Some random things I want to share with you

So.
During my almost two months here, I've gathered a bunch of these small things that I would like to share with you. Like the things I wrote in the weird things -post, only things that aren't weird as such. Just things. But also things that aren't big enough to write their own post about. So I thought I'd just gather all of them into one post, so then it won't matter that they're all short. Here they are. Not in any particular order. I'm probably forgetting things (like last time), though, and more of these things will come up later. But maybe I'll do another post then. Maybe not.
Ok, let's go.

At my local grocery store (which I have in my head extrapolated to mean all stores, but I'm not sure) they want to see an ID when I pay with a credit card. Someone told me they want to verify that the person using the card really is the person whose name is on the card. Though they don't actually check the name on the card. They just write my passport number or something down on the receipt that stays with the store. And this is in addition to using those machines where you have to input the card pin. So I don't really know what that's all about. But I think I've seen an ID asked from other people too, so I don't think it's because I'm a foreigner.
Also about using the card here. You can't use a card in nearly as many places as you'd expect. For example, when we went out to see the encontra das águas my first week here, we couldn't pay the company arranging the tour with a card, but had to go get cash. Market vendors not accepting card isn't surprising (also true here), but tourist-half-day-river-tour-companies not accepting card is. So I mostly have to use cash, except at the grocery (is apparently a word I can't spell) store.

The Simpsons-cookies. Chocolate ball flavored Simpsons cookies.
They're not actually very good, to be honest. But they were cheap, and I wanted some cookies and some chocolate, so I thought I'd give them a try.








The electronics hate me. First, my camera memory card decided that it's 90% full even when there's nothing on it, so no more than ~70 pictures will fit. So I bought a new memory card. The new memory card pretty much instantly decided that it will only save 25 pictures, and the rest after that only as notes that "you took a picture, but I didn't save it, so you can't see it", and then has to be reformatted so it starts to save pictures again. Or, well, you can take more than 25 without a problem, but you also have to remove them. Trying to same a 26th photo on the card seems to be the problem. (I actually already talked about this in a previous post, but I seriously want to be able to take pictures while I'm here, so not having a working memory card in my camera is one of the most annoying things.)
Then the lamp in the ceiling of my room stopped working. As a person who has installed some lights into some ceilings a handful of times I took a chair and climbed up to see what the problem was, to find that one of the two cables that come out of the ceiling and go into the lamp (well, to the thing that the lamp is screwed into) had broken and come loose. So I took a screwdriver and screwed it back in, because that kind of thing is easy to fix. So done. Except when I tried to switch it on, nothing happened. Even if I tried a lightbulb that worked in a different lamp. So fine, I'll just use the desk lamp.
Except the next day, as I came home late and tired from my first day of classes during my time here (I'll get to that in a bit), the desk lamp simply didn't switch on either. So. Yeah. Some people came over the next day to do some general cleaning and maintenance, and that evening the desk lamp was working again, so either they fixed it somehow, or it started working again as mysteriously as it had stopped working in the first place. But it's been working fine for a week now, so maybe that problem is gone.
Also, once I had determined that the camera memory card really won't save more than 25 pictures without being emptied and/or reformatted (as in when for  the second time it stopped saving the pictures after the 25th), I decided to try and reformat the original memory card, since I had now figured out how to actually do that. And it seems promising. At least currently it knows it's actually empty. So maybe that worked. I hope it did, and I don't have to think about how many photos I can take between the possibilities of emptying the card.

Here's the doublebanana from last week no one asked to see again, but I post it to you anyway. It was a good banana, once it was ripe. (I actually didn't wait quite long enough, it was still a little raw when I ate it, but it was good anyway.)
So there are two things (well, there are more things, but I'll just stick to these two for now) I remember our aunt saying about this place before I came here.
1. Manaus is not a very nice city and
2. The bananas here are great.
I agree with both.
When I heard this about the bananas, my reaction was pretty much "how are they especially great there, I mean, a Cavendish is a Cavendish is a Cavendish, no matter where you are in the world" to which she said something like "they have other bananas there besides Cavendish". And they do. I don't think I've seen a single Cavendish banana my whole time here. The bananas they mainly eat are there small ones. And they are great.
(For those of you who don't know, Cavendish is the cultivar of banana the rest of the world eats. I don't think I'd ever seen anything other than a Cavendish before I got here.)

