We had a wonderful Thanksgiving here in Rio, even though we are missing our families during the holidays.

Our Thanksgiving festivities started at school, where my American History class and I celebrated by reading historical Thanksgiving documents, including George Washington’s and Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamations. The kids brought in desserts to share after the school cafeteria’s Thanksgiving turkey lunch, and I baked them a pumpkin pie, since most of them had never tasted one before. Then, we watched Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving, in true American tradition.

After school, we were invited by our friends Rhonda and Chris to their family’s Thanksgiving celebration, where we ate far too much Cajun-style turkey, stuffing, and pie with some fellow teachers and friends from church. It was a great holiday, and we are thankful that we had wonderful friends to spend it with.

Yesterday we were fortunate enough to attend the 33rd anniversary concert of a friend’s singing group. Our friend Julio Carvalho, from Union Church, has been a member of the Sons of Israel (Filhos de Israel) men’s octet, a group that travels around to churches in southeastern Brazil performing inspirational music.

The concert was at a little Baptist church about twenty miles outside of Rio–just imagine your church stuck out in a crumbling suburb, surrounded by green hills, bicycle shops, hamburger carts, and laundry hanging from people’s balconies. Add peeling paint, wooden slatted pews, and a picture of a waterfall painted on the back wall of the baptistry. We were the only English speakers there, and the service was entirely in Portuguese. It lasted from 7:30 to 11 PM. It was wonderful.

There were four singing groups other than the Filhos de Israel, including a large men’s choir, another men’s group, a quartet of young men who sang some very cool modernized hymns and some old Michael W. Smith in Portuguese, and JeVi, a mixed septet whose name stands for Jesus e Vida, Jesus is Life.

One of the greatest blessings of being here is seeing Jesus praised by so many different kinds of people. Going to church last night with Julio was one of the highlights of our time here so far. His wife and daughters and some grandchildren were there, as well, and we had a great time after the service trying out our Portuguese and licking cake off napkins in the Brazilian style.

I meant to write more about the Olympics immediately after they were over, but I’ve been sick for the last week, which tends to get in the way of things like that for me.

Anyway, we’ve both always enjoyed the Olympics, and watching them in a different country was a unique experience. There’s a lot less of the American teams, naturally, but you get to see a lot of sports that you wouldn’t in the US. Sometimes, that’s because these sports are dumb, like handball and racewalking. Other times, though, they’re pretty cool, like judo. And some sports, there’s a good deal of both Brazilians and Americans–specifically in volleyball, which the two countries collectively dominate. There was also a good deal of swimming on TV, because everyone loves Michael Phelps. Brazil also won their first swimming gold this year.

They did not, however, win the gold in soccer, much to the consternation of pretty much the whole nation. They were stuck with the bronze, after a stunning 3-0 defeat at the hands of the hated Argentinians. My 7th grade class, though, has as many Argentinians as there are Brazilians, so when I announced the score in the middle of a quiz, there was delightful consternation. Good times.

The Olympics are not just about bitter national rivalries, though. They’re also about kitschy corporate promotions. Here in South America, McDonalds treated us to the “China Menu“. This includes three items– the “Beijing Burger,” a hamburger with chop suey on it; “Rice Sticks,” two bricks of fried rice, deep fried; the “Imperial Dessert,” a sundae with some kind of banana fritter, topped with crystallized, caramelized sugar. The first is terrible (there’s a reason you don’t put chop suey on burgers, and Brazil isn’t exactly known for its chop suey in the first place), the second is pretty good (could use some bits of pork), and the third is fantastic. The term ‘Beijing Burger,’ though, is a bit odd, considering that they call Beijing “Pequim” here.

This is not, however, the strangest thing about the Olympics in Brazil. Brazilians have an odd relationship with/understanding of China. lt reveals itself in occasionally odd ways–ways that might be considered insensitive by, say, most of the civilized world. Things like a takeout place called “China In Box.” So then we were watching the Olympics on ESPN Brasil, and saw this:

And we thought to ourselves, “was that really what it looked like?”

Oh yes, it certainly was. It was the mascot for their coverage of the games, and we saw it dozens more times.

Yes, Brazil is definitely a different country.

This morning, the maid next door leaned across her balcony railing and hailed me with a long string of Portuguese. The following conversation, I’m ashamed to say, was the best I could manage:

Me: Eu nao falo Portuguese. (I don’t speak Portuguese.)
Maid: (Another long string of Portuguese)
Me: Eu so uma Americana. (I am an American.)
Maid: (Looks shocked. Throws her arms out and utters another long string of words.)
Me: Eu nao intende. (I don’t understands. At this point my verb conjugation has suffered from my nerves, and I have used the third person form of the word “understand.”)
Maid: (More Portuguese, accompanied by sweeping motions. I now understand that she is asking if we want her to be our maid, too.)
Me: Nao aqui. (I am now blending Portuguese and Spanish, also using the word for “here” instead of the word for “now,” because I don’t know the word for “now.” Tim later tells me it is “agora.”)
Maid: (More Portuguese)
Me: Desculpe, desculpe, tchau. (Sorry, sorry, goodbye.)

There you go. My first conversation with a Brazilian.

I’ve been remiss in posting about last weekend. We’ve been houseguests for so very long, it was nice to be houseguests for someone else for a change. Jeana has done an excellent job of running down the events of the weekend, though she left out the enormous Apple-shaped bouncy toy, and the fact that Geary ordered tripe in his flautas. But with such an entertaining weekend, there was no way to include it all.

Thanks to Geary, Jeana, Noah & Toby for their hospitality. It was a wonderful break from the waiting.

Nope. Nada. None. So we’ll have to reschedule our flight. The packing is going fairly well, though I never realized before just how many books we own. Too many. Add to that the random drawer-stuff, and you have a fairly good picture of my life at the moment.

We were very pleased in the last couple of days to host my college roommate Sara and her baby girl Evelyn, who has got to be the cutest and smartest little girl in the world. Evelyn, 18 months, has enjoyed spinning my spinning wheel, playing with the air mattress pump, and going to the dog beach to throw rocks into the water and sit down in the waves. A good time was had by all.