What I’ve done since Saturday! (First day I arrived)
Sunday: we went on an all day tour of these two islands off the coast of Salvador! The first was Ilha des Frades, an island about an hour and a half or two hours away. It was very pretty! Back in the day, the natives who lived there were cannibals but since then, the majority of the population has died out. Now only about 2,000 people live on the island. There is a really old church there that overlooks the beach and the water – great view. I’m attaching some photos!
We were at Ilha des Frades for about three hours, and then we left to go to another beach nearby – Ilha Ponta de Aleia. This beach was cool because our boat pulled into the bay, but there is no dock for a boat our size, so we had to take little boats over to a smaller dock. We ate lunch at this island. There was a place with a seafood buffet outside but we thought this probably was not the best idea… seafood that has been out in the sun all day, with flies all around… not for us. So we went to this other restaurant and successfully ordered a meal! We got frango frito and camarão frito (fried chicken and friend shrimp) as well as Schin soda (Brazilian Pepsi). When they brought out the food, though, we had so much more than just the fried chicken and shrimp, which is all we thought we had ordered! They also brought rice, beans, Farofa topping (this bread crumb-y type of thing that everyone puts on the beans here), and this salsa slash pico type of stuff! It was all really good. And the shrimp and chicken weren’t really fried at all which made it even better! It was at an outdoor place and it was cool, because there was a patio and a ton of sand around and all of these families there were kind of eating the food from the restaurant but also grilling out on grills and drinking cerveja and dancing to music from the speakers. This one family nearby had all of these babies and they were so cute and dancing around! Then this other lady at a different table noticed us laughing and admiring all of the cute babies so she picked up hers and started walking over and awkwardly stopped about one foot from our table… haha it was so funny. So of course we were like, “ooooh!!! Seu nino!” and we “talked” with her for a couple of minutes. Aka she kept talking and talking and then she’d laugh and we’d laugh as if we knew what she was saying, and we’d mutter a couple of words in Potuguese. It was fun.
Then we tried to find popsicles and were unsuccessful, until we started heading back to the dock to take the small paddle boats over to our boat to go back to Salvador. We were walking through the first restaurant (the death trap, aka seafood buffet) and this guy had a popsicle cart so we bought a couple of ice creams. Then there were these three young teenage girls standing nearby, and they were laughing at our failed attempts at Portuguese, and I noticed one of them was wearing a Powerpuff girl shirt, so I tried to explain to her about two of my best friends and I dressed up as the Powerpuff girls for Halloween, and I think the girls understood, and they were laughing a lot. Then they gave me these coconut treats that they were selling for only 50 cents. The coconut was SOOOo so good! It was shaved coconut mixed with a flavor (we got a pina colada flavored one, I think) that was flattened out into a cookie-shape. We then came back on the boat, which was fun, except there were BIG waves and Jennifer and I kept getting wet and these European guys sitting near us kept laughing at us.
Monday: We had orientation pretty much all day Monday! In the morning, we talked about CCS, and our role as volunteers, and our motives for serving others, etc. We also learned about our specific placements. Later in the afternoon, we had Portuguese lessons – it was so great! I love the language; it’s really beautiful. And I love learning the language outside of class – in Spanish classes, I always get really nervous because I know it’s for a grade. But when you just get to learn the language… ah it’s so much fun. It’s very similar to Spanish but there are also a lot of differences, both with words and pronunciations. We also went down to a supermarket nearby, which was cool – it’s really big and has a lot of fresh stuff, like breads and mini sandwiches and quiches and grains and spices and pastries and various fruits etc in jars.
Tuesday: We started placement! I’m working with Kyle, a volunteer who is also my age and goes to school at Loyola in Maryland. We’re volunteering at a community center teaching English. They just started a new schedule of classes there. We teach 4 different classes each week. On MWF, we teach two classes of beginners – mostly younger students, and on TR, we teach one class of experienced speakers and another beginner class. So we started on Tuesday, with our first class being the experienced students who had already been working with previous CCS volunteers. There were three women and they were so excited to learn! It was kind of difficult, though, because we looked through their notebook and they knew so so much – so many verbs, and even past tense for verbs, etc – but they don’t really know how to use it. They aren’t that good at speaking English and actually understanding and having a conversation. So now we have a challenge – trying to take the information they have, and translate into more useful knowledge, that they can effectively use. Our second class was younger students, and they were excited to learn. They were mostly girls.
Ah it’s getting late so I’m going to finish later… Haha I’ll tell about our tour of the historic district, Pelourinho, which was quite funny. Sneak preview: we were chased by a guy with clay piggy banks. Whoo! And that night, we survived sushi (we weren't sure if we would or not...) and at the music festival, we met some very friendly locals. Lol.
First beach that we went to! Ilha de Frades!
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