hola mi amigos!

I never thought I would say this but... 

I really miss living in Belo Horizonte. 

I thought it was such a ghetto... until I moved to the middle of the desert and a city that doesn't even have a shopping mall or a McDonald's. Do I sound like a spoiled brat? I don't mean to.. but... 

Belo was so.... big. Millions of people and unexplored streets. Sometimes I would hop on the bus and just ride around the city. There were shopping malls. HUGE ones. Restaurants, coffee shops, cultural events, you could hike in the hills on the outskirts of the city, there were parks with grass and trees (I always freak out when I see grass on TV here. The "parks" and squares here are either concrete or sand.) 

And the seasons. Ohhh the change of seasons! Those cold rainy days I would crank up my heater and snuggle in bed, and then a few months later it's so hot your skin almost melts away. And though I would prefer to live by the sea, Rio is only an 8 hour bus ride away..

*Sigh. 

Yesterday Deison and I went for supper, and as we turned on the road to get to our house there were a bunch of wild horses trotting down the cobblestone street. And no one was bothered. 

Where am I, 1879?! 

A lot of people have horses here, which pull a cart that they sit on with their merchandise. And they drive down the street in the middle of heavy traffic like it's no big deal.

Deison once asked me if we had horses on the streets in Canada. 

Can you imagine? Winnipeg.. Portage Avenue.. there's buses and cars zipping along, and then all of a sudden a horse is just prancing along and no one finds it odd?

A few weeks ago I was walking to the store and I passed this old woman sitting on her rocker outside, curlers in her hair, popping bubble wrap. 

There's so many strange sights.

That.. only I find strange.

I'm interested to see what Deison sees in Canada that he finds weird that I don't think twice about. Looking through another set of eyes...

Also, I'm starting a new project. 

I'm going to learn Spanish. I can understand a lot of it already anyway as Portuguese and Spanish are so similar, but my goal for 2013: become tri-lingual. Since a lot of Latin-based languages are similar in their grammatical structure and vocab, they say it's not hard to learn the others once you learn one. Since I already speak Portuguese, the rest should be a breeze - theoretically speaking. So after Spanish I think I'll conquer French. And then maybe Italian. And then maybe Latin. I know it's a dead language but I might as well do them all right?