The water that comes through the pipes isn't drinkable here. Which is annoying, when you're used to the Finnish way of things, but I suppose not all that surprising. I mean, if you can't drink the tap water in the US without filtering, I suppose I shouldn't expect it in Brazil (which I keep spelling with an s instead of a z, because that's how they spell it in both Portuguese and Finnish).
Also, only one temperature water comes out of the taps. There''s no hot water, and no cold water. The temperature of the water that comes out is determined (I assume) by the outside temperature. Or at least on hot days the water in the shower seems warmer than on cool days. Which is a little annoying, because on cool days you want the water of the shower to be warmer than on hot days. But nothing you can do. And it's not too cold. By which I mean the unheated showers on the big scout camps are a lot colder than the water here, and those are just fine. For the week the camp lasts.

So, I'm not a tall person. I'm actually quite an average hight person, despite the fact that my sister (the other sister) keeps telling me I'm short. But there are plenty of people shorter than me in Finland. There are also plenty of people taller than me in Finland. Probably more people who are taller than people who are shorter. But here. Here I'm actually quite tall. Seriously. I realised at some point during the classes last week that I was one of the tallest people there, including the guys. And once I realised that, I realised that almost all the other people I've been interacting are also shorter than me. Even the standard length of a mattress is 188 cm, not 200 cm like in Finland. And I have to say, I do not like it. I don't like being tall. I feel sorry for you actually tall people out there.

People here tie their hair. If I want to tie my hair up, just get it out of the way or off the neck in the heat, I take hairband and use that to tie it up. Here people who have long enough hair literally just tie it. They start twisting it like they were doing a bun, but then they pull the end through the thing, so it stays in a knot. I don't know how they do that. I'm pretty sure I've tried that sometime, and it's just simply too slippery to stay in a knot. Maybe the latino hair is somehow different on the microstructure-level that makes it stay in a knot? Or maybe I simply suck at making knots in my hair, because I never do it? I don't know.

The roads here are very large or very small. It seems to me that there aren't really that many medium-sized roads here. Also, the small roads always seem to have a lot of steep but very small hills, both up and down. And I mean steed enough that when the car starts going downhill, my thought is always "ok, so this hill is a little steeper than I'm entirely comfortable with in a car". The big roads though, they don't have those steep hills. I don't know if they've built the big roads in places with no steep hills, or if they've somehow evened them out so that the steepest parts are less steep.

Here are some snails on a wall after rain. I just thought they were cool.










They apparently don't teach English at schools here, which just seems like stupidity. All the people who speak English have either learned it themselves, or been to a special private school where they do teach English, or been to these special language schools, which only teach languages during the afternoons and weekends when people don't have actual school. And participating in any of this, of course, costs money. Apparently a lot of money. So the only way to learn English in this country is to is to be relatively rich and willing to pay to learn.

Speaking of school, now about my classes this week. So I finally had my first week of classes last week. Here the courses are in blocks, a whole week or two of the same course, all day every day. Ok, not necessarily all day, we had one morning off this week. And even on the days when we had technically all day, we had a three-hour lunch break. So we had three hours in the morning, starting at 8:30, then a three-hour break, and then another three hours in the afternoon, and finally getting of at 17:30 (which is about 45 min before sunset, after which it's getting more dangerous to be outside). This means, of course, that I have three hours of nothing to do, and then after I get home at six (or half past) I have to start doing any possible homework, which has to be done the same day or latest the following day, because if the course only lasts for a week, the deadlines for any assignments are within that week.
And this wouldn't be a problem, but it fits my daily cycle not at all. I'm relatively five about waking up before seven (especially since the sun always rises at six, so it's already daylight outside) to get to class on time, but then I spend my most efficient hours in the middle of the day doing nothing, and then should start doing something once I get home after six, which is not the time I can get anything productive that requires concentration done anymore. Well, depends on the thing. It's eight in the evening right as I'm writing this. But this is relatively light doing. The point is I can't do studying after about seven anymore. I'm simply not going to learn anything anymore, and not get anything done about assignments.
So why don't I simply do the homework in the weird off-hours in the middle of the day? Because most of that work requires a computer, and I'm not going to get my computer robbed on the street because I'm carrying it with me. I could take uber when I go and when I come, but I'm also not going to pay 12 reals to get to a lecture in the morning and another 12 to get back just because it's dangerous to walk in the street with a laptop, because it's ridiculous you can't carry something like a laptop (or a camera!) with you on a busy public street without the fear of getting robbed. Also my route to INPA is along a really big street, and the traffic on it is so bad at about the time when I come and go that it's literally as fast to walk the two and a half kilometers than take a car or bus. So no, I'm not going to pay that much money just to be able to take my laptop with me. (Maybe I could just carry it with me on the street. It's not as if anyone actually knows whether I'm carrying something valuable at any given time of not.)
Also, since the courses lasting only a week or two mean everything needs to be done now, it means scheduling when to do things is impossible. Because if there's something to do, it needs to be done now. And as someone who is excellent at scheduling my studied and then sticking to that schedule well enough to practically never be stressed about studying and still get good grades, I really hate it. So yeah, this schedule of studying does not fit me at all.
Then again, this was only the first course. Maybe the others will be different, or maybe I'll find a way to study with this kind of course schedules that works for me. I do have three more months of classes, after all.

