Carnaval?

This is the extent of my Carnaval experience:

...watching the Sao Paulo parade on TV.

One of my teacher friends, Ana, volunteered to go to with me to a parade, but the closest one was about an hour away and at a crazy fairgrounds place. The only things in our city are the private parties at the athletic clubs that both Ana and Alexandre insist aren't worth the money.

Sigh.

I wish I could've just decided for myself that I didn't like Carnaval, instead of the few people I'm close to deciding it for me.

It's been like any other weekend, with a sushi dinner and a late-night trip to the grocery store. Summer means a plethora of fruits I've never seen before...


... including giant bananas and tiny bananas! (10 points for anyone who can make up a good dirty joke):


The good thing about the week is that I'm on vacation:

Haha. I've wanted an excuse to post that picture for weeks! Yes, it's a LOLcat, NOT Garbage!

Also, our weather has been hot, but lovely. Here's a picture on a nice clear day, and one of the main roads here:

And here's a great sunset from our apartment window:

:)

On the news today, I saw a special about guaraná. This is guaraná:
It's a fruit with a lot of caffeine. The Nor-Cal hippies pronounce it guh-rá-nuh, and since I hadn't seen it written in either language, it took me some time to realize that the hippies and the Brazilians were talking about the same thing.

Guaraná is used for lots of things, but in my reality, guaraná just translates to a fruit that makes a delicious soda.

On the news special, they told the myth of why guaraná looks like it has eyes. From what I understood (since the news was in Portuguese), an indian woman had a negative encounter of some sort with a snake and got pregnant (not sure if she got pregnant FROM the actual snake). Then the men in the tribe killed the baby. The woman buried it and from where it was buried, the first guaraná plant grew. But then I went to Wikipedia and the story was totally different. So either my Portuguese is much worse than I thought, or there is more than one myth about the fruit. Here's the news video, you can see for yourself, as well as seeing all the stages of guaranás preparation:

Anyway. That's what I've been up to here. A whole lot of cleaning and not doing anything for Carnaval. At least I can sleep in!