair cut by the Brazilian Edward Scissorhands. I’m not sure who he was trying to impress, but even with my Tupperware Bowl #2 hairstyle, it should take longer than fourteen seconds to cut my hair. I’ve never had a barber move so fast. I was just trying to sit as still as possible so I didn’t get my ears cropped. He would even take two or three warm up snips in the air with his scissors before he came in to make each new cut. It was like watching a golfer take practice swings in high speed before teeing off. Slightly disconcerting to spend the whole time wondering why he needed all the practice. To his credit, no blood was shed, the haircut is pretty good, and I literally spent twenty minutes and nine dollars from start to finish, so there’s that. Yea, I’ll go back.
We are getting the hang of finding ingredients to make some home favorites. Taco night was a huge hit. Everything you need except for hard taco shells is readily available here. When you can find it, that $1.99 box of hard taco shells from Lexington, Kentucky has undergone a transformation. Somehow in the magical world of international commerce, when it finally makes its way through customs to the Whole Foods style store here in Brasilia, it has quadrupled in price and will set you back a healthy $8.00. Small fortune maybe, but tasty, and the the girls will say that it was worth every cent. Which brings me to the sad realization that no one should ever under any circumstances try to send us anything here. Friends had their family send them a package valued at $20 US and had to pay over $200 US in fees and taxes when it arrived. You might as well just fly down with your suitcase full of taco shells for that price!
And if you are wondering what the rather uninteresting picture on the blog is this week, that is my very typical example of just how things seem to go here when I start talking Portuguese. Take another look and then imagine a totally white nightstand, two inches taller, two inches wider, and without any glass, because that’s pretty much what I thought I was arranging by Portuguese text conversation with a very nice gentleman from Facebook Marketplace down here. I was feeling pretty darn good because I was able to order the dimensions and color the girls wanted and I even managed to arrange delivery to our apartment and everything. Don’t mind the fact that it was a back and forth three day conversation, I had done it! Imagine my surprise on delivery day when from a block away Lila spots my new friend outside our apartment with our nightstands and says, “Dad, those aren’t white.” And in another ten steps, “Dad, is that glass on the top?” In my head are several words that are not shareable here, followed by the thought of, “what the ______ happened?” I know the word for white in Portuguese, even without Google Translate. And if it’s not obvious from picture that we kept them, we did. I do admit to Lila and I deciding in the last thirty seconds of our walk that we cared more about having nightstands than going through this process again. And as in many decorating decisions, at least involving me, once it’s in the house, no one cares any more.
Sara is still alive, at least that’s what we hear from her co-teacher. The two of them are doing pretty well and seem to be settling into their relationship. Long talks, weekends and nights together, you know, figuring it out. We hear she might be home in time for Thanksgiving, so we’ll keep you posted. The girls have been setting hot coffee outside the apartment in hopes of luring her home earlier, and we’ve gotten a couple of phone calls from the posters we put up, but they were in Portuguese, so we don’t really know. (We have parent teacher conferences this week, so there’s almost no chance she’ll read this, but I’m going to pay for this one at some point.)
We love hearing that all our friends and family in Bend have already had snow in town. That feels so far away right now. We are planning trips to the beach instead of trips to the mountain. Hannah is doing great, spending lots of time with friends, and super excited we are spending Thanksgiving surfing on the coast. Well, off to bed, love to everyone, and fingers crossed that we get a little more boring before the next good story.
Adam
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