A Chance To Practice Some Portuguese Swear Words
Autor: Shiva | Publicado: 2012-03-04T14:57:00-08:00

I am ...how can I put this? ...continually shocked by my consistent bad luck here in Brazil. But I am too stubborn to give up and go home, however much I may feel like it.

Don't judge me - I know that life isn't a bouquet of roses - and I am a reasonable, logical person. The past few months have just been really ...crap. I have even been feeling this in my body - Over the past month I have felt&nbsp; food-poisoning-like symptoms for at least 7 days. It occurred to me the other day that perhaps my nausea and awful stomach cramps might not in fact, be food poisoning, but just plain stress. I am esgotada.

On Tuesday Guillaume and I got kicked out of our republica, our sharehouse. Why? Well, apart from the leaky ceilings, water literally inside of my walls, the fact that my room actually flooded once, yes, flooded, the very noisy work from the probably illegal construction on the house, the washing machine that made our clothes dirtier, the internet which constantly cut out, and the gossipy maids and construction workers reporting my every move to the landlady, the landlady was also a totally stupid, manipulative cow who thought that her boyfriend (one of the construction workers on our house - yet another example of her absolutely unprofessional and disgusting behavior) was interested in me, and decided to get rid of me, for her pure insecurity. So, when she came to me to report that 'everyone was complaining about me' (and believe me, I could write a whole essay on those people), I was not very impressed, and told her where to go. Why, after all, had she been coming to ask me every few days if her boyfriend was trying to flirt with me? It seemed very convenient for her to have a reason to get rid of me. After lying to me and trying to intimidate me about Brazilian laws (I did not fall for this crap), she also told me where to go. Com prazer! I told her, with pleasure.

Needless to say, this verbal altercation did not leave us much time to get out of our place. Rafael, my good friend, who never ceases to amaze me with his problem-solving skills and engineering brain, cleaned up my mess with the maldita filha da puta vagabunda dona de merda landlady and helped us get our new place. Yes, you just witnessed my intense effort at swearing in Brazilian Portuguese, as you can imagine, I had a lot of practice using them in this past week. 

Now we are living in a much larger, more dormitory-style accomodation, in a better location, still near the university. It is a dorm with 34 other people, shared bathrooms and kitchens. A place which Guillaume once delicately described as Cap d'Agde, a reference to a nudist town in his native France. This, because in our few days here, we have encountered an astonishingly mostly male population walking around barechested. It's damn hot here, they can't be blamed, right? Guillaume however persists in his dislike of our shirtless housemates. 

Amusingly, in our new place, there is this very-Brazilian microwave:


Brigadeiro and cocada are in the easy-cook sections!





We managed to move all of our belongings without any suitcases (we had them stored in Guillaume's aunt's place, 1.5 hours away, for lack of space in our old room), but by use of plastic bags, rubbish bins, cardboard boxes, backpacks, açaí buckets, and hammocks-turned-bags. Another demonstration of the versatility of our Amazonian-bought hammocks.&nbsp;

The next day, on the way to a voice recording for an English textbook (one well-paying but hard-to-find job for English natives here in Brazil), I took a hard fall down the marble stairs of my new place. Havaianas are comfortable and cute but they consistently seem to do me wrong while walking down stairs. Unfortunately this past Thursday there wasn't anyone at my side to catch me from falling and I got to top off my awesome week with a very sore back, neck, and lots of analgesics. I think this one will take a while.
I am trying to not be a pessimist...