Well, I had a great weekend, how about you? Really though, after a long string of satisfyingly relaxing but dull weekends, this one was pretty non-stop and fun. To start with, on Friday night, we were invited to dinner at a friend's house, though we were very late, because I had to teach until 8:30. So after arriving late, we ate a bit, had a drink, and went to the praça in town for live music. For the first time since arriving in Sal Rei, there was a crowd in the center of town, drinking and listening to music. I'm not sure if it's just because it is starting to be tourist season and they want to put on a good show for the cash cows, I mean, visitors, but it was a good time. We got pretty tired pretty early, because it was such a long and exhausting week, so we were back home by midnight, and I was asleep by 12:05.

We had invited a lot of people over for dinner on Saturday, promising Mexican food, so we spent a lot of Saturday preparing for that. I spent all morning walking around town, buying a few things for dinner, but mostly trying to organize picking up some of our stuff from the port. Peace Corps sent us our beds, tables, and chairs from Praia by boat, so we had to get them. Unfortunately, this involves finding someone with a truck we can use while both the port and the future apartment are both open at the same time. Harder than it sounds. Turns out that neither were open Saturday morning. So hopefully that will happen early this afternoon. Anyway. I relaxed a bit in the early afternoon, and then we tackled making dinner. We made enchiladas, refried beans, and spanish rice. To those of you in the US, this is not terribly exciting. To anyone who has lived overseas, this is earth-shattering. Nadia's mom sent her some spices you can't get here, like chili powder, so that is what made a large part of it possible. In any event, 6 or 7 friends came over and ate with us, and the dinner was a huge success. The enchiladas were awesome, and the rice was also very good. The beans were good, but I think I need to work on that one a bit. Not that it really mattered to our guests, considering that I don't think any of them had really had any of these things before. So everyone stuck around until eleven or so, and took off. One guy promised to return in an hour to pick us up to go out to Mazurka, the one and only real discoteca around here, but three things prevented that: we passed out in the living room of sheer exhaustion; the power went out at midnight, as always, thus ensuring that we would not wake up again; and Paolo never showed anyway. He just told me this morning that he fell asleep at home. And a bird just smacked headfirst into the window of the CEJ. Lovely.

Which brings us to Sunday. We had planned on not doing a damn thing all day. At least, that's what I planned. Reading, running, swimming, napping were the only agenda items. But Helena, a Portuguese teacher at the high school, called at 10 asking if we wanted to go on a little trip with her and her family. So obviously we said yes. Helena and her boyfriend Tony came with the two kids and we drove to the opposite shore, in the northeast corner of the island. After picking up two more kids in João Galego, we went to a place called Baia das Gatas, where the water is calm, shallow and warm. So I spent about two hours floating in two foot deep bathtub-warm water, sipping cold beer and eating watermelon. I can think of at least 7 million worse ways to spend a Sunday. We went to a little fisherman's shack nearby, where we bought some fresh fish and eel. We then returned to João Galego, where Tony is from and where most of his family lives. The whole family was absolutely amazingly nice, and it also turns out that at least two other people I know in Sal Rei are immediately related to them. That's just what it's like here. One big family. My counterpart also has family there, so she was there with a coworker, and we chatted with them briefly. We hung out with Tony's family until about 8 pm, drinking beer, chatting, eating, and just hanging out. I got to witness my first goat killing, followed by my first goat skinning, gutting, and dismembering. My only observation is really just that there was a lot less blood than I thought there would be. I guess the goat was pretty small, but still. We deep fried the moray after it got dark, which was delicious, as always, though the little spine bones are a pain in the ass. Tony's uncle and their neighbor, who also works at the high school here, were particularly drunk and were desperate to practice their English. I obligingly had many long, drunkenly repetitive conversations with them about various and sundry topics, but mostly we just reiterated many times over how Boa Vista is the best island in the country, and how they also think it is the best place in the world to live. Anyway, other than the conversations in English, one of the best parts of the day was realizing that I had almost zero trouble with Creole all weekend. I managed to carry on conversations with a minimum of pausing and repeating, and overall had a damn fine time of it. Go me.

So that's all for now. Back to putting together an English course.