Routine

We are starting to find our routine for daily life it seems. We get up, slowly, get ready, clean up the house maybe run a small errand and then feed the girls lunch and get ready for language school. At about 1:30 our sitter comes and we have a conversation in Portuguese that I think I understand most of but am never really sure:) We kiss the girls and head to the metro, it just takes us a few minutes to walk to our station and now, being the Lisbolettas that we are, we have metro passes so we just hold our wallet over the ticket thing and walk right in. It's great and our passes are new so we are still really excited about using them:) We ride several stops on the yellow line to the Marque de Pombal station where we switch to the blue line ride two more stops and get off, once again using our fabulous passes to get out! We walk a few more minutes to our school and settle in for 3 hours of leaning Portuguese.
Our first teacher, Paulo, doesn't speak much English and he loves to draw pictures on the white board. And he doesn't distinguish men from women by drawing a skirt on the woman, he draws her ummmhh upper body and the man, well the man gets a moustache. The first time he did this in class Mark and I laughed like we were in junior high again, we really had a hard time recovering. He also, apparently. think I speak Spanish and frequently tells me to stop speaking Spanish to him. Our second teacher I just love! She has a great teaching style that makes us really try to use what we are learning. And she will stop and explain cultural and historical things as we are learning. Its so fun and we have been able to have some really great meaningful conversation with her as well. Unfortunately she is gone on vacation so we will have a new teacher today... makes life interesting for sure!!
We get done with class about 5:30 and head back to the metro to get home. It takes about a half an hour so most days we stop and get pipocas from a little vendor at the metro station where we switch lines. Pipocas is sweet popcorn, not like kettle corn, it's better really:) After the metro we walk up about 150 steps to get home. Our sitter heads out and we relax, play with the girls and then about 7-7:30 we start looking for some dinner. I am starting to figure out some things I can cook like pasta, rice and beans, soup... sometimes we get roasted chicken from our grocery store, some times we go to this great cafe just across the street.
Then it's shopping or just relaxing until bed time... of course, in a few weeks the girls start school and our class time will change so we will start all over adjusting our routine.