Olá! Eu vou tentar escrever isso em português, então pessoas que não falam português não podem ler. Que pena para eles. (Or english speaking folks can scroll down to the bottom). Agora eu preciso escrever uma coisa. Eu fui para praia!!! E também para Beto Carrero World, que é bem legal. Agora eu conheço as praias do Brasil (só da Santa Caternia, na verdade, mas tudo bem) e eu posso dizer que esse país é o mais lindo do mundo. Quero dizer, olha só:

(os fotos não são muito bons, descupla)

Areia perfeita, água quentinha, sol quente mas não quente demais, tudo que eu poderia querer. Eu estou feliz. Quando eu falo assim parece que eu não gosto de Frederio Westphalen, só da praia, mas isso não é verdade. É só que eu senti tanto saudades da praia e a mar. Nadar e tomar banho do sol e fazer castelos de areia (eu não estou velha demais para isso, né? Foi só um...) são as melhores coisas do mundo.  

Também fui para Beto Carrero World, que eu gostei muito. Eu nunca fui numa montanha-russa antes, então eu tinha medo, mas foi tudo bem. Eu acho que eu só fiz porque eu não parei para pensar até que fosse tarde demais. (eu não tenho um foto que eu gostei muito disso, então tem que ser mais fotos do praia) 

(Olha que fofinhos!!!!)

A outra coisa que aconteceu foi que eu descobri quando eu vou embora. Dia 6 de Junho, que é só 10 semanas e 2 dias de hoje. Eu não sei como eu me sinto sobre isso. Num lado eu estou ansioso para ver minha familia e amigas e meu país que eu amo tanto, mas no outro lado eu não quero ir embora. Só 10 semanas e meu intercambio vai acabar para sempre. Já fis 8 meses da minha vida aqui, e será difícil deixar todo isso para trás. Eu quero aproveitar cada momento que eu ainda tenho. Bjs, Sophia.

And for the english speaking people, here's a link to google translate. I was going to write some stuff in english but i decided I have other things to do. I have a weeks worth of school to catch up with after all. See you all in a few months!!

Apparently when you have a blog you're supposed to update it every now and then. Like write about what I've been doing recently or something. The problem is I honestly don't remember what I've been doing. Holidays have a tendency to just all blur into one homogenous lump of not much really. The weather doesn't help on that- yay for the hottest summer in 90 years- 35-40 degrees most days (that's what it was last i heard anyway). Maybe I'm just pathetic, but i have zero interest in stirring from in front of the air conditioning btween 10am and 5pm, by which time it's sometimes almost bareable. The last week or so has been better- this one time I actually wore a cardigan.

My holidays have really been much like holidays anywhere. Reading a lot, going to the pool most days, watching random movies, that kind of thing. I joined a gym last week, which is a pretty radical move on my part, and so far I'm enjoying. I joined a zumba class, which is among the silliest looking things I've done in a while, but it is fun, so whatever.

And now a week later... I currently have a 5 day weekend for carnaval, after only 4 days of school- a nice way to ease back into the year. Carnaval in my teeny tiny town is not an incredibly exciting affair. There was this party that I was going to go to but then things got complicated, as they sometimes do, so that didn't end up happening. It's still nice to have a relaxing weekend, and I'm at the grandparents' house at the moment, which makes a nice change from living in an apartment.

What do people even want to know about? Blogging makes me self-concious. Look, have some photos. Now I don't have to write anything, right?

Well, I'm back. It's been a while since I blogged (no suprises there) but I'm not apologising because I've done that enough times. (I wrote that sentence nearly a week ago and only now returned to it. I'm not so good at this blogging thing.) I spent christmas and new years this (well really last) year with friends of my host parents in Rio Verde, Goias, which is more or less right in the middle of Brazil. We drove around 20 hours (over 2 days) to get there- to me an incredibly long way, yet we still hadn't crossed even half of Brazil. I think in New Zealand we have no concept of scale. Or perhaps it's that Brazilians don't realise quite how far everything is. In New Zealand you drive 2 hours and chances are you're in the sea; in Europe you drive 2 hours and end up in another country. Here in Brazil you drive 2 hours and you haven't actually gone anywhere. That aside, the drive actually wasn't so bad- the scenery was incredible (yeah, this photo doesn't really say incredible, but I promise that it actually was and I just didn't take photos of everything)

 The first few days there were pretty much spent just relaxing, exploring the city a bit, sleeping in, that kind of thing. The big christmas dinner was on christmas eve (I appear to not have taken any photos on christmas day itself)

 Sooooo much food. Very very good food. Panetonne! Why don't we eat panetonne in New Zealand?  It's amazing. Like cake and bread at the same time. Christmas day was spent at home, with some presents in the morning, churrasco for lunch (I think, i don't perfectly remember...) and the afternoon was spent drinking beer and chatting.

 The day after christmas we visited a place with pools. Yep, super duper descriptive there. But it was great. They had one of those bars that you don't have to leave the pool for. Yet again my descriptive muscle fails me. You know, like in the movies. Only the movies don't show the bit where you fall off the seat into the water. Repeatedly.

World Cup stadium in Goiania. The World cup possibly deserves a blog post of it's own, people don't seem to be all that optimistic about it...

