Day 3

We started the day by just resting after running around so much the previous days and after lunch we went with Alex to visit the school he works at, CCAA Hauer. I met his students from that afternoons TN9 group and chatted with them for a while. One of them wanted to leave early to go meet up with her secret boyfriend, not sure really what that’s about hahaha!!

Above: Myself with Alex’s students.

Later in the day, once Claudio had finished work, we went to visit Parque Tanguá. It was already getting dark by the time we arrived there but all of the park was lit and the fountains looks spectacular at night. We wanted to go in the daytime later in the week but we didn’t find the time. There is an observation deck that lets you see out over the park complete with a see through floor to view down the the bottom of the waterfall, but at night you cannot really see all that well.

After leaving the park, we went intothe city center to grab something to eat and drink. One nice thing about Curitiba is that you can be out enjoying the nightlife at night in safety. Police are about all night and move on transients so that they aren’t in positions to rob or harrass tourists. Food and drink in bars and restaurants at night aren’t so expensive and if you know someone who lives there they can recommend the best places to go

Vacation

I haven’t posted for a week or so because we traveled to the south of Brasil to visit friends in Curitiba. I’ll post a link later to some photos we hosted in Facebook. While i was there I managed to cut my finger while washing the dishes and ended up having to go to the hospital to get stitches, total nightmare. Also while we were there, we visited CCAA Hauer and spent some time celebrating Teacher’s Day with them at a pizza parlor   Although we were there for a week, we didn’t have time to see everything that we had wanted to, so we will return there next year to pick up where we left off. Places we did visit were the TV tower, the city zoo, a lot of the outside parks dedicated to different things, etc. The city zoo is free and well worth going to visit, you can enter for free and have lunch there during the week. We took some video as well, Roberta and I are going to try editing it and maybe we’ll post some of it online for our students to see. With over 800 photos to choose from we also have to find some to post in our Orkut accounts to share with our students too.

One thing we really loved about Curitiba was the transportation system. It’s probably the best I’ve seen in my life. Nothing in Goias or District Federal comes anywhere close to the one in the city. A single fare gets you into the busses and you can change buses in a system of tubes dotted around the city without paying any extra. On Sundays this costs you only R$1, no matter where you are going in the bus system. In Brasilia this would cost you a small fortune to do. Roberta took some video of the super length buses that the city uses, these buses have their own dedicated bus lanes and this means that travel times around the city are faster than by car. When we were there we saw that many many people leave their cars at home to take advantage of the bus system. It’s a shame that this kind of system will never happen in our city, the bus company that has the monopoly in our city would never permit it   Although Brasilia is the capital of the country, in some ways it is very far behind some of the other states and cities. Hopefully, one day some politicians might travel there to see how a real city should be run, preferably in time for the Olympics in Rio.

Busy

I’ve been busy this week. Over the weekend we visited the farm and spent Brazilian Independence Day with Robert’s family. As we aren’t all that far from the capital we got to see the fighter jets flying over the farm all morning as part of the celebrations. The president of France was here for the commemoration too but his main reason for being here was selling arms to Brasil. I have no idea why the government here would want to spent billions on submarines when they have so many other things that this money could have been spent on. The celebrations were really only for the morning inthe capital as they had to unblock all of the roads ready for Tuesday morning for business as usual. I think next year Roberta and I will go to the capital to see the parades and stuff, in the 9 years I have been in Brasil I have never been to see this. The problem of working all of the time means that I spent very little time doing anything else, although Roberta says that now I have to cut down a little so we have more time to travel and see Brasil. Since I’ve been in Brasil I have only really traveled once to the state of Sao Paulo to visit Roberta’s grandmother. This year we will go to visit Curitiba, a lot of my friends said this is one of the best places in Brasil to visit, clean,beautiful, loves tourists and not so much violence too. I checked out the site for the city and it has a huge list of tourist places to visit, should be a lot of fun. Just have to make sure we take a lot of extra blank mini dvds for the video camera as the website lists so many place to visit and things to see and do. I don’t know how many of them we will fit into the small amount of time we will stay there hahaha!!

Also this week Roberta is giving her final classes in the pre-vestibular course at the uni here in the city. Its a free course that city hall gives here every year to try to get more people from the city to study in the uni here as more or less all people at the uni are from outside satellite cities. The first pre-vestibular course they had for free in the city was a bit of a nightmare, the English teacher was more or less incompetent and my wife knew more than she did. Now they have some better ones and students from the Letras courses also give classes as part of their course to gain credits, these classes are all monitored to make sure that the classes are good and relevant to the uni vestibular exams. These student-given lessons are better than the ones given by the regular vestibular teachers I think, because the regular teachers aren’t monitored to make sure they are actually doing anything whereas the uni students are in their final years and need to make sure their classes are up to scratch to get their credits towards their courses. Roberta’s classes are always nice, she has a knack for coming up with interesting ways to give class and to get the main points of whatever it is she is teaching across

This afternoon I’ll ty out the activity I posted about earlier in the blog. I have just to cut out the cards and then I’ll see how it goes. My MEC students are always good for testing out new creativity tasks and they love a chance to do something a little different from the normal methodology. I’ll post how it goes after class.