First Snowman!

When you move to a place that has snow during the winter the first two things that you need to do, after losing the fear of it, are to build a snowman and go sledding.  But so far this winter has been disappointing. We got a lot of cold weather with wind chills reaching below zero, but where has the snow been? We had only two main days with snow; one was December 31, 2012 and the other was February 22, 2013.  On this last day, my wife and I built our first snowman.

After a day out of the city, my wife removed all snow from our driveway and sidewalk in the morning. I came back in the afternoon and looking in our backyard we had a good amount of snow to do something, so we decided to create our snowman. We had an idea how to do it, but when we started we realized that it was not as easy as we thought.

We built the base with a medium snowball but the shape was not too good. When we put the second on top of the first one, our man was looking like a mushroom instead of a snowman.  We started to rebuild the base. We tried once, twice, and the third time we got it.

The last part was the head and that was easy. It was a small ball and some sticks for the hair, arms, and mouth. We included a scarf and it was done. Our first snowman stood outside until last Friday when the sunlight destroyed it.

It was a good experience but maybe we need to wait until next winter to complete our journey and go sledding on the snow!

Carnival in the U.S.A.!

Who said that we would not have “Carnaval” here in the U.S.A.!

Carnaval (or Carnival in English) is the biggest popular celebration in Brazil. It’s a 4 day party, starting on Friday and finishing on Tuesday and in some places like Bahia the end of Carnival is not until Wednesday. Here, it was different. The party started Friday at 10 p.m. and finished at 2 a.m. It was short, but it was still very good.

The Carnival was in Champaign, a city with a good size college (University of Illinois). The host bar was Radio Maria, downtown. The place was crowded!

My wife and I went there with another Brazilian couple, and as soon as we arrived, even before we entered the bar, we heard Rio’s funk. It was a strange way to start the Carnival (Where was the samba?).

Shortly after we entered, around 11:00 p.m. the samba and axé music started. Instead of a band they had a DJ playing the songs. The guy mixed different kinds of Brazilian music, from Rio’s funk to axé to Sertanejo.

Another positive point was the number of Brazilian people inside the bar. I didn’t know that Champaign has a lot of Brazilian students. It was easy to listen to Portuguese there. We stayed until the end, exactly 2:00 a.m.

I think we need to visit Champaign more often to meet other Brazilians!

Happy New Year !

Is it possible to celebrate the New Year 3 times in the same location? I can say that it's possible, and I’ll tell you how.

During the New Year’s celebration, it's sad when you are far from your family, but we are building another type of family here. There are other Brazilian families that celebrated the New Year here in the USA, so my wife and I joined their celebration.

At this time of the year, Brazil is 4 hours ahead of Central Time in the US. So when it was 8:00 pm here, it was midnight in Brazil, and we celebrated for the first time. We watched on TV the fireworks at Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, the famous New Year celebration in Brazil.

At 11:00pm, we celebrated the East Coast New Year because CNN was showing the Times Square party, and we had an American couple that usually celebrates at that time. Our final celebration was at midnight, local time, with all the families together.

It was not the perfect New Year, but it was very fun and I enjoyed it a lot. But I can tell you right now that next New Year I will be in Brazil with my and my wife's families celebrating 2014.

Happy New Year !