This blog post is dedicated to Maggie, because she told me I should blog again. However, I probably can't just leave it at that, so now I have to find something to write about. So I clicked through the photos on my camera that haven't been shared, and realised I could tell you about last weekend. It wasn't terribly exciting or anything, just a pleasant weekend.

Friday was a public holiday, I think because of Brazil becoming a republic (is there a word for that? Republicising?), so there was no school or anything, and my family went to visit relatives in Planalto, an even smaller town about an hours drive away. There isn't actually all that much to say. It was just a lovely weekend spent outside in the sun (living in an apartment gives me a newfound appreciation of just sitting outside) reading books and chatting with people and swimmming in Eliandra's sister's backyard pool. Oh and the 15th birthday of a cousin (15th birthdays are a big deal here)

Sitting in the car on the way home, watching the world flick past my window it struck me again what a beautiful country this is. Sometimes it's a neglected, broken sort of beauty, but it's beautiful all the same. New Zealand will always be my home where I belong, but Brazil is the perfect place for an adventure.

Hello my lovelies, it's been a while. So I'm going to try to make this an extra long post to make up for it. It is yet to be seen whether that will actually happen, but I have good intentions.

So, what have I been up to? The day before yesterday I travelled to Porto Alegre (the state capital) with a group from my school, to visit a big art festival thing and a book fair. It was about a 7 hour bus ride away, so we slept on the bus two nights in a row so that we could spend the whole day in Porto Alegre. I say slept, but that's a bit of an exaggeration. It was a nice bus, as buses go, but no bus is ever going to be an ideal sleepng place, especially not with 40 teenagers on it. (There is a time and place for a screaming competition. On a bus at 3 in the morning is not it. Just in case anyone was wondering.) The day was spent wandering around art galleries and the book fair, which was nice, but exhausting. It was cool to see some conceptual sculpturey stuff (i've missed talking pretentiously about art :p ), though nothing particularly stood out. By the end of the day the more important question became 'is this a work of art or a convenient place to sit?' But Porto Alegre is a beautiful city, and at the end of the day we visited a mall and i watched Thor 2, which was fab, so no loss there.

 Pretty mueseums

 And parks with art in

 We were allowed to take photos of the art throughout, but I finding taking photos in a gallery weird and somehow disrespectful, so this is the only one I got. And now thinking about it, it was a kinetic sculpture, what I hoped to achieve by taking a still photo of it I don't know. But I really liked it.

Yarn bombing! (I am so annoyed at this photo. Or more accurately, I am so annoyed at blogger, which will not let me rotate, however hard I try, and forced me to create a google+ account in the attempt to rotate it and then that still didn't work. So I give up in despair and you'll all just have to rotate your heads intead.) EDIT Hey look, it fixed itself. Now it's just weirdly squidged. You can't win...

Then on wednesday evening we had our school halloween/day of the dead party. For this we had to decorate altar thingies celebrating famous dead people. So this is my groups one for Elvis Presley.

My only actual contribution was the skull, but it was fun.

In which Sophie was wearing makeup, an unheard of, and probably unrepeatable event. Sorry, it's a terrible photo, but I thought there should be some evidence.

Other than that life has just generally been plodding along like life tends to do. There a good days and boring days and bad days, and I suppose I'm learning stuff, though I wouldn't necessarily be able to identify what. I feel like now that I've been here for 3 months i should do some kind of post about where I'm at, and how I've grown a person and whatever, but I don't know if that's simple enough for me to articulate it in a simple blogpost, and I have my doubts about what should be on the internet and what shouldn't. That's all for now I guess. Sorry it wasn't all that long after all.

It seems almost obligatory to begin a blog post with an apology for how long it has been since the last one. I'd promise to do better next time, but I won't, so there's no point. And because I don't know how to write this thing, have a list. Things:

• I went to the Iguaçu Falls. It was pretty cool. That was an understatement. They were amazing and powerful and beautiful and all the other cliches you can think of. I also encountered the I think uniquely Brazilian approach to distances- 7 hours drive away, sounds like a daytrip... The kind of day trip that starts at 3am and doesn't finish til 11.30pm. And that was fairly close really.

• I've been feeling really annoying, when I have to ask someone to repeat something three times, and I still don't know how I'm supposed to respond. I usually know what they're talking about, but not well enough to actually have a conversation. I long to be able to talk...
• I'm also frustrated with myself for how much of my life I live in English, despite this being my amazing opportunity to learn Portuguese. I read in english (though I am working on that one- halfway through Harry Potter One, althought it's hard to tell whether I'm actually reading, or just looking at the words and remembering what they ought to say), the internet is in english, my internal monologue is very very english. But at the same time it's such a relief to be able to read english and not have to think.
• I'm stressing probably too much over making decisions for Uni and stuff. I know this is ages away, but I like to plan ahead, and I can't decide. Chemical engineering at Canturbury or arts/science double degree at Vic, if anyone feels like having an opinion/advicings please do.
• And finally, enough about me, Neil Gaiman is fab. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming

Sophie has feelings

I wrote this yesterday, but I wasn’t sure whether to post it or not. Because while it is true, it sounds worse than it really is. Life is never so terrible that there’s nothing to be happy about. The sun is shining. I just spent a fairly lovely weekend visiting host grandparents. But I can’t shake the melancholy feeling. So here you go.

