Reading, Holidays, Pizza Hut

Yesterday was a Brazilian National holiday, Assumption Day, which lead to us having the day off from the lab. This allowed me to read a bit, work on Portuguese, and have dinner with a Brasilian medical student and her friends. I have enjoyed the opportunity here to read for pleasure, something that I've done little of in the last few years of medical school. I just completed Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, a chronicle of Paul Farmer's work in the area of global health. I am now nearly halfway through the Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I have delayed seeing the films of this series for some time, as I had planned to first read the books. Unfortunately, with the demands of the 3rd year of med school, I am only now getting started reading the series.
Thus far though, it has been a great read, and I'm glad I delayed seeing the
movie.

Last night, Ben and I joined Germana, a medical student here at UFC, and some of her friends for pizza at Pizza Hut. Now, I assure you that the restaurant choice was their's not ours as we plan to avoid American
restaurants (especially McDonalds) while here in favor of experiencing the many great local restaurants. In any case though, it was good to meet some other Brazilians, and spend an evening hearing Portuguese spoken (albeit little of it from my mouth), as that definitely will aid my language acquisition.

Today, I have some meetings in reference to the physical fitness study in the morning, and then hopefully will be able to really get started on my
project with the remainder of the week. The weather remains perfect, I continue to adjust to life in Brazil, and I continue to strive to communicate in Portuguese. In the future I plan to continue to try to post a text update at least weekly, in addition to a weekly photo update. I have also taken many more photos not posted on this blog, which are freely available on a Kodak Ofoto site. Email me if you'd like to check any of those out. I've tried to select a few of the best each week for the blog, as I realize that most of you do not want to sort through the 50-100
pictures that we've been taking weekly.