Happy December everyone!!! This week wasn't a very busy one for our family, but here are a few highlights-

 Because none of our stuff has arrived yet, we are always left trying to come up with creative ways to pass the time. Aubrey invented what she likes to call "couch yoga", so we decided to give it a try.

Aubrey's beautiful pose

Sam's poor attempt to re-create the pose (it's hard when you're not flexible and have super long legs)

We went to the embassy after school on Friday for a tree lighting party and to see Santa. It was more of a "let's plug in the tree lights"party rather than an actual tree lighting party.  Gwen wanted to talk to Santa, but refused to sit on his lap. When we asked her later why she didn't want to sit with him,  she said "Santa scared me".

On Wednesday we didn't have school due to another Brazilian holiday, so we traveled to the mall to look for some valve oil for Aubrey's trumpet. We ended up coming home empty handed, but while we were there we enjoyed a delicious buffet lunch and some fun Christmas displays.

The display also had some snow machines set up, and as we were walking out they turned them on. The Brazilians started going crazy, adults included. Not wanting to miss out on the fun, Jo and Gwen ran in and got their share of the "snow" as well. 

3rd week in Brazil

Hello everyone!

How’s it going? Sorry the email came so late! We didn’t have any reception at our vacation spot, which you’ll hear about in a bit. This week was a bit of a wake up call to the new culture...our first holiday in Brazil!

School was easy, since we only had two full days on Monday and Tuesday and a half day on Wednesday. Wednesday after school, we just rode the bus to the American Embassy to see Dad at work and meet up with Mom and Gwen for a Thanksgiving lunch served at the Embassy. It was good, but Sam missed rolls, Maddy missed stuffing, and Aubrey and Jo missed potatoes.

On Thursday, we participated in a turkey trot to raise money for #jakesmiles, an organization that an Embassy mom founded to raise money for research on lung and heart transplants in Philadelphia, when her 1 year old nephew died from contracting an infection after a transplant. After the run, we headed off for a vacation to Pirenopolis.

That afternoon, it poured, and poured, and poured, but we still ventured out to explore the cobblestone lined village. We stopped for pizza at one of the restaurants and hey, pizza is pizza, but it’s still different than American or Italian pizza(that was also our thanksgiving dinner of sorts).

Friday we set out to go hiking to a waterfall and then went to shop in the town while the sky was clear. For lunch, we went to a Brazilian buffet, and boy, was it GOOD! In Mom’s words, “What wasn’t there!?”. Everyone loved it!

Saturday we woke up early to head out to an adventure park. We got to rappel, swing over a ravine/large ditch, complete an obstacle course, and zip line through the forest. It was awesome, being able to be completely surrounded by the forest. We then went on to go to another waterfall and then came back to the obstacle course site to have a lunch. 85% of the food was from their farm on the property, and you could tell! The butter and cheese had that ‘just churned from fresh milk’ taste, kinda hard to describe, but if you've tasted that before, then you know what we're talking about. There were three dachshund hounds there too and we all loved them. Maybe all except Mom.

Sunday, since there was not a LDS church near us, we took it easy and just went on a few more hikes to waterfalls and then made our way home. It’ll be nice to sleep in our own beds again, but our weekend was such a fun experience! We’d love to hear from all of you-what’s going on in your lives or questions that you have for us.

Next week we are planning on posting our weekly updates on our BLOG!!!!! Sam has decided to update the family blog after much neglect these past two years, so look out for the email with the address soon.

With lots of hugs,

Holman Family

(written by the one and only pair of Holman twins)

WE FOUND KEVIN!!!!!! Any of you disney/pixar fans should know what we're talking about(hint, hint....UP) We saw three of these emu bird things on our trip. We even saw a little baby one who had just hatched but sam forgot her camera at home

Thanksgiving meal in Brazil!

Sam lost the race to Aubrey, meaning she got a pie in the face at the turkey trot

The 1st waterfall we went to

The town mascot- a creepy cow (there were statues everywhere!)

The adorable cobblestone lined town, just one of the many streets we drove down

2nd week in Brazil

Hello again

This week we all started school again. The school is nice and we have all made friends already. Sam and Maddy hang out with a group of 8 kids in our grade. Four of the girls are from Germany, one is from Virginia, and the three guys are from the US and also attend our church. Aubrey and Jo both have a couple of friends who are also from the US.

