Settling in...

Ive been in Brazil for about a week now but arrived in Juiz de Fora on Saturday afternoon. After spending only a few days in this city, that will be my new home for the next five months, I have already met lots of really nice and helpful people and been able to explore a lot of the city. The three other students in the program and I started our portuguese language course on Monday and will take the course for the next two weeks. The course is intended to help us with communicating around the city but more importantly prepare us for our first day of class at the university on August 9th. Right now I am living in an apartment about halfway between the downtown and university. I have two american roommates who are here to take a computer science class at the university but they will leave in the next week. Since I do not have the opportunity to speak portuguese while at my home I am trying to move in with a Brazilian family or get an apartment with a Brazilian student. This sort of language immersion would help me a lot with learning portuguese....help that I could definitely use at the moment. The portuguese language has a lot of similarities with spanish so my background in spanish has been helpful but the accent is proving difficult to pick up. I can only hope that my accent improves by the time classes start in a few weeks. Other than the difficulties with the language, the experience thus far has been amazing. Im very excited for the next five months!

Garrett