We arrived in Somerville on Sunday and were pretty blitzed from the red-eye flight and general stress of traveling through airports at this particular moment in time. We discovered last week that our friends Leah and Ariela’s apartment was unoccupied and they agreed to let us stay there for the time being, especially as we …
Continue reading “Coronavirus Update #3: The End of the Road”
Well friends, it looks like our Brazil adventure is coming to a close and our stateside Coronadventure is just beginning. Yesterday morning, we were feeling optimistic about the situation in Brazil (650 cases) vs in the US (14,000 cases) and decided to try to stick it out a little longer here, so we changed our …
Hi friends. We appreciate everyone who has checked in, and also everyone who has not checked in but are thinking of us – responding to everyone would be overwhelming when we are already overwhelmed with news and decisions. Every Fulbright program in every country (and there are usually multiple per country; I think 4 different …
After lunch today, Duck and I went on an adventure. We walked nearly an hour to one of the city libraries, around the east side of Lake Pampulha and north. We finally reached the Parque Municipal Fazenda Lagoa Do Nado (City Park Farm Lake of Swimming, where swimming is curiously not allowed), which houses a …
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 …
The weekend (o final da semana) was chock full of hanging out with other Fulbrighters, between the raindrops. Victoria invited us over to her house on Saturday, which was great, and then I met up with Cara and her family on Sunday at the Hippie Fair downtown and we ended up getting caught in the …
Well, we made it through Carnaval! A couple of times we found ourselves at blocos where everyone was singing along to the music and dancing so freely and I have never felt whiter! My Puritanical blood rebelled against even trying to imagine my body moving in those ways. While things were closed, we killed time …
We made it to our first synagogue experience in Brazil! We went down to the synagogue a bit early (around 5:30; services started at 7) because there are lots of street closures downtown for Carnaval and we weren’t sure how long it would take. We located the synagogue just to make sure we knew where …
Wednesday evening, Duck bounced all around me like Tigger until we left for our very first Carnaval experience. He did all the research online and found two blocos (Carnaval block parties) on the other side of our neighborhood (Boston readers: think of our neighborhood as JP, so a smaller segment of the city, but still …
This afternoon Duck managed to get me out of the house and downtown to browse at some livrerias. As in Spanish, this word is a false cognate; it does not mean library (that’s biblioteca) but rather bookstore. But the two we went to today were not what you’re thinking. One, called Pauline, we arrived at …
Horntoes in Brazil