We both went to classes from 8:30am-5:30pm, Monday through Friday. My course ended the Friday before Christmas. It was pretty intense. In just 8 weeks, I exceeded where I ever was in either German or Spanish from high school and self-study. The Spanish helped, of course. Portuguese has a lot of cognates and similar grammatical rules, so I was able to catch on quickly. I am able to speak (or at least read and write) in the present, imperfect, preterit, present continuous, imperative and future (the vou/vai/vamos/vão + infinitive kind of future) forms. I have fairly good pronunciation. Unfortunately, my old brain isn't doing very well at processing what other people are saying very quickly. I can understand anything thrown at me by Pimsleur or Mango, but when it comes to having a conversation with a native speaker, I need to tell them, "Você poderia falar mais devagar, por favor!" or else I get lost. Okay, I still get lost, even then, sometimes. But I am determined to succeed.
The good news is that I get to start a distance course later this month. I will get to pick up where I left off in an online format, and each week I will get a 45-minute call from a native Brazilian mentor. I'm not going to progress like DH is, but at least it is something. Living in almost any other country, one can find English speakers and get by, but that isn't the case in Brazil. In order to run my household, I will need to be able to buy groceries and clothes, connect internet service, and do just about everything else in Portuguese.
DH gave me a gift certificate to a Brazilian salon in MD for Christmas (mani-pedi time!). They don't speak English there. I am going to have to get brave and make an appointment after the kids go back to school next week. Speaking on the phone is the worst for me. Having no body language to clue me in just makes the whole experience worse. Oh, well, what do I have to lose?
DH, the kids, and I all got diplomatic passports, and we also got the kids tourist passports (we already had them). DH is working on visas, and I have gotten the kids' school application paperwork turned in. That was a project! There are still two school counselors who have not completed their part of the paperwork and turned it in, but they have promised to do it next week. I hope we won't have any problems getting into the school. We felt pretty good about the school we decided on. We had multiple choices, and it was a hard decision. I don't want to have to re-make it if something doesn't work out. There is a waiting list, so we will see...
The holidays went well. My in-laws came for Thanksgiving, and we enjoyed spending time with them. We visited the National Zoo with them, which was really enjoyable. There is an Amazon area there, which has all sorts of monkeys. We saw some of the kinds that we can expect to see in our own back yards there. We are all excited about monkeys! Also, we can expect to have some kind of cool trees in our yard, like avocado, banana, lemon, lime or cocoa. That will be cool! There is also a good likelihood that we will have a backyard pool, as well as a brick barbecue. We will find all of that out closer to our move date, of course.
DH and I did our Christmas shopping on date nights, as well as another extra Saturday or two, and utilized Amazon.com a bit, as well. I think the kids appreciated our efforts. We went pretty small this year, as we have limited space in our little apartment, and considering that we have a weight limit for our shipment to Brazil. We didn't do all that weeding out of our stuff back home just so that we could replace it with more junk. The highlights were DS1's pottery classes, DS3's piccolo, three mini quad copters for DS2, 4 & 5, electronics kits for DS6, and a princess castle that makes Play-Doh dresses and princes to go along with three Disney Princesses for DD. It even squirts out Rapunzel hair from the top of the tower.
I should mention that, although DD, DS5 & DS6 had a lot of fun mixing all of the Play-Doh colors together so that they could make the aforementioned hair stretch nearly all the way across the living room, the Doodle Car that we got her was more of a hit with her. Have you seen these?
You can either draw or print out a track, and the car will follow the line. DD gave one to a friend for his birthday in November, and she has been begging for one ever since. She and DS6 played with it a ton on Christmas Day. We let them draw all over the backs of the remnants of the Christmas wrapping paper (they got a good 20 feet off of those rolls, I'd say). Then, they printed out and taped together a bunch more from the Doodle Car website.
Last night, for New Year's Eve, DH and I played Settlers of Catan with the younger kids while the older three went to the church dance. We all stayed up late and slept in this morning. I think most of us are up now (due to loud music at 6am, DH woke up and woke me up, and although we both tried, we only got a few catnaps before giving up at 9:30am and just getting up). We don't have much planned for today. Several of us have head colds and are trying to recover, so we will probably just take it easy.
I get to go back to being home alone after this week. I have a lot of cleaning to catch up on, and plan to sleep a lot before I start up with the distance learning course again. Between taking the kids to seminary and going to classes, I ended my 2 month course pretty tired. Hopefully, I will recover quickly and be full of energy before it is time to pack us all up and move again!
By the way, in my last post, two months ago, I mentioned that we were supposed to get our car back after a month of being in the shop. We finally got it back on Monday. Yes, Monday. Between the insurance company and the shop's ordering errors and mis-handling of diagnostics, it took over 3.5 months to get the repairs from the accident done. It took another couple of days, due to Christmas, to get a worn CV boot replaced at another shop (no chance we were taking it back to the VW dealership for that one). We are now convinced that we don't really need a second car, and plan to sell the Jetta. It would have been nice to have it when the van's alternator died two weeks ago, though...but at least Ford can turn one of those around in less than 24 hours.
HEY!! Wow that was a great recap i've been thinking about you!! Sure miss you!
ReplyDelete