Thursday, September 23, 2010

A series of firsts



My first time...

Witnessing a construction worker without any safety support climb up into a tree, to cut it down

Feeling strange when I ate a meal without a side of rice and beans (this might be a problem when I return to the US)

Having four mosquito bites on my left knee cap (and about thirty more on various parts of my body)

Seeing three lizards during a fifteen minute walk

Not having a cell phone for two months (and planning to continue for three more)

Being asked if I wore shorts in the winter (the temperature gets up to 100 degrees here in the winter)

Being stopped and asked for my MSN messenger name as I walked down the street (MSN messenger is the most popular computer communication tool in Brazil)

Living across the street from an elementary school with an animal farm (don't ask me how I forgot to mention this in former posts)

Being scared by a young boy sitting up in a tree

Learning what an "adverbial" was ten minutes before I had to teach a lesson about them

Eating a Brazilian hot dog, which actually consists of two hot dogs boiled and placed between a hamburger bun, served with lettuce, onions, crispy fried potatoes, ketchup and mayonaise. Brazilians don't understand how Americans eat hot dogs so plain, and I don't understand why they have never attempted to put the hot dog on a grill.

Yesterday my student brought me a cup of exotic Brazilian fruit that I had never tried (the name slips my mind at the moment), since we were discussing fruit the previous day in class. I took out a piece of the fruit and proceeded to put the entire thing in my mouth and spit out the center, hiding my expression once I realized the fruit was in fact disgusting. The class then began to chuckle. "What?" I asked, confused as to what I had done. "Teacher," my student explained, "You eat inside, not outside!"

4 comments:

  1. What's worse - all those mosquito bites or that time in Australia when you got all those bed bug bites??

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  2. I can think of a few more "firsts" to add to your list:

    -not watching TV for 2 months
    -crossing a border illegally
    - attending more religious ceremonies in 2 months than you've attended in the last 5 years

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  3. Hmm, the bed bug bites went away after a week. The mosquito bites have been pretty constant, so I'm going to have to say the mosquito bites.

    - True, but I have watched movies on my computer, so I think that qualifies close enough to television.

    - Very true.

    - True. Or will attend for the remainder of my life...

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  4. This is really making me look forward to becoming a teacher in Brazil... It brought a huge smile to my face when I read it. :)

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