Ariel Dunster -- Brasil

November 10, 2009

Santos- Boqueirão, District 4420

Family:
Claudenir and Prescila Coute
Rua Tocantins 77/51Santos, SP, Brasil11055-341

I´ve done a lot in the past month. I´ve attended Rotary meetings regularly. I also have begun to hang out with students from my school. I went to a school dance. It was a lot of fun because students from five different schools went. I feel like I´m finally understanding the material in school. I no longer use my Portuguese-English dictionary on a regular basis.

Unfortunately things did not work out right with my first host family so the head of the Santos YEP asked to move me to a different family because he did not think that my host parents and I were a good match. It felt bad because they were a really nice family, but I´m also very happy and a lot more comfortable in my new family. In my new family I have a 16 year old sister and an 18 year old brother, but my brother lives in a city in the south of Brazil called Porto Alegre. He´s invited me to go visit him in January, and I am happy because it is another opportunity to travel, and I only have to pay for the plane tickets.

I´ve already done a lot with my new family. We went to Guarujá last weekend. It was a lot of fun because there are no roads that connect Guarujá to other cities in Brazil, so we had to take a boat to get there. Also, Guarujá is known as "the Atlantic Pearl" because of its nice beaches. With my new family I´ve also taken a tour of Santos, gone to the coffee museum, and gone to the aquarium.