Squishing this post between the last post and the one I'm about to do for class (with pictures).  But for anyone interested in how awesome my life is, here's another sweet post of things I love/am grateful for :)

1.  NO MEAT!!  Okay, I'm still eating meat (when it's served...in a few weeks I might be brave enough to actually order it myself so I can try new things, but for now I'm still working on the non-optional part haha).  But last night, I was SO dreading dinner.  It always involves meat, but my stomach was finally feeling better and I didn't want to eat any meat.  At all.  I went home, and walked in to a VEGETARIAN dish of EGGS AND TOMATO!!!!  (Note: that may sound disgusting...but that was one of the foods that I grew to LOVE in China.)  Seriously, I could not have been more excited, or more grateful.  I am so thankful for vegetarian food!! :)

2.  I HAVE A ROOMMATE!!!  (if you think I'm over-using capital letters, get over it.  I'm in a good mood.)  Shawndeen is awesome.  I am so excited to not be alone so much.  AND to have someone to force me to practice Portuguese.  *AND* she served in Florianópolis, the city I'll be living in for fall semester, so we will be able to have some sweet talks about that.

3.  I love my Professor and her family.  They are fantastic.  Vanessa  has practically adopted me into their family, and I have so much fun hanging out with them basically every day.  But she also manages to maintain professionalism (is that a real word?) when we're at school, so even though I love how much I have gotten to know her as a person, she still works hard to influence me as a teacher.  I have loved our class so far.  Sometimes it's hard for me to understand, but I love the things I do understand, and I love the ideas we have discussed, and the way it has made me think about how to best serve others (hopefully more on that later).

4.  Morning runs on the beach = glorious! :)

5.  A brain.  Is Portuguese still hard?  Duh.  BUT!  Today, in class, I felt like I understood almost everything. Granted,  that can probably be at least partly (if not mostly/completely) attributed to the fact that I talked to Natalia and Vanessa about all the stuff last night, so I knew a lot of the info, and was just filling in the translation.  Regardless, it was nice to feel like I can do this.  Maybe not quite yet, but it will come!