Party Time....Excellent!

On our nearly-last night in Campinas, the other MAGIS group threw a party in the city and invited us to join them. It was the Junina Festival, which celebrates the month of June in Brazil. (I know it was July. Just deal with it.)

The Junina Festival is basically a large hoedown. Everyone wears straw hats, the girls put on ridiculous pink blush and fake freckles, the gents who are clean shaven get eyeliner goatees, and we all dance the night away drinking hot wine.

FYI: Hot wine is great if you like red wine and hot cider.

During the party, there is a skit performance of the "Hick Wedding". Here in the US, we might call it the "Shotgun Wedding". You know the story; the father is upset because his ugly daughter is pregnant, and he forces the man to marry her, but the man doesn't want to, then another woman comes along, is pregnant by the same man, is much prettier, and so the man wants to marry her, then tries to marry both, and eventually another man comes along for the ugly daughter and both couples are happy. This was hilarious to watch, and afterwards all of the partygoers pair up and do the wedding dance.

After two rejections from Tom and Tomas, Delaney and I found partners in our Jesuit friends; Stephen and Juan Diego. Note: this picture is of terrible quality because I had a crappy camera. I apologize.

Delaney and Stephen

The wedding dance lasted a good 45 minutes because someone let Jucelio have the microphone and he kept adding sections to the dance.  It was great fun, but by the end of it I could barely stand.

It was at this party that I also discovered Pacoquinha, which is Reese's Peanut Butter, basically. SO GOOD.

I left my heart in Campinas, Sao Paulo

I arrived in Campinas on a Monday afternoon. I left Sunday morning. I was only there for a week, but it was a week that changed my life. I've told you a couple stories already, but no amount of stories will truly portray that week.

• For those of you who haven't seen me recently, I have blue hair. It's also purple, green, and white. I specifically touched up my hair the day before I left for Brazil because I knew that children liked colorful hair and it would be funny and whatnot. On my first day, one of the children asked me if I was a singer or a rockstar. Mind you, none of the children spoke English. And again, I don't speak Portuguese. So all of the conversations I speak of took a really long time, and involved lots of miming and inference. Therefore, many of my assumptions about what some brazilian people were saying to me may be entirely wrong. But this one was not. A girl asked me if I was a rockstar. She also asked me if I knew Chris Brown. Not personally, no. But I'm in a band, so I'm kind of like a rockstar.

• Everyone was fascinated with my sunglasses. All of the children (and Juan Diego) wanted to wear them and take pictures of themselves in them.

This is one of the kids in my sunglasses:

And this is Juan Diego in my sunglasses, along with Delaney and Edward in their own:

• We had a field day of sorts, and Susan and I were both on team Amarelho (yellow). We decided that just a color wasn't a good enough team name, so we renamed our team the "Zags".  It was adorable teaching the kids to cheer, "let's go Zags!" However, Jucelio misinterpreted the meaning of the word "Zags" to mean something along the lines of "line up here". And so he tried to tell the English speakers to "Zags" and nobody understood and it was a moment of hilarity.

Team blue was victorious the first field day:

• Tom and I had an interesting talk about the constellations in the southern hemisphere. Tom looked it up and discovered that from where we were in Brazil at that time of year, one an only see three stars of the Southern Cross, and only on the deep horizon at sunset. Needless to say I didn't see the Southern Cross.

• So many young adults from the local community came and helped us with morning prayer and evening Mass. I know I'm going to leave some out, but Jordy, Júlio, Lidiane, Bianca, Leonardo,  Otavio, Fabricio, were some of the people that came every day and it was such a blessing to meet these people, and now I'm leaving people out because I'm forgetting names. Sorry!