Rainy Days and Hot Coffee

Even though it is still considered winter here, the temperature is about 68 degrees and it is rainy today.  I will say on days like to day, there is nowhere I would rather be than curled up in my house with a cup of coffee and a book (or my cell phone's Kindle app.)  Lucky for me, I haven't started working yet and that is precisely where I am (and the stuff on the edge of my coffee mug is just the remnants of my foamy cinnamon dolce faux-latte.)  I finished reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time yesterday and have decided that I am now ready to tackle some more classics.  Namely Anna Karenina before the movie comes out, but I have downloaded all of the free Kindle classics that caught my interest and I plan to read them all this year.  Considering I really only started reading for pleasure a year or so ago, I have a lot to catch up on and reread so that I can appreciate what I wasn't able to when it was forced down my throat in high school.  I have to say that while I really loved Pride and Prejudice (it made me laugh, cry, love, and hate), I was secretly hoping for the line from the movie where he says "You have bewitched me body and soul and I love... I love... I love you." and it never came...  I could watch that scene from the movie a million times and never get tired of it!  I guess this is the problem with watching the movie before reading the book!    
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iGbNmny8Nk  

In other news, we finally received our new table on Tuesday after a month of waiting!  It is a traditional looking farmhouse style table and it is perfect.  Thank you for the Birthday/Christmas/New Year's/Valentine's Day/St. Patrick's Day/Easter/Next Birthday present Mom!  It is so nice to have a table and our house finally looks reasonably furnished!  I have repurposed the kegs and melamine boards into a very practical little desk with a great view out of the window of one of the bedrooms.   

I will start teaching English classes at a school near us in a couple weeks (after Carnaval) and am looking forward to it.  It is making me anxious knowing it is coming but without a lot of details as to my specific classes and what to expect.  I hope to know my tomorrow and start planning lessons next week.  It will be nice to be working again and doing something productive with my time.  (Not to mention getting paid!)

I hope to start taking some Portuguese classes as well.  The school offers discounted private lessons for Portuguese, so I may end up taking that route since my Portuguese cannot really be put into a specific level.  The problem with learning on your own, is that you learn the things you want and not necessarily all of the things that you need.  I know all of the tenses in Portuguese and when to use them (fairly well), but since I rarely talk about my appearance or the things I keep in my desk, I don't have the vocabulary that even the most basic class would teach me.  It makes you realize why it is so much quicker to learn a language when you live in the country because you aren't bogged down with semesters full of unuseful vocabulary.  Now, as I am at a point where conversation is possible, the only thing to do is increase my vocabulary and learn the finer grammatical points like which preposition to use!  I think that this has to be the most difficult thing to learn in any language because there really doesn't appear to be a rule!  I think the school that I will be working at is a good fit.  Most of the teachers are around my own age and seem to be friends, so that is a good sign in itself. 

I have met a couple of people here on my own but making new friends when you are 26 and aren't in school or working has got to be one of the most awkward things in the world.  In college, I considered myself pretty good at making friends, but it has been almost two years that we have been moving around to new places and now I kinda feel like socially awkward penguin every time I try to talk to someone new.  Especially when the conversation is in Portuguese!   

 

Anyways, things are getting better every day here.  We are settling in a little bit, starting to have a more put-together house, and meeting new people.  We have discovered that we can watch new movies for $3 each for weekend matinees so we are back to going on movie dates (our favorite) after about 9 months without going. 

 

Dad is coming to visit in April and we are going to visit Iguassu Falls for a few days.  I am making him bring us a suitcase full of supplies from America that are either impossible to find or too expensive over here, so that adds extra excitement to seeing him.  It will be awesome to have him here and let him see, first-hand, our life here and what Brazil is really like.  Iguassu Falls should be beautiful...  It's one of the 7 Wonders of the World, so it can't be anything less than spectacular!