We are all busy, working hard in our various classes. This year Sam is taking- Portuguese, Gym, Modern World History Biology, Physics, Math, English, and Digital Photography/Video. Madison is taking- Portuguese, Gym, Art, Theater, Modern World History, Physics,

Math, and English. Aubrey is taking Portuguese, Science, Gym, Digital Design, Math, Band, and Humanities(English and World Studies). We are all ahead in most of our classes and our teachers are all awesome. Madison and Sam are a few weeks behind in physics,

but are working hard to catch up. As of now, Sam’s favorite classes are Biology and Photography, Madison’s favorites are History and Art, Aubrey’s is digital design, and Jo loves art.

We are all looking forward to participating in after-school activities. Jo wants to do drama, art, and origami, Aubrey wants to do cooking and yoga, Maddy wants to do cross-country and the musical, and Sam wants to do jazz band, Basketball, and Volleyball. The

sports here are a lot less rigorous than they were in Maryland, which is a good and bad thing. This means that the teams aren’t as good as some other schools when they go to the tournament at the end of the season, but it also means that your life isn’t controlled

by your school sport.

On Tuesday we didn’t have school, because of a Brazilian holiday. We ended up going to a fun museum with some families from our church.  The museum wasn’t very big- it only had a few exhibits, but everyone’s favorite was the puppet exhibit. It was a room full

of countless old puppets from previous Brazilian puppet shows. A few were actually kind of creepy, but they all had a story to go with them.

After the museum, we went to lunch with our sponsor family(the Dyals). We decided to walk from their apartment building to the french bakery and then to the ice cream shop. Once at the French bakery we found seats outside and ordered our food. Most of us got a “Monte Cristo” sandwich. The younger kids all got these little quiche pizzas with ham and cheese. After we finished lunch, we walked over to an ice cream shop on the other side of town. It was super cute and was also selling pastries and other breads. We all ordered the homemade gelato and went outside to enjoy it. After lunch we headed to the pool at the embassy and swam there. The water was a bit cold, and if anyone knows Madison, she didn’t hop in.

On Friday, we had a bit of an interesting day at school. Right before lunch there was a gas explosion in the cafeteria. Luckily only the cook and one student were badly burned. Madison and Sam actually saw the student after the accident, and it was pretty bad. They were able to rush them to the hospital and are saying they will be alright. It was kind of a scary moment- but the school was able to handle it and make sure everyone was ok. We ended up doing nothing for the rest of the day and a lot of parents came to pick up their students. But I guess that’s the unlucky consequence that rarely happens when your steak(yes..there’s steak for lunch), pasta, rice and beans, bread, and all the other assortments for lunch are prepared and cooked by the chefs. A little bit different than the “food” that is tossed into microwaves in Maryland school lunches, huh?

Saturday morning, Mom and Madison went to a HUGE market that sold fresh fruits, vegetables, eggs, milk, cheese, bread, meat, plants….the list keeps going on. They only went to the produce section and said it was as big as a Costco, but outside. They came home with a ton of fruit and veggies.

Last night it rained like CRAZY!!!! We were actually at a church event during the storm, but as we drove home the streets were flooded. As we entered our neighborhood we noticed that all the houses were dark. When our electric gate wouldn’t open, we realized the

power had gone out. Thankfully, mom had bought candles and matches only a few days before. However, as we were getting ready for bed we noticed a leak in both the laundry room and the family room. Well actually we smelt the one in the family room before we

saw it, but we got it cleaned up and are drying out the carpet.  

One of the creepy puppets at the museum

Gwen enjoying her sweet treat

Our delicious gelato

Our daily fruit counter

Mr. Stubby, our lizard friend

Our new church building

1st week in Brazil

Oi, amigos!!!!!                                                                                                                             We miss you all so much! We decided to start sending out weekly emails, that way we can stay in touch with everyone back in the states. Unfortunately, we have no internet in our house, and won’t for about another week. So, sorry for the late start, but no, we didn’t die for all of you that were worried. We sent this from our sponsor’s home (they graciously invited us over for dinner and luckily have wifi). Our goal is to send out an email every week- again, it’s a goal so we won’t be completely perfect.

