The trip was long, but not too delayed, and fairly smooth at customs, etc. we left JFK at ~10pm on Friday, flew through the night to Sao Paolo. Then to Recife (pronounced Heh-see-fi) where Johanna’s mentor Celso picked us up and drove us to Joao Pessoa.

The city is pretty awesome, we are two blocks from the praia. (beach) My Portuguese comprehension is actually suprisingly good, all of those Spanish and Italian classes I guess have proved somewhat useful. I still sound like a retarded
5 year old when I speak though, although Johanna is holding her one beautifully.

Overall though, the Brazilians I’ve met are all *extremely* helpful and speak very good English. We had one hysterical moment where Jo’s advisor here at the UFPB asked her if she was from “Jew Family” which could have been straight out of Borat.

We weren’t thrown on a train or anything, and everyone here is muito simpatico.

The house is very nice, it’s a private home owned by this woman Fernanda, who lives ere with her son Iuri and rents rooms to a steady string of foreigners. Now there is a German student named Helga here on an internship. There is Narry, the other girl from OSU and Johanna and I are in the guest house, which as best as I can explain is a pool house, except there is no pool. Rent is reasonably cheap, 400 Reals (~200 USD) per person per month. n fact, pretty much everything here is inexpensive, food, drinks, buses… Electronics re *mad* expensive here, especially relative to everything else.

We had a hard time trying to figure out what to bring as gifts, as America doesn’t really have anything “cultural” (what? a native american dream catcher?) So for Jo’s dvisors we brought Maple Syrup and Ipod Shuffles. Turned out to be a great idea, they looked at us like we handed them gold bars.

Other than that, we have wireless internet (inter-netchy) at the house, and its slow, but that are you going to do… Maybe it’ll keep me from wasting all of my time here doing dumb shit online.

Please email me (kremdela–gmail) with questions/ comments/ requests or recommendations.
I plan on buying LOTS of records down here, and have been checking out lots of Brazilian music
I also found a really funny poster for a concert promoter here in JP, and am really upset that I missed a Brazilian Evanescence cover band.

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