I woke up at 2 today. I had forgotten to bring an alarm clock, so I had been depending on my roommate (who I hadn't met yet...more on that in a bit) to wake me up with his alarm. But for some reason he set his for 2 instead of 9. I was still laying on my bed in the hazy purgatory between sleep and consciousness when I got a knock at my door. It was Erin, telling me that they were about to go out around the city. Up to this point I still thought it was 9 am, so I was feeling good about heading out so early. It was only when Erian told me it was actually 2:15 that I realized how much of the day had gone by. I brushed my teeth quickly, and as I finished, my roommate came back in the room.

My roommate is name Rui. The R is guttural, like you would say it in French. I had not seen him yet, because he would wake up and leave really early in the morning and come back around 3 am, when I was asleep. So even though we had slept inches from eachother for two nights, I did not know what he looked like, or what kind of a person he was. I won't lie, I was a little apprehensive about meeting him...I think I automatically assume that people who I don't know are assholes. I don't know why I would think that, given that literally EVERYONE on this island is really nice. Anyway, I walked out of the bathroom and Rui was standing there. This was our conversation:

Rui: "HELLO GOODMORNING"

Me (thrown off by how much enthusiasm he used): "HI"

Rui: "let me know if you need any help with the kitchen"

Me: "...ok i will"

Rui: "or anything else really. I can help you out. Sorry my English is so bad"

Me: "hey man, your english is a lot better than my portuguese"

Rui: "haha"

Me: "hahah"

Rui: "ok I will go back downstairs, see you around"

Me: "ok bye"

Turns out he is studying at the university to be a nature guide. I'd say he's my age (like almost everyone else at this Residencia). Also I have the same pants as he does. word.

After meeting up with everyone downstairs, we headed out into the city, in search of a supermarket that apparently "put Walmart to shame" (according to Nico, one of the fellows from last year). On the way there we came across a cemetery in the middle of the city. I have never seen so many graves packed into so small a space. There were enormous Mausoleums and extremely intricate gravestones throughout the area. We walked around and admired them for a little bit, and then ran into one of the workers at the cemetery, named Moses (pronouced Moy-sees). We asked him if he knew English, and he said "A little." And by "A little" he meant "im fluent"...his English was near perfect. He had lived for a few years in California, and he had family there...his english had a mexican accent to it. Anyway, he was really talkative/nice. He explained to us how they bury the dead. Apparently they dig down two meters into the ground, and bury someone. Then they bury someone else in the same plot (usually from the same family). After 9 years, they dig the bones back up and put them in a box and put it on top of the grave, and put another person (or two) in the grave. This way, they can conserve space...there's not a lot of it in the cemetery. After that, he told us about the festival that's coming up in a few weeks, and invited us over to his house for food during the festival. I'll explain what the festival is about in a later post, but suffice to say that I can't wait for it to happen.

We pressed on to the store, where I bought soap, a notebook, and some COOKIES. not much to say about this place, except it looked eerily similar to Target.

We then walked back to the Residencia to drop off all the things we had bought, and then Nicole, Aisha, Erin, and I walked to the phone store to buy phones. I was buying a phone partly to stay in touch with the other members of the group/my parents, and partly because i really needed an alarm, as this morning had showed. The phone was actually pretty cheap (about 19 euros for the phone and the plan), so it wasn't that bad. They were selling the iphone 4 for 140 Euros (about 200 dollars), so I was really tempted to buy one. But I resisted and decided to stick with my throwback, 1999-esque phone.

After coming back to the Residencia, we chilled for a little bit while Laura R. flew in from Lisbon, and then we went to dinner...at a chinese restaurant. run by chinese people. This was the last place I was expecting chinese people to be, way out in a small island in the middle of the atlantic ocean. Whatever though, the food was good. we went to eat ice cream afterwards, and came back to the Residencia.

It's kind of funny how everyone we've talked to has said that they speak "a little bit of English," but most of these people are really good at it, if not fluent; the taxi driver who took us from the airport to our Residencia on our first day here sounded like he was from Texas. I think people are just scared of us judging them if they dont speak it correctly, so they leave themselves a buffer zone by saying that they only speak a little. This is funny to me, seeing as how most of us don't speak any portuguese at all in a portuguese country, so who are we to judge?