The airport shuttle arrived at our rental house at 3:00 pm on Monday. We loaded up all 27 bags and boxes into the back and front row and then crammed into the remaining 6 seats. We got to the airport not long after and proceeded to rent 5 luggage carts. Printing our tickets and checking our bags took a while, due to our family of seven….. We got through security with minimal issues and found our gate. The plane hadn’t arrived yet and wouldn’t until 20 minutes before we boarded. We finally hopped on the plane and were off the ground by 6:30 pm. 

The flight to Miami wasn’t very eventful and by 10:30 pm we were boarding the plane for Brasilia. Once we got on, we quickly realized that we were about the only Americans on board (even the flight attendants were Brazilian). It was fun to hear the language, but we couldn’t pick out a single word. We were getting ready to leave and the flight attendants were having everyone sit down. There was one attendant who the Brazilians named “the witch”. She kept racing back and forth yelling at people to sit down. It soon became a funny joke between the passengers and the Brazilians liked to imitate her.

 The plane left the gate on time and we were sitting on the runway, when the pilot came on and said we were overweight. We went back to the gate and sat, and sat, and sat…. 3 hours later, 1900 lbs. lighter, 6 people less, and with one petition created we left for Brasilia at1:30 am. Sleep didn’t come easily for us because the lights weren’t turned off until the attendants decided to serve “dinner” at 2:30 am. Sam also had a stomach ache and Madison woke up every time she moved, but the rest of the family didn’t have much trouble falling asleep. To be honest, we think Aubrey got at least 12 hours of sleep that night. 

We got into Brazil at 11:30 am on Tuesday (3 hours later then we had originally planned…) and realized how hot it was when wearing pants; plus, most public spaces do not have air conditioning…including the airport.  We went through customs and grabbed about 6 luggage carts (they’re free in brazil!) We claimed our baggage and met our sponsor family, an embassy family who is responsible for helping us adjust to Brasilia. Our luggage and family were loaded into 2 large shuttle vans and 2 cars and we left for our temporary home. We got to our temporary house, started to unpack, and caught up on much needed sleep. 

We haven’t done much this week, but we’ll give you a quick overview of everything we’ve done:

·         Tuesday- Slept, unpacked, and then went out to dinner with our sponsor family. We ended up eating at a local pizzeria a few minutes from our house. The pizza was good, but there were a few slices left over of the veggie pizza (no one liked the pea, corn, and eggplant combo)

·         Wednesday- We relaxed and got situated in the new house. We went out to this super yummy Brazilian buffet place for lunch. Sam’s favorite was the beans and rice and Maddy liked the pasta bar. That evening we found our new church building and went to youth group there. We met a lot of fun and friendly girls who go to the school we’ll go to as well. 

·         Thursday- We went to the Embassy and got a lot of needed work done. We spent most of the day there getting our Brazilian Identification cards made, making school bus arrangements, meeting the US ambassador, creating security badges, and meeting the other Embassy workers. That night there was an Embassy “Meet-and-Greet” party for the new and departing families. It was actually rrrreeeeaaaalllllyyyy boring- the worst party we’ve ever been to. We showed up, our family picture was displayed on a PowerPoint, and then we had the option of buying a crappy $10 burger. We ended up leaving and going to eat pizza with our sponsor family again (random coincidence). We decided to eat at “Pizza a Bessa” (Sam’s new favorite restaurant) and it was DELICIOUS!!!! It was basically an all you can eat pizza buffet, but you didn’t have to get up. Once a pizza was done the waiters would bring it around and you would tell them if you wanted a slice. It was super fun to see the different types of pizza they had. They had a margarita, 4-cheese, hot-dog, chicken garlic, stroganoff, Mexican, arugula, pepperoni, sausage, ham and mushroom, bacon, and beef savory pizza. A few of the sweet ones were cinnamon banana, chocolate marshmallow, chocolate strawberry, goibada cream cheese, and a sweet coconut pizza. The chocolate and banana pizzas were served with ice cream and chocolate sauce on top. It was super yummy and our plates were piled high.

