Brazil is awesome and fun. Everything is nice and most people we have met live in apartments. The food is not at all what I expected. I thought it would be hot and spicy, but it is actually nice warm and cool. We eat sandwiches for breakfast and fruit. They have a little machine that looks like a George Forman but it is for toasting bread. My favorite kind of bread is the kind you can hollow out, mom says it is called Pao Frances, or french style bread. The toasted ham and cheese is really good. People do not normally eat cereal, pancakes, french toast or eggs and bacon for breakfast. I like how they eat breakfast here and I want my mom to get one of the toasting machines for our house.
Portuguese sounds very nice, I am not really understanding it yet, but it still sounds very nice. I keep thinking of words in English but for some reason Portuguese words keep popping up. I do not know what they mean so I ask my mom. She tells me but I have a hard time remembering.
We went to a party yesterday where there were kids. There was a soccer field with three balls, one ball was flat, one was to light and one was perfect. We asked the kids if they wanted to play, and then the girls joined in, and we lost. The kids did not speak English, but it was fun. There were two girls who spoke English really well so they translated for us. I did not really talk, Austin did.
There are a lot of dogs here. They do not have a good system for lost dogs here, or groups to rescue them. I met two dogs, one named Barney and one named Schweps. Schweps is a funny name, but he lives in an apartment with a family that my mom used to live with. Barney is only allowed in the kitchen and cannot go in other rooms of the house. I think he likes people to watch him while he eats because when I go to hang out wit him, he always goes to eat. Schweps and Barney are very lucky because they have good owners and their families treat them very well. The dogs in the street don't have families. When we were headed back from the beach, I saw a dog that was laying on the steps of a place we stopped. That dog might have been blind because when I stuck my hand out, he moved to a certain position, and when I came back after eating, he was still in that same position. I think he might have been sick. He looked like a nice dog and he did not growl at all. I bet if you brought all of those dogs in, they would be nice like Yoshi, and they would appreciate a home, and never run away, like Yoshi. Seeing all of the dogs running around in the streets makes me feel sad. I think they could get hit by a car easily. A few days ago I saw a dog who almost got hit.
On our walk I saw a Dotson, a few seconds later, her two baby pups appeared. They were not street dogs, but lived at a home around the corner. The puppies ran out through the cracks in the gate but the mom could not fit. The mom thought we were trying to take her babies so she barked aggressively. We kept telling the puppies to go back inside, in Portuguese and my mom called to see if someone was home, but no one was there. So we walked away and the puppies went back to their mom. I was so tempted to pick one up, but I knew the mom would get even more mad. We were all really worried the puppies would just wonder off, but my mom said that they would stay with their mom until they were old enough to leave and get a job!
We have done so many things here. We walk to a lot of places like the park down the street. It was set up like a little gym, kind of cool. We sort of worked out, like at a real gym. We went to get ice-cream at the little local market after the park. It was really hot, and I got sun burned at the beach.
This is all for now, I promise I will write more later.