At the AFS pre-departure camp in New Zealand before I left, they talked to us about expectations, and how important it is not to be too fixed on your own expectations of the exchange, or host families or host countries, because chances are it’s not going to work out quite like you thought. At the time I nodded and smiled and thought to myself, yep, I’m alright, while I was okay with the not living by the beach, or in a big city or anything like that, I had huge expectations of myself. I knew that learning a language would be hard, but I assumed that I would be fine. I thought the language barrier was easily surmountable. I somehow expected that simply because I was in a different country I would become a different person. A more confident person, able to be friends with everyone, able to talk without knowing how. I knew I’d miss people in New Zealand, but I didn’t really know what homesickness was. When I pictured myself two months into the exchange, I had a very different picture from the reality. I thought by now I would be able to speak Portuguese. Not fluently, of course, but decently. I knew I’d miss people, but I thought that it would be okay after a couple of months. I thought there would be less time spent alone and tired and not really feeling like doing anything.

Perhaps the worst bit is I ought to be happy. I have an amazing opportunity, that so few people get, and I should be happy about it. I have an incredibly loving host family, and everyone at school is friendly and helpful, so I ought to be happy. I chose to do this, and paid for it, and everyone back in New Zealand expects me to be having an amazing time, so why am I not? The whole world is conspiring to tell me I ought to be happy, and like a petulant child I insist on being sad anyway.

Semana Farroupilha

It seems that it is only when I sit down with nothing in particular to say that I am actually able to write anything. I don't know how to write about actual things. This past week has been Semana Farroupilha, which is, in short, a week long street party to celebrate a war that we lost. Any excuse for a party. But then, thinking about it, in New Zealand we have a day off in June, to celebrate the birthday of a queen we don't really care about who was born in April. There is no precedent for these things making sense. So anyway, some history. Rio Grande so Sul, where I live, is the southernmost state of Brazil, and is very keen on differentiating itself from the rest of the country. So keen that in the 19th century they had a revolution and declared independence, which lasted all of 7 years, the war of farroupilhas. This history is irrelevant, the point is, this part of Brazil has a very distinct culture and we just spent the week celebrating it.

With accordion playing. (the songs never seem to quite scan right. This may be a general problem that folk music has)

And little house things (casinhas I think) set up all around the park for the week. I think the deal with these was they are set up by the local council (thing, whatever, i don't actually know what it's called) and then you could rent one for the week. So we shared one with my host dad's work colleagues. There were people around all the time, but we ate there about 6 times during the week. Lots of churrasco (see the picture below) which is a kind of barbaque and incredibly yum. Not a good place for a vegetarian.

This is what the whole park looked like. Lots of people wandering around in their traditional outfits (including me, whoo! But I don't have any good photos of that, I will try to get one some time. Suffice to say I adore my gaucha pants (bombachas) and I see no reason to confine the wearing of them to this one week.

More churrasco, almost done now...

And there were concerts of traditional music and dancing

She probably won't thank me for saying this, but I think that Larissa and her dance partner are the cutest thing that ever existed. 

And finally a parade with people riding horses down the street.

Looking back at my photos there are a lot of things i failed to capture. Like there are no good photos of what the traditional costume actually is. There was also a lot more sitting around in the casinhas chatting (not my favourite, being as my chatting abilities are not exactly scintillating) and wandering around the park and a fair amount of drinking and playing cards (playing cards appears to be a manly thing to do here). It kind of reminded me of going camping over christmas in New Zealand, with barbaques and beer and sitting around in deck chairs. About the same amount of rain too.

Mum suggested I blog again, so here I go with the bloggings. This week is Semana Farroupilha (get your googling skills out if you like folks), so there's been lots of exciting cultural stuff happening, but I am waiting to blog about that until it's finished, because I like completeness. Have a teaser photo:

So today's blog post is just going to be random things that I've been up to, whatever happens to pop into my head. First, today is Larissa's birthday. Happy Birthday to my beautiful little sister!

Other things. I found a cafe with amazing hot chocolates the other day. It was like really really good hot chocolate custard. That sounds a bit weird, but it was amazing (especially after my other two cafe experiences in Brazil- one that was so sweet it was undrinkable and had fake jam in it, and the other was kind of beige coloured and as far as I could tell contained no hint of chocolate). To go along with that, it's weird the things that you do regularly and you never think about how you do them, because that's just what you do. Like we just take it as given that you go to a cafe, and you order your drink or whatever and then you pay and go sit down. But in Brazil you don't pay until you leave (that was a bit awkward the first time). Also most restaurants are buffets, where they weigh your plate and charge you based on that. The food is amazing, but I have no photos, because I always have that moment where I wonder if it would be awkward to pull my camera out, and decide that yes, it would. 

I've also been going for runs quite a bit, in a vain attempt to conteract the effect of the aforementioned hot chocolates. And the brigadeiros, which are pretty much just condensed milk and cocoa. And the pastels (kind of pie-ish things). Yeah, you get the idea. Maybe I should just talk about food. Food is good. 

What else... I've now posted enough letters that the people in the post office know me. I guess that's a good thing? If you want a letter message me your address :)

Basically life is pretty normal. I wouldn't say I'm full of ecstatic joy, I'm just content. This is my life, and I could carry on this way for a while. I read books, I sit through school half comprehending, I smile at people in lieu of actual conversation, I live. 

It's only September!!!