Wednesday, August 12, 2009

This Is Why I Haven't Been Responding To Emails (part 1)

I got home tonight and found that the wireless internet now requires a new password, which ruined my plans to catch up on my emailing tonight (sorry to everyone whose emails and facebook messages I have been neglecting – I will get on that soon).

Anyway, instead of reading, conjugating verbs in Portuguese, or doing anything that would be helpful in my life, I found myself watching John Tucker Must Die. Dubbed over in Portuguese.  While you all know how much I love this movie, I realized that I could do something else at the same time: blog. So here I am, writing in a Word document which I will figure out how to post tomorrow.

I was supposed to start classes tomorrow morning. However, while on our weeklong vacation in Salvador da Bahia (which I will get to in a moment), we found out that the beginning of this semester had been postponed until next week! As a public health student, I’m not exactly a fan of swine flu, but as a Brazilian student, I think it’s probably the best thing that could have possibly awaited me upon my return to Rio.

So, Bahia. Wow. A lot happened, and hopefully I will be able to get to it all, though it may take more than one post.

We flew out of Rio the first of August. The flight was a lot different than a domestic flight is in the U.S. First of all, I didn’t have to take my shoes off at any point. I carried my water bottle right on the plane. The plane was significantly late without much fanfare, as if that kind of lateness happened all the time (which it does). There were some drunk men sitting just a couple of rows in front of me playing drums on their armrests and singing loudly. The flight attendants wore weird white sleeves that weren’t connected to their shirts.

Arriving in Salvador, we found a huge screaming crowd waiting to greet us. Just kidding. They were waiting for the arrival of a soccer team from São Paulo, who came out of the terminal right behind us. One little boy started crying when he managed to sneak under the police barriers and get the autograph of one of the players. And this was the visiting team!

The hotel we stayed in was a nice one, with a delicious buffet that included pasta and scrambled eggs (depending on the time of day), two things I had been craving for the past month.

In fact, the hotel we were in was nice enough for Angela Davis as well, as she was staying there almost the whole time we were. I sat near her at breakfast and tried to spy on what she was reading on her computer (her breakfast companion/colleague was reading “Is It Ethical to Study Africa”) and on what she was eating for breakfast (peanut butter). I also sneaked around the hotel lobby trying to take a picture of her while she sat at the bar but I was too shy to talk to her (though several of us studied her Wikipedia page in case the need to have an intelligent discussion with her ever arose).

Ok, I have to wake up to go register myself in this country in just a couple of hours (I’m finally going to be legal! But I’ll get to that in another post), so I’m going to end here. I will be back later with more on Salvador.

No comments:

Post a Comment