Questions, Questions, Questions

Yesterday after everyone left we started poking around the house, and started a page of questions to ask....somebody. The biggest question we had immediately was internet access. It doesn´t seem like it should be a big deal, but we had no way to communicate with all of you loved ones back at home. The internet was out and we couldn´t get it to work. It is amazing how much we rely on the internet to communicate with everyone. We also were going to pick up a cell phone in Recife (ours from home wouldn´t work out here) and had left Recife sooner then we thought we would. Sandro nicely lent us his cell phone for the afternoon. The next question was how to get rid of our garbage. The reason this was so important is because you are not allowed to flush toilet paper down the toilet, you put it in a trash can beside the toilet. The toilets in this house have a little sprayer for the "big" jobs fortunately. Even so, that garbage starts to reek really quickly! Another concern is the water, which you can´t drink. Sandro had told us to contact him to get water delivered, but could we cook with the water? How do we wash the dishes? Also I remembered that to eat fresh vegetables here we needed to soak them in bleach or something like that, but I couldn't find any anywhere.

Sandro saved us around the time we were talking about phoning him by showing up at the house. With our broken Portuguese and some hand signals here and there, with his English, which is actually pretty good, we explained some of our problems and questions. He tried out the internet and told us it wasn't working because of the storm. I'm actually having problems saving this again so this might not be published until tomorrow (right now it is 16:30 on Friday the 5th). He found some vegetable alcohol vinegar cleaner stuff in the fridge and told me to soak lettuce and such in water with a few drops of that. He found some dish soap as well. Told us that garbage gets picked up daily, you just put your bags out on the road before 8. There are little garbage bags all down the road, now that we look. Incidentally, Shaun picked up around 60$ worth of groceries, and the checkout person packed the groceries in around 20 bags. No exageration. He said they even double bagged a lot of stuff that didn't need double bagging. Apparently they haven't heard of global warming down here...haha.

Some other stuff that is different than home that some of you may find interesting:

The stove is propane and they have a propane tank under their counter. The keyboard is portuguese, so it has ç where the : usually is, and has other symbols moved around. I don't know what is normal but here they have a perculater for coffee. If you buy normal milk it isn't pasteurized so it's only good for a day or two. The other kind of milk sits on a shelf in a tetrapack until it's good for months...so is it actually milk? You may think this is a problem for my kids (who go through around 5 gallons of milk a week) but they seem to like it alright.

It's really interesting being here thinking that we may come back for a longer time in the future. You really pay attention to what you like and what you don't like. I also am writing a lot of this for my own personal memories. I know that you get used to things so fast that you forget how they were, or how you felt or reacted to them when you first were presented with them. But because I'm trying to write everything I notice, it does get a bit long-winded, and I'm sorry for that.

By the way, the internet has been coming in and out while I've been writing this. Also our power went out for a few seconds. There is a tropical storm going on, which dumped 35mm today, and supposed to be 25 tomorrow, and then apparently supposed to diminish over the weekend. Seth and Shaun walked down to the beach in the pouring rain and blustering wind today. Of course they came back with coral which Seth put in the bugcatcher he painted this morning! The windows of this house are not sealed very well so we had many puddles of rain all over the house. With the tiled floors it makes it very slick. Half of the upstairs is an open balcony, so we had rain dripping down the stairs. Other than that, the house will be a wonderful place to live for a couple of months. I feel like I could write a lot more observations, but I must go watch some Brazilian TV and hopefully learn some Portuguese while I'm at it. Love to you all from us in Brazil!