Entendeu?

Sooo I've been here a month now (!) and we have a two week break before the semester starts so I'm finally getting a chance to catch my breath. Even without classes this week and next, I've still been keeping pretty busy with capoeira and running and figuring out my life. By "figuring out my life" I mean I'm thinking about things beyond whether or not I'll go to the beach today, but not as extreme as what I'll be doing in the next few years. I guess I'm trying to figure out what I want to make of my time here. I could spend all my time going out with friends and getting crazy and having adventures that will make really exciting stories to tell. Or I could spend all my time studying and volunteering and being as productive as possible in my time here without saving any time for myself. OR I could find a balance somewhere in between and have the most real experience possible while I'm here. That's what I'm trying to do. It seems like it should be an easy task, right? Emphasis on the word "seems." Either way, I'll figure it out, and I'm enjoying myself in the meantime :)

So today's agenda:
1. Laundry
2. Speaking in Portuguese

1. Laundry
While I was packing for my trip here, I saw on the packing list that it had a note about hang-drying clothes. The note said to pack only things that will dry quickly because clothes dryers are very rare here and almost all clothes will be hung dry. This immediately made me dread having to do laundry here. What they forgot to mention, though, was the fact that everything dries quickly here. I can hang up a pair of jeans at 9AM and have them ready to wear by around 1PM (though here we use 24hr time so it'd be more like 09:00h and 13:00h). I'm really surprised by how well the detergent works here, too. I bought some powder detergent on sale at the grocery store and wasn't expecting it to work very well, but after handwashing my disgustingly dirty capoeira shirt I am actually very amazed. It's like a powdered miracle. Hanging the clothes is kind of a relaxing task, too. I'm sure I'll get sick of it after a while, but I kind of look forward to doing it for now. The apartments here all have wire racks that are held up by ropes. You can raise and lower them by setting the ropes on different knotches on the wall. So you lower the racks, hang the clothes as efficiently as possible, and then raise the racks so you don't have to walk through your clothes every time you want to go through that area. It's kind of cool looking into the surrounding apartment buildings and seeing racks of clothes in almost every window. It's kind of a reminder saying, "Hey, look how much energy we're saving while back in your country there are probably 8,000,000 dryers running right now!" And honestly, my clothes dry much faster on those racks than they eeeeever did in the dryer at my apartment in Berkeley.

2. Speaking Portuguese
In case you didn't know (please tell me that you did know...), Portuguese is actually the language spoken in Brazil. Not Spanish! Though I usually end up speaking what lies somewhere in between the two languages, known as Portunhol. Portuguese is a beautiful language, but it is proving to be very difficult to master. I have some days where I feel extremely confident speaking and understanding, but I have others where I just have no clue. I think this probably has a lot to do with how tired I am on a given day, and which people I am surrounding myself with. I've found that the people who have traveled to other countries tend to be easier to understand because they know that they need to slow down their speach a little bit for me to really distinguish the words they are saying. Those who haven't traveled or experienced a necessity to try to speak in another language tend to have trouble understanding why I can't follow their rapid-fire speech.
The thing I've found to be more annoying than anything else, though, is when people try to correct me. Granted, it's great to be corrected when I need it so that I can learn how to speak properly. I shouldn't go around saying the wrong thing over and over again - in that case it's great to be corrected. It gets annoying, though, when I am talking about a complex subject and someone corrects me on a simple grammar error. Imagine you're speaking in English with a group of friends about a heated topic like slums in a big city, and someone stops you in the middle of a good point because you said "me and him" instead of "he and I." That would be annoying, right? So I appreciate when people correct me when it's really necessary, but when I make a simple mistake while I'm talking about something difficult as it is, it gets really frustrating. After being corrected in instances like that, it makes me want to stop talking all together. But I guess I need to just learn to embrace it and keep talking.
Some of my favorite words/terms/phrases that I've learned so far:
*Nossa! = "Oh my!"
*Logico que nao... = "Obviously not"
*Isso e um absurdo! = "That's crazy!" (I'm not sure if I have that one quite right, but my friend says it all the time and it makes me laugh every time...)
*Entendeu? = "You know?" (It took me a while to learn the real meaning of this, because at first I kept thinking that people were actually asking me if I understood. Entender = understand. But people here use it the same way as we use "you know?" or "get it?")
*Cara = "Dude" (It's kind of funny hanging out with different groups of people and seeing who uses this term and who doesn't. When I hang out with kids my own age, it's used at least 15 times within 3 sentences - even more often than we use the term "dude." When I hang out with anyone of a slightly older age group, it doesn't even exist in the vocabulary.)
*Caracas! = "Whoa!"
*Pra caramba = "extremely/a lot/really" (This doesn't quite translate directly. But here's an example, Tenho um dor de cabeca pra caramba = "I have a really bad headache." At least I think that's how it works.)
Anyway, I'm still learning.