Home Sweet Home 2

As you can tell, I haven't had a chance to update this as much as I want to because we still don't have internet at home. Hopefully it should only be a few more days without it.
We are still so happy to be living in this new place with our friends all around us. So far we have had coffee and treats together outside several evenings, and there is a party planned for tonight. It's super convenient to just walk downstairs to have a good time (or to borrow something).
The first night here, all 8 of us neighbors had a little party to celebrate the new move. One of our friends here who is a chef made a bunch of really tasty pizzas for us, and we all toasted to our little villa!

Home Sweet Home

It's been way too long without making a post on here, and after moving and taking a vacation, I am finally getting around to it. Better late than never, right?

We just got home from our beach vacation early this morning, and we are sooo happy to be returning to our new casa! There was some stress and drama associated with the move, but I am happy to leave that in the past. After all of the trouble of arranging the move (can't just call U-Haul down here, had to enact Plan B at the last minute, extra money for bribes, etc.), it was completely worth the hassle in retrospect.

This new place is way bigger, way nicer, way safer, way calmer, and closer to the teatro, gym, and park. We both are still adjusting to the fact that we are not just visiting a friend here, since it used to be our friends' place. As it turns out, there was an open place we were gonna take underneath our friends' old place. Right before we signed the lease, they asked if we would trade places with them, so they ended up moving downstairs, and we moved into an already painted and ready-to-live-in place. Besides having downstairs neighbors that are our friends, we are friends with the other 2 couples that live in the other complex here. Three out of four of the places have musicians from the orchestra, and the other one is has a very cool couple. Everyone gets along very well, and we can't help but think that it's like Melrose Place here, minus the drama!

The guys we ended up hiring to help us move were amazing! Four guys showed up to our old place with a truck and some boxes and tools at a little after 2 pm. They had disassembled our bed and moved all of our furniture and appliances (you have to take your fridge and stove with you) from the old place to the new place by 4 pm. We tried to help them carry some things, and they didn't even want our help. They were incredibly efficient and fast and even joked around the whole time- and it wasn't even expensive.

We were shocked when one guy carried our fridge on his back-

down some steps and across the street!

Inside the new place- that is the living room, 

and you can see the 2 bedroom doors

Success!!!! 

You can see the kitchen 

and laundry room behind us.

I will post more pics later because the internet is being frustratingly slow right now... 

And we're on our way to have some coffee with our new neighbors outside :) 

Serendipity

YAY! We're MOVING!

We just so happened to be checking out a friend's washing machine the other day since ours is a complete dud. After closing the deal to buy their machine, they jokingly asked if we wanted to move into the place under them. We've spent plenty of time in this particular "village" at another friend's place, and I have always imagined this as the place I would want to live in Manaus. Unfortunately for us, when we moved here several months ago, there was nothing available. But now, in less than a week, we will be trading our nice but noisy casa for a nicer, safer, calmer, and bigger casa!!! With plenty of built-in friends in the same complex!

We still need to get all the details ironed-out with the actual moving, disassembling of things, reassembling of things, and all that stuff, but we are both so happy!! Once everything is all settled, I will put up some pics for you all to see.
Oh, and now we don't have to worry about moving that washing machine!

Good Things

I am totally over last week's little issues, and as of now, I am feeling super for several reasons.

First of all, Saturday night a bunch of us girls got together and had a little festa sans men. As if that in itself is not enough fun, we all brought clothes, shoes, and jewelry that we didn't want anymore. So in between eating pizza, pão de queijo, and cake, we dug through piles of our friends' clothes searching for something good. Although I definitely had the least amount of stuff to trade, I mean I did only have 2 suitcases when we moved here, I walked away with some totally adorable things. None of the shoes fit my big ol' feet, but I snagged some black pants and shirts to wear at concerts and a couple really cute dresses. SCORE!

The second reason I am happy is because of the incredible experience I had last night playing Shostakovich Symphony No. 7, "Leningrad." The piece is gigantic and involves 125 people. We played with the Experimental Orchestra, which is like the youth orchestra here, and the musicians filled up the entire stage. The piece was written during WWII and one can hear the soldiers approaching Leningrad, feel the torment and crying of the victims, the hope that remained, and the eventual triumph over the Germans. The piece is very moving in that respect and has some bombastic trombone parts. The Teatro was packed, and everyone seemed to appreciate our efforts. I know it was an incredibly rewarding experience for me that I will always treasure.

