O Centro

Ugh! It's 90 degrees in our apartment at 1:30am! I miss central aaaaiiiirrrr...


I went on a little adventure downtown today. I stopped in the "big" used book store and picked up 3 books in English. 2 were hard cover and one was Updike, and it was less than 30 reais! What a steal.

I particularly enjoy walking around our downtown area because it has all these random knick-knack shops. There's one I found before I went home for Christmas, but it's really hard to find parking close to it. But today I was on my way over to it anyway (probably about half a mile from the bookstore, but I didn't want to hassle trying to move the car) when I found an even BETTER awesome knick-knack store!

It totally filled my cravings for Big Lots-style shopping. I don't know how these little stores are able to offer products are reasonable prices when most other places don't. I've heard that some illegally import the stuff from Paraguay, but almost everything I bought today had the "industria brasilera" sticker. I'll try to figure it out and get back to you.

So, at the store (it had a name, but I don't remember it, so I'll call it The House of Plastics), I picked up some wonderful household luxuries:
1. Ice trays for the freezer
2. A napkin holder for the dining room table
3. A new broom, dust pan, and hand scrub brush since we destroyed ours with the tile-cleaning process
4. A cute little tray thing that goes by the kitchen sink and holds our soap and sponges. These are actually really common here, but this one is special because it's raised and has holes to prevent mold.
5. Hangers
6. A new spatula (since we left ours in the oil while frying coxinhas and destroyed it... whoops)

All that for only 23 reais! I know it sounds kind of silly that I'm so excited to have found that kind of stuff for so cheap, but those are the types of little things that make living more convenient, and also that make the apartment feel a bit more permanent. It's been very frustrating to know that this kind of household bric-a-brac is so cheap to make, and yet we have to pay unrealistic prices in other stores for it. (For example, a new broom at the bigger stores here is usually around 15-20 reais. In this store, it was 4.50!)

So all in all, it was pretty satisfying.
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Another one of my old students from the Stupid Job scheduled and started private classes with me at home. (I'm up to 3 now. I feel no guilt from stealing away so many students! Crazy boss can suck it.) Anyhoo, she wants 4 classes a week! My private class setup is actually taking off this time. (These 3, plus 2 people that are friends of other students.) I guess the last time was just a stroke of bad news bears who didn't follow through, because people are actually sticking to their schedules and paying up this time around. (Chalk it up to post-Carnaval resolutions!)
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I guess that's it. I didn't know this was possible, but people wrote other captions for one of the lolcat pictures I posted of Gatinha in the last entry. Some are really good. You can check them out here if you want a good chuckle: http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/TemplateView.aspx?tiid=1114231


That's it for now. Ya know, I'm kind of running out of ideas of things to tell you guys about. Any questions or requests?

Have a good week. :)