Tuesday night capoeira wasn’t so great. It was taught by the master whose style I don’t particularly care for because he uses lots of maneuvering on the ground and adores moves that involve supporting your weight with your head (which I don’t feel properly trained to do and I’m mildly-severely concerned that I’ll snap my neck and become a vegetable). He also made us all take turns playing an instrument and since I have no instrumental training I played a little percussion instrument that basically looks like a small and a big coconut on a stick with circle openings on the top that you strike with a stick to create a dung-DUNG-dung sound. Then to top off the class he pulled me out and made me fight with him, whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiich… didn’t go that well. Uff! Right when I thought I was catching on! Some days I genuinely love going to capoeira, then others I feel so incompetent… but I figure that I can afford to humiliate myself in front of people who live on the other side of the world. I can only get better, right?

Yesterday I officially registered for classes which means that I can’t switch around anymore. We still haven’t heard about whether my anemia class will be funded, but we are going to start preparing anyway. Yesterday we started discussing different types of nematodes and amoebas that can cause anemia. Our teacher told us that last semester at a birthday party the class saw a boy get sick and throw up some worms- a few even came out his nose. Infection normally occurs from contact with infected human feces or water/vegetables/fruits that have been infected. Good times, eh?

I gave a presentation today in my Spanish class and I think that I mostly spoke in Spanish. My main issue is pronouncing words like ‘de’ correctly, that is, with a soft ‘d’ like they do in Spanish and not the ‘g’ sound that is used in Portuguese. When I got home I read through a few articles in Spanish and my pronunciation is coming back. Just hearing Spanish spoken does wonders to help me differentiate the two in my mind. I also bought a Portuguese- Spanish dictionary that I think will force me to go from English to Portuguese to Spanish when I want to look up a word so that I am reminded of the Portuguese word as well.