vizinhos macaco

I just got back from running a few errands with Betto and spending way too much on dog food. Ah, language barriers. Betto was able to talk to the shop workers and get us a discount. That’s what we get for not wanting to feed our dogs the McDonald’s equivalent of pet food. We also had to pick up some fly-preventative collars. Supposedly there is an insect-borne illness here that can be transmitted to dogs. We could get them a vaccine, but Betto doesn’t seem to be too worried about it. He says the collars are fine.

I just put Penny’s on and she’s moping about it.

We spent the weekend mostly just hanging out. On Saturday we went to an open air market by the TV Tower in the city center. There was an interesting mix of tourist-y knick-knacks and things that local people buy. We didn’t buy anything. It definitely reminded us of the Muslim bazaar in Xi’an, China, though. After that we headed over to Grenat, a café downtown. It opened at 1 pm, so we had lunch there (really good steak sandwiches on baguettes) and coffees. Yes- Brett had a mocha!

Later we came home and wanted to swim, but it wasn’t as hot up here as it was down in the center. The dogs did though (well, Penny). We also found out about a farmer’s market that is open on Saturdays just up the road from us. We will definitely be hitting that up! The next day our neighbors invited us to eat breakfast with them. They had a fruit strudel, some small strawberry cakes from the bakery, coffee, juice, green tea, pao de queijo, and some breads. We hung around eating for maybe three hours.

love these goofs.

After we left, it seemed like we’d only been gone for an hour when they invited us back down for lunch!  They had leftover meat from a prior barbeque so we had that, along with some corn and potatoes, squash and bread. A couple of their friends came over to play War (Risk, essentially) but that didn’t happen until way later. Brett played for a little while, but we had plans to go see Star Trek. After the movie we very nearly got locked into the Carrefour parking lot, but we heard a guard signaling to us the exit, thankfully.

Our monkey neighbors came to visit the other day as well. Desmond didn’t like them, but Penny really wanted to know why they wouldn’t come down and play. One of them sat around for a long time just throwing sticks down to Penny. I was sitting outside while they climbed around in the trees.. it was actually quite frightening because I’ve been told they will come down and take food if you have it out. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them making their monkey noises above me. I don’t think they’ll come down with the dogs around though.

Tonight I’m going to go with Estella to the University of Brasilia and attempt to register for a Portuguese class. So we will see about that.. it’s essentially a 48 hour intensive course, over a certain amount of days or weeks. I haven’t figured out how long it is. I will hopefully be able to teach Brett some :)

sweet zion

looking for macacos

he came down pretty close! Penny loved it.