I Almost Stepped on a Boa Constrictor

It was huge. Here we were, innocently walking along on this nice path covered with dead leaves and things in the Atlantic forest-y zone of the University when I noticed something that was basically right under my foot (OK, it may have been 3-5 feet away, but in the moment, it was really dramatic). We were wearing boots, so it wasn't too dangerous, but I don't think I've ever seen a snake that big in the wild. I get a little jumpy in situations like this so I may have also been incredibly jumpy the rest of the day and especially that evening when I lifted up a chair and found a cockroach. Fortunately Sam smashed it for me. I was trying to think of some foods that are specifically Utahn and came up with funeral potatoes. Our friends here got a kick out of the fact that these potatoes I love are called funeral potatoes, so now I will make funeral potatoes for the cockroach that died.

 Things have changed a bit in the past two weeks. We are now living in Sao Carlos, which is about twice the size of Assis. The temperature is a little less hot here and we don't have as many of Ricardo's relative here to hang out but we're making friends:)

This is my friend Bernardo from Assis. he did this awesome trick with popping a balloon with a toothpick and a clothespin. We had a lot of fun together and he showed me this cool iphone game about teaching penguins to fly. It was awesome.

Before we left, these awesome girls from the church invited us over for a girls night of popcorn, chocolate, hottidoggis (Brazilian hot dogs) and Age of Adeleine. They're so fun and we miss them.

One day these guys who work at the lab with Algae invited us to go collect algae with them. I've never done anything like that before so it was interesting to see what places are best for collecting algae. Also, apparently if you smell the algae, you can tell if it has cyanobacteria or not because it has a distinct smell.

This is the cacao we saw at the supermarket. It looks really pretty and I would love to try and make my own chocolate, but apparently the process is a little bit hard.

Our PCR finally worked! This means our dragonflies have DNA. 

Every day we walked to campus, we passed these shops where they sold calda do cana (sugar cane juice). We finally tried some right before we left Assis, and it turns out it was pretty good. I discovered that sugar cane actually has a distinct flavor, not just sweet. There are a lot of plantations with sugar cane growing.

Our friend Thiago made us "Tapioca". It's pretty intense. It's just this powder that you heat up and it magically forms these tortilla/crepe like things. He's vegetarian so he made us Tapioca with soy protein meat stuff. It was really tasty.

Ricardo loves Kendo. I admitted that I didn't understand exactly what it was, so he gave me a demonstration. I'm not sure I totally get the picture, but I understand that it involves a lot of hitting people in the head:)

We finally met our professor Rhainer right before we left Assis. He took us to a place where we could see the cerrado (fascinating Brazilian savanna-type landscape), and we practiced asking questions and I saw this really cool fly.

There's also this fly called "mendinha", because it follows your finger around and sucks the sweat off of it. I will bring them back to America and market them as a skin cleanser:)

This is a cocoon of some kind of butterfly. Butterflies here are something else.

It was hard to say goodbye to our friends in Assis, but hopefully we will come back before we leave.

We ate at the food court at the mall at this delicious Italian place. It was tricky because they wanted us to customize our order of gnocchi, but we mostly just wanted food without talking too much in Portuguese. Apparently what we ordered came with these nice dollar bills... Yay for useless American money!

This is the trench we were walking along when I saw the snake. A guy was mowing down all the grass and destroying the habitat of the native damselflies and making the water all mucky so we were pretty upset.

This is a cool parasitic tree we saw. It's crazy to me how cruel and fierce nature can be here and even though there is so much life, it's a fight. It doesn't come easy for any of the plants. 

 Here's a damselfly that we caught. This is the genus we are looking for down here, Hetaerina or Ruby-spot damselflies.

ACAI! I like. 

This is Rhainer and his wife and kids and one of the post-docs Gustavo who work in the lab.

Gustavo wanted to build aquariums to research fish so we helped him sand and assemble them. 

After church on Sunday, Junior (who was a mission companion of one of our friends from Provo) and his family invited us for lunch. We had delicious goiaba juice and goiaba pudding for dessert. Fruit here is so good... At church, the people knew immediately we were Americans before we even said anything. I don't understand why cause I'm not THE whitest person there. But apparently my blue eyes are a giveaway. Or the way we walk.

I thought I got a fungus on the back of my hand, but it turns out that it was probably just a lemon burn. Who knew if you spill lemon juice on your skin it can stain? 

Junior took us to get lanches, these HUGE hamburgers with multiple patties and lots of lettuce. Eu gosto!

Anyway, life is good. I feel blessed that we haven't been sick and that the people around us are so good to us and we are even learning a bit of Portuguese. Obrigada Pai Celestial.

