Home…at least temporarily,

I still have not found a place to stay so I’m at this hotel, which doesn’t exactly leave me with a sense of being home. But Friday night hanging out with my fellow classmates really helped me to feel like I was home. We got together for Gaetan’s birthday. Of course this had to be done Brazilian style so a bunch of us met up for a drink at the corner bar/loncheria. The cool thing about these places is that it’s a place where people gather from the neighborhood everynight and socialize. You don’t have to drink beer because you can get a suco (juice/smoothie) or you can also buy food. After the pre party dining/drinking we walked across the street to Gaetan’s place. As soon as he opened the door to the apartment he was sharing with some Brazilians, it looked like we were stepping into some swanky bar lounge. There were vinyl records arranged on the walls, antique tin cans hanging from the ceiling and of course velour couches, red-lighting and a wet bar in the middle of the living room. We’ve only been here a week but this night we bonded. It felt like we had all known each other for ages. No one brought their camera, including myself, so no pictures were taken. This was probably a good thing since our attempt to practice the Brazilian method for checking testing sobriety, which involves standing on one leg and forming a figure 4, led to some yoga poses and a eventually a handstand… so of course we were sober….right?