Athena - Salvador, Brazil - Singing in the Rain

At the Lighthouse  (Farol da Barra)

Rain, rain go away- that could be the theme for our time in Salvador, Brazil so far. But Tiffany and I are determined to still have fun. Yesterday, we landed here at 4:30am and settled into our apartment. I use the term apartment loosely, it's more like a bigger hostel. Since we didn't sleep a lot the night before (a 2 am flight will do that to you) we slept a lot yesterday. Finally we grabbed some food and it started raining cats & dogs. We ended up staying in the restaurant for a few hours, waiting for the rain to stop before we walked back home.

Athena - Argentina -Singing in the rain

 Happy November! I can’t believe it’s already November…and that now there are just two months left in the year. Craziness! It seems like I say this every year, but time really is flying. Today it’s raining pretty hard.

Rainy day view from my apartment

 There was a thunderstorm that came in last night and hit some areas pretty hard, but that was just a warm up. A larger storm is in the area now, some flights at the airport were cancelled and now there’s lots of rain. It’s definitely one of those days where you just want to stay inside & curl up on your couch and watch TV or read a book. I would love to do that, but nope, I have to actually leave my apartment and venture out in the rain. I’m meeting with my Spanish tutor for 2 hours today. We’re working on some of my assignments for class (papers that are written in Spanish) and I’m sure she has lots of feedback for me. Learning a language is challenging but I like it. Sometimes it’s frustrating, sometimes I realize how basic my Spanish is, and other times I get excited when I remember something that I learned. Overall it’s like a big bag of emotions, changing from day to day. I do feel like I could be working harder on at learning more and hope to do so in the upcoming month.

One other update from this week: On Monday evening I went to Chinatown after class for dinner with friends. The food was yummy and the restaurant was mostly authentic. It somewhat reminded me of my trip to China. It was so nice to have multiple dishes for dinner instead of just one, how we do in the US. And it reminded me of my team that I worked with in China and I have to say that I miss those guys. The best part was the dumplings. I LOVED these while I was in China and they were great at this restaurant. I want to go back to Chinatown in the daytime so I can see more stores & restaurants.

Dumplings at dinner. They disappeared fast!