Chicken Foot

Just as I was about to leave this morning, I got a text from Daniel that he had sent an hour before (gotta love the cell service) that said that Nicole was sick and there wasn't class this morning. I called him to tell him that I was sick as well, and he allowed me to skip volunteering today. This is the worst my throat has felt yet and it was kinda hard to breath this morning. I am starting to sneeze a lot and my head pounds when I do. My mom made some juice for me and chew on ginger root. The weird thing about this cold that I have had for about two weeks now is that it gets better throughout the day and then I relapse every night. My family is still blaming it on the change in weather, but I'm thinking that I am having a reaction to something environmental possibly in my mattress. I really sprayed it with Raid last week, so I don't think there could be anything alive in it, but you never know in Brazil!

I decided to use this day to work ahead, so I went to the beach and finished the Jeffrey Sachs book for my Political Science class. I also caught up on my blogs. I went to the store to buy some lemons, caju juice, acerbola juice (it wasn't until tonight and I finished my last bottle that I found out that this was essentially "from concentrate" juice- I just thought Brazilians liked their juice how they like everything else- super sweet), and activa yogurt (really been missing yogurt). I returned home and tried to ate the lemons with salt and drank the juice and as much water as possible. I gotta get over this cold- its been affecting my life for 2 weeks now! I tried to sleep for a little bit during the day, but after it rained the heat was only amplified. This seems counter-intuitive to me, but my mother explained that the rain cools the ground, but the ground boils the water and makes the air a humid, tropical oven! I got to talk to Laurel a little and worked a lot on my Biology publication. I should have it done for review soon. This is probably going to be another long process, but as many people have told me, it would be a shame if I didn't publish what I put so much work into.

For dinner, my mother made me chicken noodle soup. I guess that's another thing that crosses cultural barriers. I had a somewhat pretty good conversation with her and it is amazing how much easier it is for me to carry on a conversation with my family compared to a stranger. During this conversation, I glance up at my mother's plate and noticed there was a chicken foot sitting square in the middle of her soup. I didn't think anything of it because I had some unidentified chicken meat in my soup as well, but I thought it was there to make the broth only- I was wrong. My mother proceeded to pick up the whole chicken leg and start crunchy on it starting with the three toes. At this point I asked her about eating the chicken foot and she said her whole family eats them and fights over them at family dinners. Kinda sounds like the Woleslagles and the turkey gizzard at Thanksgiving!

The two pictures are of vistas near the Vianna region and Domingos Martins area that I visited yesterday