Tudo bem!

To follow up on our portuguese classes that we had signed up for a few days ago. We had been told that if too many people signed up that could actually attend the class that it would become a lottery; sure enough that did happen! But... yesterday as Tracy and I were checking our e-mail we had both gotten confirmation that we had won the lottery! WOOO classes start september 14th :D

Today we woke up and got ready to go to a meeting at the university. We understood about 10% of it... at most! I think it's time we start speaking and practicing more portuguese at home before classes start. After the lab meeting I finally got to meet Vanessa Kanaan (the lady that I will be doing my internship with - not to be confused with Vanessa Kuhnen who we are living with haha). She was so nice and welcoming and it was very good to finally get to meet her! We discussed the different projects that I'm going to be working on and so now I know what I'll actually be doing! R3 is a wildlife rehabilitation centre that we wanted to volunteer at - turns out that is where my project is actually going to be so I get to go there all the time! Vanessa Kanaan has outlined a project that me and two other girls will be running on our own. They have about 30 turtles at R3 and they don't have the proper set up for them to be healthy and happy little critters. So we're testing to see if they spend more time on the dry substrate that they are exposed to or if they just spend their time in the water. We are also going to be measuring these lesions that they have to see if over time they get better with increased exposure to dry land. Sounds pretty fun to me! This is just a mini project that we get to work on on our own and then there is also the larger project with the birds. She explained that since the work with the turtles will be pretty easy we're expected to help with the birds as well. And we can also volunteer with all the other animals there too!! I'm going to try and get some pictures but I'm not actually sure if I'm allowed to since it's government property protected by military :/ we'll see though! Sunday will be our first day there just getting oriented and handing in our volunteer sign up sheets. Oh and I'm going to have to get my rabies shots before I'm allowed to officially handle the other animals. Who doesn't love getting more vaccinations?! I am starting to think that soon I will be invincible haha.

After the meeting Vanessa (Kuhnen) Tracy and I went to get a sim card for the phone we have. Unfortunately the store we were going to get it from was closed down; bummer. But that's ok we'll just go to a different place tomorrow. We still went inside the shopping centre for some lunch. Their food courts are so much nicer than ours! They have REAL food with REAL cooks that make it RIGHT THERE! It was soooo delicious. Oh and you can also buy beer there, weird. After eating lunch we helped Vanessa do some of her english homework while we digested. Vanessa was still hungry then so she made tracy and I order her food for her from one of the places. They were so nice and patient with us - super cute! We totally made their day with our beginner portuguese. We had to wait for her snack to be ready and when it came up there was an extra smoothie drink on it that we hadn't ordered. Vanessa went to ask about it and the guys told her that they had made it for us! They definitely made our day too :)

Tracy and I walked home and didn't have anything planned for our evening. Hilda came into our room and suggested that we walk to a certain part of the beach to watch the sunset. Since it was such a beautiful day today (about 25 and sunny skies!) it was bound to be a beautiful sunset too! So out the again we started on a walk to another new place. Unfortunately the skies are still cloudy with smoke from the fires and seem to get worse at night so we weren't able to see the sunset. It was still nice scenery around us though so we took a seat in the grass and just watched the water for a while. It was nice and calm out and very relaxing. We saw lots of fish jumping too! I've never seen big fish jump as high as they did here - a little excessive if you ask me :P

Another nice long walk to get home and then it was dinner! We cleaned up after ourselves and now that I'm done my blog I think I will brush up on some portuguese. And a little after that Nivaldo is going to make us Tapioca for dessert! You'll never guess what we have scheduled for tomorrow night; another BBQ!

What a life...