Where are all the girls?

I wanted to take a minute to answer a common question we've received from a few people reading this blog: Where are all the girls?? Well, both Eddie & I actually did have one girl each to sign up for our classes. However, the girl who signed up for my class has never shown up. The girl signed up for Eddie's class, Vera, thought the classes started the week after they actually did start, so she missed the first two classes.

Vera was concentrating really hard in Eddie's computer class last night.

Other than Vera, there have been a couple of girls to drop by the club on a couple of occasions when we've been there. It seems that more girls would come if they saw other girls at the club but maybe the girls shy away from coming when it's mostly boys. I'm not really sure. Plus, the club is run by two guys, so that may have something to do with it.

This is my new friend Luciana. Kelly snapped this photograph of us yesterday afternoon after the afternoon English class. She didn't really want me to take a picture of her I don't think but I said I saw the photographs Darcio took of her for one of his assignments and that she's beautiful! She may be reading this so THERE, I said it! Luciana, you are a very beautiful girl. :-) I'm very excited to be able to keep in contact with her after we leave. It seems we may have the same sense of humor. Sooo, I tend to joke around with her a lot and I give her a hard time...all in good fun of course. Luciana...I love you...IN CHRIST (hee hee hee).

Last night we were invited over to Anderson & Adriana's house after Eddie's class. Cris had planned to go with us to help translate, but Nicolas ended up falling asleep before we got home so she couldn't go. We said we didn't mind going without a translator if they didn't, so we all had a good laugh and headed to the car. Wow...was it a lot of fun! When we first got there, Anderson saw his neighbor and I heard him say that we didn't speak Portuguese. However, we managed just fine I think! We all passed around the two dictionaries we had and believe it or not, we did have some conversations. It was difficult at time and some times we just had to laugh. Obviously, if we could have communicated better, we would hav been able to get to know them even better. But, we were so glad to learn a few things about them and now we have another reason to return at some point. This couple is from Rio (or Hio as they would say) and so they have a different accent than everyone else we've come in contact with. Adriana's accent is very pronounced. So we joked that we would learn to speak Portuguese with a Carioca (a name for a person from Rio) accent. We stayed at their house until after midnight just talking, laughing, and having a good time. It's amazing how much a person can begin to understand (even if you can't speak it) when they are immersed in another language and are constantly by people who speak that language.

Today I plan to give the second "private" photography lesson to Michel and Luciana, then there's church tonight and I think several of us are going out for pizza after church. It's sad because now we're in the saying good-bye phase. :-(

Have a great day everyone! Obrigada for reading!