Leaving home, coming home

Alo my friends!

It has taken me a couple days to get myself settled here but I am now ready to share with you all how my life in this beautiful country is going. I suppose a little introduction is in order. I currently find myself in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Starting October 1st I'll be taking a month long course to get my IDELT (International Diploma in English Language Teaching) certificate with a company called Bridge Brazil. With that certificate, Bridge Brazil will set me up with a job teaching English for adults. Along the way I hope to do much exploring, introduce new characters into my life, eat alot, get lost a few times, watch an entire telenovela episode without getting wildly confused about whose father is sleeping with whose brother's murderer and get my samba on...just to name a few.

To start things off, my family here has been more than wonderful to me. My entire extended family lives here and the last time I saw any of them was 5 years ago when I was in Brazil in 2007. They really have taken me in here with open arms and I am very grateful for that. I'm living with my aunt, Bernadette, in an apartment in Copacabana, a short block away from the beach. So while my bed for the time being is a pull out couch, it's comfy, large and next to a window that I always keep open while I sleep. Not to mention that her apartment is decorated with more photos of my brothers, my parents, and I than in my entire home in Oak Park. So, I feel very at east here. I can't pass up showing off one of these photo gems I get to see every day...get your kicks Alexia....

Charlie Brown xmas tree

 Moving on. As most of you know, my bike is my most prized possession and cruising along Chicago's streets and lakefront was my livelihood. Coming to Brazil I was determined to keep riding. Bike riding in Rio is not nearly as prevalent as it is Chicago; there are very very few bike lanes and cyclists don't have quite the same command on the road as they do back home. There are not many hard-core, every day cyclists here, but I am SO very lucky that of those few, one of them is my younger cousin, Matheus. My first full day here, there was a group ride to create awareness to motorists of cyclists in Rio and to promote creating more bike lanes in the streets. For those who are familiar with Critical Mass (only my favorite day of every month) it was something like that...but much much much smaller. Since there are no marked bike lanes on the streets in Rio, as we rode along we would stop periodically at stop lights so that the leaders of the group could quickly spray paint a bike onto the street, using a big paper stencil.

The bike movement is alive and well in Rio: spray painting a bike onto the road to mark  a shared lane

Little cuz and I. Proudly reppin´ Bobby´s!

This past week I had Portuguese class at Bridge Brazil every day from 9-1. My class consisted of myself, a guy my age from L.A, an older guy from Germany studying physics here and an older girl from Ireland, working on her PhD in anthropology. They had all been in the course for at least a couple weeks and will be continuing on for a few more weeks but since the IDELT course only allows me one week of  free language classes, this was the only time that I will spend with them in the classroom. We all got lunch together every day and exchanged info so hopefully we´ll be keeping in touch if I don´t see them around the school anymore.

Also, it is no secret that I am directionally challenged but for everyone who was holding their breath to see where I would end up after the first day of commuting via public bus by myself...exhale. I pick the bus up down the street from my aunt´s apartment, hop off for school when I see the giant church, hop back on after class at the same spot and hop off for the apartment at the first stop after the 2nd tunnel :) So until I get street names down that´s what I´m working with and its working just fine.

Next week I´ll start the IDELT course. That´ll go from 10am-6pm Mon-Fri for all of October and from the info I´ve read it is supposed to be pretty intensive. My teacher wrote to us to warn us to ´´be prepared to not be able to take advantage of Rio´s beauty for the first month due to the amount of work required´´....but from a former student of the program I was chatting with, this is just a scare tactic they use to get us to buckle down. I´m not concerned about it, what is college for if not to teach you how to simultaneously manage a heavy workload and have a great time? Kidding, dad....



Today I went to Corcovado, also known as Cristo Redentor, also known as that giant statue of Jesus that looks over Rio. The view was breathtaking, but I´ll let the photos explain that.
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OK so I´m struggling to figure out how to type after these photos, so I´ll finish up up here. For those of you who followed along with the MyMerida blog, I promise to try my best to stay more on top of this one than I did with my Mexico adventures. These are also all pictures off my phone because I cant manage to get the photos from my camera onto my comp. I´m sure I´m just putting some chip or cord in upside down or backwards so I´ll keep working on that, so I can share many more photos with you!

Rio! She´s a beauty.

Thank goodness for wind breakers



If you know me you know I don´t need to profess this but I miss you all very much and want to know whats going on in your life also! So, shoot me an email, fb message, tweet , smoke signal, letter, pigeon, whatever it may be, let´s keep in touch! Until the next post, keep having fun and if you´re in Chicago, stomp on some crunchy fallen leaves for me!