·         Friday- We went to the school and finalized all of our info for that. We met a lady (Noella) who is in charge of getting new students ready and acquainted with the school. She gave us a tour around the campus, which is actually pretty nice. It is a gated area and you travel from room to room outside. It’s pretty neat because the rooms are in closed walls, but everything else is open and outside. We visited the cafeteria and saw the lunch that is served (it’s like a restaurant)- for lunch each day you can choose from homemade feijoada, pão de quejo, a salad bar, pinto beans and rice, and a lot more. The menu changes every day. The school runs on a A and B schedule and on Wednesdays, school doesn’t start until 9 am. Every day after your 2^nd class of the day you have break for 20 minutes and most kids use that time to eat or buy a snack. Before lunch you have 30 minutes of study time/teacher help and then you have an hour for lunch. After we finished the tour, Sam, Madison, and Aubrey got their schedules made and chose our classes. We also took a look at the clubs and sport teams while we were there. The fall season is just finishing and this week the sport teams were all traveling to São Paulo for a tournament. The teams travel all over Brazil for different competitions and games. We got everything finished and then traveled downtown to buy uniforms. It took a while to try everything on and decide on what everyone wanted. After the uniforms were purchased, a few of us went on a big shopping trip to get needed food and house accessories.                                       

·   Saturday- We went to a church activity for the kids in the area. The activity went from 9am-4pm and while we were there we played games (soccer, dodgeball, ping-pong, Uno, etc.) and participated in skits with other youth our age. For lunch we got a taste of traditional Brazilian food – it was basically yellow rice with chicken (bones and meat). Afterwards we went to a large celebration for all the embassies represented in Brasilia. It wasn’t quite what we were expecting- it was super crowded and really loud.

·         Sunday- We went to church (everything is in Portuguese), but a few of the American embassy families attend as well and are in the same boat as us (not fluent in Portuguese). The main service was not translated, but the classes were taught in Portuguese and English.

Since Tuesday afternoon, we have learned that…

*Our jungle in the backyard will never be quiet due to the constant singing of the birds during the day (think of the bird house at the zoo and multiply it by 10) and the bats in the evening

*It rains at least twice every day out of the blue…. like one minute it’s all blue skies and the next it’s a torrential downpour and then a few minutes later it’s completely sunny again

*Brazilians put peas on pizza; we don’t know if this happens regularly in the US too, but it never came up with our family

*Pasta is often served with lunch and dinner at any traditional Brazilian restaurant, something we didn’t expect

*Cars tend to swerve into a neighboring lane without turning on their turn signals. And motorcycles, well that’s another story. They, on the other hand squeeze through masses of traffic barely scraping by car mirrors without hitting the car. In Dad’s words, “That’s why you don’t stick your hand out the window.”

*The beans and rice are to die for!!!! 

*Barely anyone speaks English, which we had planned for; but we better learn fast. It’s hard to leave Dad even at a buffet lunch for the fear of someone asking us questions (it has already happened more than once)

*Occasionally exotic animals show up even in the city- a few weeks ago a puma was found in a backyard 8 blocks from ours and an anaconda was stretched out across a 4-lane road…. YIKES!!!!

* Sam is easily creeped out by the 4 sets of lamps that are super bright at night in our backyard; they can be easily seen through the 2 layers of window drapes. They look like the lamps from Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (if anyone knows what I’m talking about). Sam thinks the White Witch or Mr. Tumas will pop out as she’s getting ready for bed. 

*We are all afraid that an animal will be waiting for us in our bed due to the unsealed door in the laundry room. Dad had to chase a baby gecko around the house a few nights ago to catch it and let it go. Maddy also found a medium-sized millipede on her bed the other night. She also likes to say that we have immortal ants. You squish the ant and pick up the toilet paper and the assumed dead ant speeds out of reach because it realizes its life is at stake. You can also rinse them down the sink, but sometimes they come crawling out of the drain after the water has been turned off. 

*Fruit trees are everywhere! In our opinion, a mango from the store tastes just as good as a mango you picked from a tree off the side of the road. 

*People here are super creative with ways to earn money on the side of the road.  In the past week, we have seen: a man balancing a ladder on his shoulders with a woman waving flags on top (this was not a small ladder), three magicians performing magic tricks, and two fruit jugglers. All of these shows were being performed in the middle of large intersections. They have it timed just right to complete the trick and collect their money before the light turns green.

We love you all and miss you tons!!!! We would really like to hear from you, so feel free to write back

With love,

Holman Family (composed by Sam and Madison)

All of our uniforms- getting ready for the 1st day of school

Yummy buffet spot for lunch, most of the restaurants are outside here.

Beautiful sunset

View of Brazil from the plane

Who doesn't love a fresh picked mango?

The main bridge in Brasilia

View of the lake from our house

Flowers on a tree in our backyard

Gwen passing time, coloring at the Embassy

Thankful

 

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

I am so grateful for all my many blessings