This is a rehearsal pic from the newspaper 

article about the concert. 

You can't see the trombones, but there 

were 6 of us in the very back. 

The full theater before we started.

The third reason to smile is that after a long month of waiting, the package my mom sent us finally arrived!! She was told it would take 7-10 days to get here, but according to the tracking, it's been sitting in Brazilian Customs for the last couple of weeks. I never stopped waking up with the hope that today would be the day, and it finally was the day! In our package, we got some much needed chapstick (haven't found any here), contact solution (very $$$ here), some cool Cardinals paraphernalia for the man of the casa, my favorite tea that they don't sell here, yummy salt-and-vinegar chips, and some clothes for me, among other things. All in all, it was worth the wait, and we're already looking forward to the next one!

Recent Frustrations

Lately we have been presented with various situations here in Manaus that really test our patience. While we have actually gotten used to most of the smaller ones, we've encountered a couple especially trying times already this week.
Not much is as embarrassing or annoying as going grocery shopping, getting through the check-out line, and having your card rejected when you try to pay. We had just that happen to us today, but this time, it wasn't that we didn't have enough money in the bank. Right before leaving the house, I checked the balance on my food allowance card (like a debit card from my job), and I saw that it had just been refilled. What luck for us! Needless to say, we left the house with just that card, bought about $100R worth of food, had a rejected card, had to ask them not to put our food away while we walked home, got a real debit card, and walked back to get the groceries. Ughhhhh. It's most frustrating cause it's not our fault, and we wouldn't have bothered to use the card if I hadn't seen the balance on the internet.
Even more annoying, this weekend we planned a vacation with some friends for our week off during Carnaval in February. My friend found a great deal on airline tickets online, and there will be two other couples going with us. Since we were all together, we decided to buy our tickets from the airline's website. We each had to try, no exaggeration, like 40 times to get the tickets to go through without an error. And every single time retrying, I had to enter our names, credit card number, and other info all over again. After 2 HOURS of trying and getting extremely frustrated, my friend ended up getting the tickets for us. We even waited on hold for 30 minutes calling the airline, just to find out that they can't actually sell any tickets, and the problem was just that the system was busy. It was past midnight on a Sunday, which means it was 2 in the morning in the big cities of Brasil, and this is a major airline.
I'm getting the impression that this is really not that unusual here. It's like businesses don't mind if they don't make money or something.  Kinda like the time we went to the movies 15 minutes late, and the guy was too lazy and apathetic to sell us our 6 tickets. Too much work for this so-called worker. I mean, he'd have to take our cash, count it, and put in the drawer. Wow, I'm exhausted just thinking about it!
Oh, and don't get me started on how your debit card won't work at an ATM or at a store when it's particularly busy here... :)

Stuff

Well, a whole week has passed without us going to a party or exploring some part of Manaus. My poor, neglected camera!! I think the fact that I was sick with a cold kinda slowed us down. I just wasn't in the mood to hang out with a bunch of people, exhausting my brain speaking in Portuguese while trying to hide my used Kleenex, ya know?
Luckily I started feeling better just in time for our orchestra concert last night. We had a guest conductor from Italy who spoke only Italian the entire week during rehearsals (my new favorite number is 55 in Italian), and we played some great repertoire. Probably my favorite concert yet this season- Rossini's La Gazza Ladra, Nino Rota's La Strada (movie soundtrack), and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. It was not an easy program, but it was so worth the extra rehearsals. And we played for a full house that was very appreciative, including my hubby.
Now that the Cardinals are out of the Playoffs (boo), Jay is much more available on weekends. We even spent a Sunday afternoon yesterday at the mall with no mention of kick-off times, and he admitted that he was a little happy to not have to be "so obsessed" with football now! Better luck next year, Cards!

Go CARDS!!!

Since this blog is officially called "Our Jungle Journey," I thought it would be nice to include a little something from Jay's point of view.
I just got home from playing an almost 2 hour long mass with chorus, and I was immediately given the pleasure of watching the end of the Cardinals game on the computer. It had finished just a few minutes before I got here on tv, but we have a subscription online to see all the games. Anyway, after an amazing game filled with lots of ups and downs, this house has one extremely happy man in it.
Here's to hoping that next week's game against the Saints doesn't conflict with my concert... I mean, that the Cards win again!!!!! ;)