Room for two, not three....

As most of our followers I'm sure noticed, we haven't been blogging as faithfully as we should be; we missed uploading our blog entry for last week. Really, it's a reflection of our concern for you, our reader. The way it works is pretty simple actually; the more comments you post, the better and more frequently we blog...

JUST KIDDING!!!

Here is last week's update.

Becca and I went to the Parque Villa Lobos. It was a super nice park, not quite as much shade as Ibirapuera though. We rented a tandem bike...

which turned out to be a lot of fun! The seats kept falling down at random times during our trip which made for a mega-exciting ride. Not only did we have to worry about staying balanced, we also had to worry about the impact landings on our back ends.

Later on we found a drum playing stand. They had cut up metal barrels and stuck them to a wall. I played until there was a line built up behind me (a little kid and his mom).

Then we moved on and found a little bell set, even better...

This is what the shady part of the park looked like.
This was a sweet ampitheater that we saw. Note the concrete block extending over the theater without any support. An ingenious bit of architecture.
End.

The Lookrooms

We were reading about the amenities offered by our hotel, notice the "Lookrooms." It is actually "locker rooms" in Portuguese, kind of ironic isn't it? Bad translations are always a funny thing to us!

It was even funnier when we went to see the locker rooms though, they were complete with a toilet, sink, shower, and...window?
Maybe it wasn't a bad translation after all... as you can see from the picture, it actually was a "look room!" The window opens right up to a patio area where groups of people gather to hang out. Oh no! I guess these are two rooms that we won't be using while we are here! Ha Ha
And this is the swimming pool on our roof... Awesome! We'll get a great workout swimming laps in this pool.

"Museu dos Oculos" and "Parque Ibirapuera"

Things are going well here in Brasil. Craig is enjoying work, and being given more and more projects to do. His boss has been impressed with the projects that he has done, which is really good! My Portuguese is coming slowly, but I am still progressing and picking up a little more of it every day. I finally have a volunteer position at an Englisk speaking Elementary school! Hooray! Now I can leave the wonderful world of our hotel and surrounding neighborhood. Instead of reading, being crafty, online scrapbooking, etc. all day, now I get to ride on the bus with Craig to go volunteer at the Elementary which happens to be really close to his work! I am really excited! I didn't realize that I would miss teaching as much as I have been. So I am excited to be back in the school soon.

Even though Craig is working all day and I am staying home, we have a blast together when he comes home at night and on the weekends. This past weekend was exceptionally long because of the Brazillian Independence Day on Monday. It was fantastic!

Sao Paulo has a museum for just about anything you want to see...so on Saturday we found a museum we could walk to that was all about glasses! It was kind of random, but really fun! They had glasses from the 15th century on up. Here are some of the crazy ones we saw....

Yes, the ones you see here do have "shades" like on a window!

Here we are outside of the museum. We thought the building even looked fun!

While walking back home, we saw a little neighborhood that had strung these green, white, and red strands down the street. I don't know if you can tell from the picture, but the strands are made from little windmills! It was fun to see them all spinning! It was like a little Italian part of the city!

Saturday night, we got to be part of the huge Brazillain -Argentine rivalry and watch the big soccer game. One of Craig's co-workers invited us over to watch it. It was a lot of fun seing how dedicated Brazillians are to their team. It wasn't as intense as it could have been....the Brazillian team won an easy game of 3-1, so I don't think we really experienced what these games could really be. Our hosts even made Mexican food for us, which turned out very delicious, even though they said it was their first time trying to cook it. (Side note: it is hard to find the right spices and ingredients for Mexican food, and impossible to find tortillas down here, so we were really happy that they made it for us!)

On Monday, we walked to the big futbol (soccer in the U.S.) stadium, and stopped by the Museum there. It was closed, so we didn't get to go in, but it was a beautiful building, in a beautiful part of town.

This shows the neighborhoods surrounding the stadium. It turns out Sao Paulo actually has some houses, not just apartment buildings! The parkinglot by the museum was huge! There were people there playing with remote control cars, longboarding, learning how to ride a bike, etc. It was fun to see this big open space for people to just have fun!
In the afternoon, we went to Parque Ibirapuera. I would compare this park in Sao Paulo to hold as much significance to the people here as does Central Park to the people in NYC. It is a pretty big deal. But we loved it just as much as everyone else! Who wouldn't when you can buy a popsicle, toss a frisbee around, play on one of the many basketball courts, play a pick up game of volleyball, or rollerblade along the sidewalks? It was a HUGE, beautiful park with lots of trees, grass space, and even a little lake. And yes, we did buy popsicles (Graviola...my new favorite flavor of fruit!) and toss a frisbee around, which was a lot of fun.

I couldn't believe how big the leaves were on this tree!

This is the lake in the park, it was really pretty.

To top the day off, we had "acai na tigela" which is frozen acai berries blended up with guarana, topped with granola. It is so delicious! Probably one of my favorites!

Sao Paulo has so many differnet parts of town. This is just the little place we buy the acai treat from. I love all of the fun colors on the buildings, so I took a picture.