26/02/10

Yesterday Ann and I were passearing (passear: to walk/wander. A PCV favorite is, in our language which is some jumbled mess of Portuguese and English, to conjugate Portuguese words in English) and stopped in the central market to buy cold sodas, the only thing close to relief from the heat here. As we stood there drinking them (the glass soda bottles have to be returned) we were looking at and joking about the bright pink 80’s prom dress with huge puffy sleeves and the bright teal 80’s prom dress with large bows hanging a few stalls down. The woman who had sold us our drinks caught on to what we were talking about and said jokingly “you like those right? Let me go pick you out a good one!” She ran over to the pile of clothes and pulled out the most hideous dress possible and ran back over waving it around. She held it up to Ann and said, “it looks so beautiful on you!” At this point everyone in the market is howling with laughter. There were multiple strange sash-like things hanging off of the dress and I asked “what do you even do with those?” “Like this!” she said throwing them dramatically over her shoulder and prancing around with the dress. Everyone laughed even harder. It was a great moment of really feeling part of the crowd, instead of being that weird white person.