Settling Into Brazil

We safely arrived to Salvador, Bahia, Brazil which will be our new home for at least the next 2 years. We were met by the HR staff at the airport and with our eight 60+ pound duffle bags containing everything we thought we would need (well…almost) were bundled off to the school to collect some spending money, use the Internet and grab lunch.
The next day we met our very friendly and helpful driver who will take us to school everyday. He speaks no Ingles and we speak minimal Portuguse but we quickly came to an understanding that we will teach each other. I said Bom Dia which sounds like to Bon Jia and translates as “Good Morning”. He asked how we were and we replied with our canned phrase from Pimsleur: “muinto bem” pronounced mweinto bang (very good). We learned our driver’s name was Dimas. First rule we learned: a D at the beginning of a word makes a J or G sound. So his name is sounds closer to Geemess. He had a difficult time with our names as well.
We had a few meetings on our first day then a fabulous lunch. The school hires a catering company to cook the meals, at a dollar a day which comes directly from our paycheck, we have a choice of chicken, fish, meat and several different vegetarian options. Yum! After work we were taken to the grocery store to get the necessities. (Beer, Chocolate, DC, Ramen Noodles) School provided juice, milk, cheese, bread, eggs, chocolate, sugar, salt, and many other goodies for us to live on so we were going to the store as an educational experience basically so we could find the store and shop on our own when needed.
We had a very confusing tour of the neighborhood we live in which is Campo Grande (said Campo Grange), bought groceries and headed home. We have NO IDEA how to get to that store again. We have learned to say the names of the major streets and landmarks which is always helpful. We also live near one of the best known hotels, Hotel da Bahia, which is a Sheraton hotel and makes getting home in a taxi a tad easier.
Cost of food and items in Salvador are through the ROOF (and mind you, we live on the 18th floor). A 12 oz. can of diet coke runs about $.70 cents from the supermercado and $1.15 at the loja de alimentos (convenience store). I might just kick my DC addiction here. An ironing board stand is $93.00 dollars. The iron, a cheapy, was $35.00. There are no clothes dryers here so we have to hang all of our clothes (but we get an incredible breeze up here where the air is thinner). An iron is certainty needed here. We bit the bullet and bought the iron but no board, using a spare desk for that.
They have a pulley system for drying your clothes which is pretty cool. You lower the drying rack, hang your clothes, and then raise it until the clothes are dry.

They also have gas stoves which I am not use to but getting the hang of. They have child safety knobs and a fold down protector/work area. You can see the knobs on the left are accessible and the ones on the right are not. Pretty cool, new to me but maybe not to you.

There are of course many other things here that are wonderful but I will leave you with this last image.
One thing I do not like here is that the toilet paper does not flush and nor do the people. A typical bathroom experience… (Don’t worry, this is not the toilet in our apartment)

I will leave this post here for now.