I’m laboring away at writing at 10-minute presentation for Thursday about the role of librarians in the 21st century. It’s not that I don’t know what to say (especially not after picking my former boss’s brain a bit yesterday); I think I’ve just got a mental block of some sort since it’s the first big public speaking I’m going to do in Portuguese. I finally finished writing a draft on Thursday (the entire script that I plan to read word for word; my Portuguese is not really good enough to speak extemporaneously yet) and when I read it out loud it was a disaster. I realized that half of it was off-topic and that I had left out a bunch of things. So, back to the drawing board…
Yesterday was the big soccer game between Belo Horizonte’s two main rival teams, Cruziero and Atletico. This game would normally be a sellout (imagine if Ohio State and UMich shared a city), but they were also running a promotion for International Women’s Day where a woman’s tickets were buy one get one free. We live right by the stadium, so on game days we usually dodge cars looking for parking for hours beforehand. It rivaled Carnaval in terms of traffic snarling, general chaos, and trash left behind. There were fireworks set off starting in the early afternoon and continued until after the game ended. Shelby and her husband went to the game and took their motorcycle here because we were able to hold onto their helmets for them (not allowed in the stadium). While we sequestered ourselves in our house, I made hamantaschen (finally figured out how to say baking powder in Portuguese, and also bought more jam).
Friday I had my first Portuguese class (PLA, or Portuguese as an Additional Language) at the university. My classmates are all European (Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and Greece) and our teacher, Junot, is from Rio de Janeiro and has a carioca accent, where they pronounce Rs at the end of words with a hard R sound, instead of an aspirated H sound. He’s also an anthropologist who spent several years in the favelas of Rio and shared with us some of his experience from that, so I emailed him after class to ask if he would have dinner with me and Duck so they can talk shop. The class seems less structured than I expected, but we just talked until we hit a grammatical question, and then talked about that for a while, and then went back to conversation. The room we’re in is very echoey so it was really hard to hear but by the end of class I was much more used to it.
After class, Duck and I went downtown to the synagogue. Normally I probably wouldn’t go so many weeks in a row, but we’re trying to get to know people and the people who do go every week definitely noticed. We have one particular friend who seems to know everyone and has been introducing us, which is really nice. In the interest of full disclosure, I am partly trying so hard because I want to make sure we have somewhere to go for Passover, which feels not very far away!
There were probably over 80 people there last night, mostly because they are hiring a new rabbi and the one candidate (I think) was here to lead Ma’ariv and give a d’var. He was also leading a learning session on Saturday. Everyone was very enthusiastic about him, and we got a few minutes in with him to talk about New York (he graduated a year and a half ago from JTS before returning to Rio for his first pulpit). He had a stronger carioca accent than Junot so it was a bit hard to follow (the hard R but also ending words with a “sh” sound – talvez is pronounced talvesh, for example), but he led a nice service and would likely be a good fit.
Horntoes in Brazil 