Abacate com Pão

Well. It's been another real classy week down here in Brazil except for one thing. Everybody here likes to shower! And sometimes like 3-4 times per day. And I'm here all thinking eh... shower every other day is good so I don't have to wash more clothes (we'll get to that later). And then they ask me if I want to shower and it's like that Book of Mormon story: I don't think that I stink! It is really humid and warm, but I feel like I'm wet before I shower and then I'm wet afterward so what's the difference?

 This is me doing laundry at our house. Guesa (our temporary mother) kind of had a heyday when she saw how much I struggled at handwashing clothes. They have a washer, but it doesn't get the stinky smell out of your armpits. Let me tell you though, Guesa is awesome at handwashing clothes. Miracle woman she is.

This is the papaya that we ate one day for breakfast. Just FYI, don't eat the seeds. The seeds taste really good on the passionfruit so we decided to try these ones too. Bad idea. But the fruit itself is good.

We went to the Friday market they have here and this guy was selling leather sandals and these hats from a city up North. We've heard that the sandals smell pretty bad and they did so we didn't end up buying them. Also, the seller guy was about to charge us extra cause he knew we couldn't understand but fortunately our friend stopped him. It was cool to walk around with her and learn the names of the fruits and vegetables. We also ate crepe de suiço which are pretty much crepes on sticks. Really yummy.

This tree was especially beautiful. It has all sorts of different things growing on it--lichens, mosses, other plants. Really cool.

After Ricardo left us, our meat loving friends decided to take us to the espetinho which is like a Brazilian barbecue but the restaurant version I believe. The meat was awesome, as were the rice and beans and Manjoka. They also put this yummy powder stuff on the rice and beans.

These are our friends who took us to the espetinho place. It was really fun trying to communicate with them in our broken portuguese. I also tried Pitanga juice. All the juice here is so good.

K so, here's the reason for the blog title. Most of the people at the lab go home for lunch, but because we live kind of far away, we've been buying lunch from the supermarket everyday. They have these really good meat sandwich things. But the other day, we weren't feeling like we wanted to eat meat, so we bought this avacado (this is a small avacado compared to some of the ones we've seen), and some rolls to make some avacado sandwiches. We went back to the lab to eat it and our friend Marcos saw us and thought we were crazy. Apparently he's never seen someone eat avacado with bread before. He said we had to try it with sugar. 

We tried the other half of it with sugar but it wasn't really as good. But later Guesa made us some avacado with lemon juice and sugar and we liked that a lot better.

On campus there are all these really cool fruit trees. This is the guava before we ate it. It was really good.

As Dr. Johnson (BYU professor) says: As long as there are plants nearby, you have some friends.

So, we heard that a lot of people here in Assis are really into martial arts, and thought we would try it as a sort of cultural experience. Our friend Vicky goes to Muay Thai (a sort of kickboxing thing) several times a week and invited us to come with her for a lesson. It was pretty fun except it involved a lot of running around and around.

These are some of the guys we work in the lab with--Thiago and Lucas. Lucas is probably one of my favorite people we have met here. He was in charge of training us in the lab, and Ricardo said he wasn't allowed to speak to us in English. But he is so patient with us in speaking simple Portuguese, and has the best funny faces. He's super cool.

Guesa took us to get Brazilian hotdogs. They were huge! I think we got the special which had not only two sausages, but some ham pieces, bacon and sauce and potato things on top. It was really good.

Sometimes we say things that people think are really funny. Like I told Ricardo that we ate chupa-cabras (I was trying to say Jabuticabas). Eh. So some words are hard to say, like paralelopepido. Then they tried to make us say Portuguese tongue twisters. Like "o rato roeu a roupa do rei de roma". So that was fun.

We found the culprit! The lady who feeds all the campus cats. When she pulled up in her car, they started coming out of drains and from behind rocks and it was like she was a magnet! She's awesome.

This is the lake where we went fishing. Apparently Ricardo's dad caught 90 last week, but we didn't catch any with him.

These kids speak really good English. And are also decent soccer players.

The farm where we went fishing had parrots and macaws and peacocks and these strange long-legged chickens.

We caught the bait with a net. It was pretty sweet.

This is our friend who took us for a boat ride. I think maybe he owns the place?

He took this picture of me. It's funny because the cow is going to eat me right???

Our friend Iara from the church took us swimming. They have a really nice pool that we almost had to ourselves.

And of course. More ice cream.

And these glorious things. Brigadeiros.

Anyway. It was a great week. Awesome people, good times. It's nice.