Still Suffering in Brazil ;)

I was afraid I wouldn't be very good at keeping up with this thing!!! I figured since I hadn't written an entry since Tuesday that I'd better get my butt on here and let everyone know we're still alive and living the hard life in Brazil. . .

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Tuesday night some of the people from CNH (Case New Holland) put together a party for Andre and Carol who left last week for Italy and to welcome Eric and me. We all met up at a really fun night club called Swingers (please just ignore the name folks, Brazil loves to use English words and they don't always know what they mean!) had some supper, a couple drinks, and danced the night away. It was a really good time! I didn't take my camera that day, so I will post some pictures once I get them from Eric's co-worker.

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Eric picked a pretty good week to move to Brazil. He found out on Monday that Friday was a holiday and he would have the day off! His new boss, Humberto, invited us to hang out with him at his "club." Another guy Eric works with offered to pick us up and take us there. So at 8:30 in the morning -a bit too early for a holiday- Felipe showed up at the hotel and off we went to Pampulha Iate Clube. It was an absolutely beautiful place! It is very high in the city and overlooks Pampulha Lake and the rest of Belo Horizonte. We were both amazed at how enormous the property was! It was the size of a country club in the US . . . except where we would have a golf course, they had large pools, tons of tennis courts, volleyball courts, soccer fields, a gym, etc. We spent the entire day lounging around the largest of the pools with Felipe, Humberto, Humberto's wife, Beth, and their 4 year old son. We had such a good time, but being in the sun all day had us plenty ready to come home and rest. The pictures with today's post are from the Club. (On a side, note, we found we are going to need to do a little bit of swimsuit shopping before we go back to a crowded pool or beach. We both stuck our pretty bad as 'non-Brazilian' in our very American swimsuits!!! Less seems to be more when it comes to swimming attire around here. But on a good note, I told Eric he will swim much faster without those big trunks slowing him down!!! hehe)

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We took a nap Friday evening from about 7-9 pm and then another of Eric's coworkers, Fabricio, called us at 9:00 pm to ask if we wanted to go out for supper. (Remember in an earlier blog post, that whole 'Brazilians eat supper late' thing . . .) We got showered and dressed and went out to a Japanese Restaurant not too far from our hotel. Eric and I both had our first "full" sushi experience! I had tried sushi a little in the past and found that California rolls are palatable for me, but not being a real big seafood fan, I've never gone all out and had an entire meal of sushi. We both decided it's not so bad though! We tried all kinds of things (none of which I could tell you about since it was Japanese food with Portuguese names-a bit confusing for me right now!) With the exception of the piece of fish that still had all of it's scales, we liked everything we ate that night. And to make it even better, it was all you can eat sushi, rice, lo mein, etc. for the low price of R$22 per person (roughly $12.) We decided that with food prices so much lower here, we can afford to experiment and try new things and we won't have to feel guilty if we don't eat it!

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So yeah, living in Brazil is real tough. ;) Seriously though, we have had a marvelous first week here and we are really looking forward to all of the new experiences we'll have and fun people we'll meet. I'm sure at some point we are going to miss home, but right now we are just taking it all in and loving it! Everyone here assures us we are going to want to stay here forever after our 2-3 years expire. Hmmmm . . . well, time will tell!