The past few days have gone by very fast (as I expected them to). We have done a lot of basking in the Brazilian sun in the past few days (and have worked up pretty good tans). Every morning we have gotten up around 7 and gone to the beach for an hour or two and then started our day. We've mostly just been shopping around in various stores. We have gone to The New York City Center in The Mall of the Americas (haha), Wal-Mart (lol) and various other corner stores. It seems the Brazilians really like pasta, cookies, and alcohol. It's very interesting to see so much English written on everything here (like shirts, billboards and various food items) and have so few people actually speak English. But we have been somewhat learning the language. We now know most of the fruits, vegetables and meats for the grocery store and some frequently used words like thank you (obrigado), towels (toalhas), and the name of our hotel (Barraleme). Before I came here many people told me that Portugese was very similar to Spanish and I thought that I'd be fine because I took 3 years of Spanish. However, upon arriving here, I found that although some words were spelled the same in Spanish and Portugese, they were not pronounced the same whatsoever. "R"'s are pronounced as "h"'s and "a"'s are pronounced as "er", just to name a few. It's all very strange to me, but I'm trying to figure it out. Anyway, we haven't just been beach bums or shopoholics, we have actually gone somewhere. A few days ago we went to the Botanical Gardens (Jardim Botanico), which is what it sounds, many plants and trees all over the place. It was really beautiful and I took an enormous amount of pictures there. Hopefully I will upload them and acually learn how to post them on here one day so you guys can see... Tomorrow we are planning to go to a mountain called Corcovado which is one of the biggest mountains in Rio and has a humungo statue of Jesus on the top that can be seen from very far away. It should be very cool but I hope the weather holds up; it's supposed to rain and get colder starting tomorrow :( Although in Brazil "cold" means about 70 degrees. Right now it is a toasty 85 degrees during the day, perfect beach weather. Well, it seems I've written enough for today...peace out