Have You Ever Seen the Rain

I woke up pretty late today because my dad installed curtains in my room and its actually kinda dark now, also I am getting pretty accustomed to sleeping with a lot of light. I still have a sore throat and I don't really understand how I got sick in a tropical climate.

It rained all night here and Amanda was complaining that she had to go to school today (she skipped last Friday because Nicole wanted her hair straightened.). I joked with her about having a rain day similar to us having a snow day in the US. I guess I didn't really understand. I have seen some flooding in the streets here but nothing major. The infrastructure here is absolutely horrible and the sewers just can't handle the mass influx of water. The picture below doesn't really do it justice. This essentially cripples the city and traffic turns into a nightmare. When Amanda returned from school she was upset with her mom because they only had two professors and only 15 students in the whole school (usually they have over a thousand!)

Later in the day I walked to Central Vila Velha to get some more money and made the mistake of taking a new way and not walking along the beach. I wanted to explore the city more, but I picked the wrong day to do so. I had to take so many detours because I literally could not walk down the street. It was crazy. Also the water is backed up from the sewers which are open and contain human waste, garbage, oil, etc; so I tried not to wade through anything. I got lost maybe three times, but I guess this is the best way to learn a city. I walked for about 5 hours and went to the bank and then to the mall and bought 50 more Reals of cell credit. On the way home I got pretty fed up with myself because I couldn't even figure out how to enter the credits into my cell phone. It turned out that I wasn't including an asterisk but it made me feel a little better when it took two of my family members to figure it out.

At about 9 Nicole called me to go to a club called Barr Acustico in Barra do Jucu (close to the clinic). Karla and her husband Sandro picked me up and we met all of the other workers from the clinic there. It was really cool and the cover band sang almost all English songs but of course in a distorted accent. I got to socialize with the people from the clinic and they are all very nice genuine people. However, I didn't really understand much of what they were saying because I find it hard enough to understand people speaking English in a club, its almost impossible to understand Portuguese! I just kinda keep up with the body language and do my "smile and nod" routine.