New Years

And I thought Christmas was a big deal.
I've never seen people make such a big fuss on New Year's Eve! We took the bus to the beach house on the 31st- Marcel, Luan, Gean (cousin from Sao Paolo), me, and Ella, who was invited along for the weekend.
The first thing we did was hop in the swimming pool. And we stayed there for around five hours, until we ate lunch.
Lunch is the big meal in Brazil, I think I already wrote all about that.

Macell, Ella, me, and Gean (jay-on) by the pool

The rest of the time, we spent on the BEACH!
Have I mentioned how cool it is that my host family has a beach house?

Luan, me, and Ella at the beach

our second band photo

The room where we all stored our stuff had a ton of chalk on the walls.. and thus, we prepared for war..

David (visiting from Illinois) and his Brazilian girlfriend, Andresa

That night, all the women got all dolled up- and all the men put on white t-shirts. All the women put on white dresses, makeup, hair, frilly shoes- and the men put on white t-shirts.
Carol, the blonde cousin from Sao Paolo, did my hair. Ella did my makeup. Fun times.

Gean, Rafael, Carol, Ella, and me on New Year's Eve

Brazilians wear white on New Year's Eve to symbolize peace for the coming year. But some people just have to be different- Carol wore blue for zen, and Sandra wore green for.. luck, was it?
As the night commenced, the girls walked out to the road and found a big truck blasting happy Brazilian music. They taught me and Ella to dance Arrocha, a dance special to Brazil. You shake your butt around in circles. It was hard to start off, but once I got the hang of it, it was really fun!
At midnight, the whole family (I mean to say all 70 of us) took a stroll and joined hundreds of other white clad families on the beach. We stood in a huge circle, and holding hands, sang and chanted in prayer.
Suddenly someone started counting down from ten- dez, nove, oite, sete, seis, cinco, quatro, tres, dois, UM!
The whole family leapt into the air, hugged everybody they saw. The kids started

Rafael, luan, and me on the beach

Ella, Sandra, Paolo, and me

Ella and me, and Rafael snuck in last second

Ella, Luan, me, and Ty- Ty's a little cousin. The day I met him he was sitting in the kitchen munching on something, and I was doing the dishes (Brazilians don't have dishwashers). Luan came in and said something obnoxious, I said something obnoxious right back, and it resulted in a dish soap war. Ty loves bringing this up.
Once the clock struck midnight, he chased me around on the sand, screaming his little Brazilian head off. He's a cute kid.

Ty, me, Gean, and Ella

The family getting ready to celebrate

When we made it back to the beach house, food was late for us. Tasty Brazilian new year's eve food.

Afterwards we had a secret santa kind of thing- white elephant. Everyone in the end received a joke present. But one uncle had a ceramic piggy bank, and with every turn someone took, he would pop twenty more reais into the pig. By the time someone won it, it was stuffed with two thousand, two hundred reais- that's over a thousand dollars!

We drove back home to Itabuna the next day, seven people sitting in the backseat of the truck that was built for three. It was crazy.
But the weekend was so much fun, I really do love it here.