On New Years (still at the same place, but with more people) I was introduced to a bunch of different traditions. I feel like New Years is more important here than Christmas. Maybe just more different. Apparently it's good luck to wear white on new years, which i didn't actually know beforehand, that just happened the dress i'd packed. Does that make it extra lucky. Also lucky is eating seven spoonfuls of lentils and seven different kinds of fruit. You're allowed to just take a bite of each fruit, but after a large dinner at 10pm (I don't think i'll ever get used to eating this late- i used to be in bed at 10pm!) the lentils and fruit were a bit more than i really wanted to be eating. But hey, it's good luck, you gotta do what you gotta do. Also the lentils tasted good.

That's about me for now. Since getting back I've been doing almost nothing at all. It's getting a bit dull, to be honest, but I guess that's just life. Looking forward too seeing all you New Zealand folks THIS YEAR!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I promised my sisters that I'd write two blog posts a month up till the end of 2013. So, this here is the final one, before I head away on holiday tomorrow. Look at this, dearest sisters of mine, I win! Barely, but whatever. Normally when it gets to the end of a year my reaction is something along the lines of 'whooaaah, what happened to that year, I swear it's only June'. This year has been a little different. Every time I hear something about looking forward to 2014, or have to write the date with a 2013 in it I do a little doubletake- you mean it's not 2014 yet? It's been a long year, and I'm ready for it to be over. Not because it's been terrible, but because new years have so much potential and so much that could happen and no evidence at all that it won't. Maybe I'll travel (in fact, pretty much guaranteed :) and I do have to get home somehow). Maybe I'll become a pirate and sail the seven seas (somewhat less likely, but let's not rule it out) Maybe I'll work out exactly what I want to do with my life (ha. haha. nope)

I haven't really been up to much lately. Last wednesday was my last day of school- we pretty much just watched a movie, said goodbye and left- none of the drama that the last day has in New Zealand. It was a bit of  surreal feeling day for me. I knew that really that ought to be the end of school forever for me, but no, I'll be back for another 3 months next year. Since then I have taken full adantage of the opportunity to do nothing at all. Midday naps, walks to the pool, reading books, that kind of thing. It's nice, but getting a little boring to be honest. And doesn't involve enough Portuguese-speaking- if I continue at this rate I'll have forgotten everything I ever learned by the end of the holidays. But that's a problem for another, less lazy day.

Goodbye my dears, Merry christmas and happy new year. When I get back I promise to write all about what a Brazilian christmas is like.

Some reflecting

Well, I’m now 4 months into this exchange thing, with only 6 months to go (actually slightly more than that now, because this took me ages to write). Not yet halfway, but I still think saying ‘only’ is appropriate. 6 months really isn’t that long. I feel like it must be about time for some reflections on my experience so far. An exchange is a strange creature. On the one hand it’s a massive adventure, living on the other side of the world, experiencing new and sometimes exciting things. On the other hand, it’s just normal life. A somewhat different normal life, yes, but it’s still going to school, and coming home, and sleeping a lot, and eating food because that’s a thing you have to do and all kinds of mundane normalness. But on the third hand, there’s nothing normal about it. It’s not normal to be this far away from anyone I’ve ever meet before in my life. It’s not normal to arrive somewhere knowing only the most basic of words. It still feels like not quite real life. While I’m gaining a lot, from this amazing opportunity to travel and live a different life, I’m also very aware of the things that I’m losing. I know it’s time to withdraw more from home, so I can not think about everything that I’m missing, but that’s easier said than done.

In the last 4 months I have cried more than I have in a long long time. And that’s coming from someone who cries a lot anyway. Sometimes from sadness, more often from frustration, or just plain my eyes decide to leak without any consultation with the rest of me. I guess I could say that every tear represents a thing that I’ve learned, but that would be too cheesy, even for me, so I’ll leave that thought there. But I am learning a lot. Or at least I hope I am. Everyone always says that the hardest things are the things that you learn the most from. Some days I wonder it we’re just telling ourselves that so that we can pretend the hard things mean something.

Life so far away from everything I used to know can get lonely sometimes. More than sometimes, in fact. On the good days I forget to feel lonely, but it comes crashing back on the bad days. The advice is always that I need to start inviting people out to do stuff. Invite someone to have coffee! I know that it’s good advice, and the alternative is to just be lonely and make nothing of my year here, but it’s not easy inviting someone when I feel so boring. Yes, I can speak Portuguese. To an extent. To a very mundane and repetitive extent. I don’t want to inflict myself on people, but I know that I need to.

This is all sounding a bit negative, but I promise it isn’t all bad. My Portuguese is vastly improving, for one thing. It’s still very much lacking in nuance (I can say ‘shut up’ but saying ‘excuse I’m very tired can you please take your conversation somewhere else’ is more of a challenge) and sometimes it strikes me as odd that the people I’m talking to understand my words better than I do, and I don’t always control exactly what they mean. Despite that, I can communicate, and no longer have to carry my dictionary around everywhere, so that’s getting better. I’ve some pretty exciting travel coming up over the holidays too, so hopefully I’ll get around to posting about that. Life goes on.

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.