Duck and I were up early this morning and headed straight from our Airbnb to the airport. It’s a quick hour-long flight from São Paulo to Belo Horizonte (which I will refer to mostly as BH: B = bay, H = ah-GAH, so bay-ah-GAH together if you want to be like the locals). Duck, in the window seat, narrated to me all the open pit mines we were flying over, and rolling hills.
Our Uber took us right to our new apartment where we met our landlords, Eda and Oscar, who are very nice. I have to remember to greet people by kissing them on the cheeks! Eda showed us all around (including many outlet adapters, bless her!) and then left us to unpack, which we have done. We are on our second load of laundry, which has to hang dry – easier said than done in the rainy season (it’s already rained about 4 times) but we are making do with indoor hanging racks and hangers.
Nossa casinha!
After lunch at a buffet place with Eda and Oscar, we came back and had a little nap to rest up for our afternoon adventure: going to the grocery store! We got some food for dinner (a little spaghetti), some eggs and cereal for breakfast tomorrow, and laundry soap. We had both been looking forward to cooking since we haven’t done it in almost two weeks! (I also brought about a week’s worth of clothes and it’s been almost two weeks so I’ll let you smell that math.)
Duck and I have agreed to try to take it easy with integrating ourselves. It reminds me of my approach to having mono: I could EITHER go to the doctor OR to the grocery store OR to the park in a day. Tomorrow we are going to go downtown to a Maranite church for mass and then to the Mercado Central, and then come back home. It’s exhausting being constantly on alert, navigating your way around an unfamiliar city, and going into social encounters where you often don’t know most of the words thrown your way (even if they do as you request and slow down!). Downtown is also where the main library is, so getting to know that bus route will be very helpful.
Next week we have a bunch of errands to run, but again, I’m going to attempt to only do 1-2 per day. We’re also looking forward to exploring the university here, looking into signing up for pool memberships so we can get more into swimming, and walking around Lake Pampulha nearby.
We settled in to write some fieldnotes (or in my case, a couple of long-overdue blog posts!). I was in the bedroom trying to drown out Duck’s background Youtube video with music (he was in the other room, the kitchen), and we were both trying to drown out the loud street music that came from one street over, a bit of a main drag (where the buffet place was). It’s still going – hopefully that will fade into the background, but Carnival will likely intensify the shenanigans!
Horntoes in Brazil 