Something I learned during the course was that I don't actually understand Portuguese. I also learned that I am able to talk about SNPs in Portuguese in front of a native-speaker audience for about 6 minutes. And it apparently went well, so. Although I did have the whole thing completely written out and practically read it from the paper, but still, considering my Portuguese skills, I'm quite proud of myself.

Also, people here are so nice. It's quite unbelievable, to a Finnish person. For example, on the first day of the aforementioned course, after the morning's class, I just sat in the hallway thinking about how I should go get some lunch, but I don't really know what to do, and this girl from the same course just came up to me like "Hey, you need some help? Do you know where you'll have lunch?" (We had had to present ourselves in the class, so I had said I'm an exchange student.) So I was like "Weeell, yeah, actually, I could use some help". So we went to her place to eat lunch.
Seriously, this is not a thing that would ever happen in Finland. This kind of thing is very confusing, but very nice.

I've been told (by more than one person here) that I need to be careful out in the traffic, because the cars and especially the motorcycles will not make way. And I guess they're kinda right, because yeah, in that traffic, you really do need to be careful. Though I was able to figure that out myself, because I have eyes. But they're also wrong. Surprisingly often someone stops to let a pedestrian cross the road. Definitely more often than in Kuopio. Then again, in Kuopio, if no one stops to let you pass, it's still possible to get across the road. Here it sometimes isn't. The easiest times for a pedestrian are when the traffic is the worst. It's quite easy to cross a road when none of the cars have any space to move.

Temperature-wise my biggest problem with warm areas like this (I've also noticed this elsewhere) isn't that it's hot during the day. That's fine. You just need to remember to drink (which is pretty much impossible to forget, because when you don't drink you get thirsty pretty fast) and eat enough salt to replace what you sweat out (which is harder. I honestly think I'm probably not getting enough salt. And salt is kind of important, knows anyone who knows anything about neuron function. Or any cell function.). Anyway, the heat and sweating you get used to. My biggest problem is that people have the air conditioning inside way too cold. I mean, I'm sorry, but if the temperature is 30°C outside, you can't have inside at 22°C, because the people dressed for the 30°C will freeze, especially since they're there to sit and study or listen to a lecture or something. Sitting is not a great way to keep warm. And I don't want to carry around an extra layer of clothes just because someone has decided cooling inside to too cold is a good use of energy.
The exception to this is the malls. I've been to three or four malls during my time here (for someone who really hates shopping, I have a weird fondness for malls), and the temperature in them has always been pretty much perfect. So that's nice.

This pizza. So food is very cheap here, in general. Many times I find myself thinking that in Finland I might pay the same amount of euros for some food as I here pay in reals. Which means those foods are about a quarter the price they would be in Finland. Ok, not everything is that cheap, but yeah, in general, food is cheaper here than in Finland But apparently Finland is a very expensive country, or so I have been told. So how is this related to the pizza? It's related to it, because apparently ordering pizza is just as expensive here than it is in Finland. We paid (translated) about 17 euros for that giant pizza with three different topping sections, including delivery. Seems a reasonable price in Finland. Here I would have expected it to be closer to 12.
Anyway. I wanted to talk about the cheapness of the food, but I also wanted to tell you about the pizza. So like I said, it had three different sections, which means if you couldn't decide which kind of pizza you want, you could take three different kinds of pizza. We had rucola (the green section) + tomato + mushrooms, then clock-wise chicken + green corn (it turned out that green corn is what I would have just called corn. They call it green here, because apparently the corn we're used to eating is actually still raw, and once it's had time to ripen in the field it dries and hardens some, and becomes more like the corn used to make popcorn) and the last broccoli + palmito (which is the core of some palm tree) + catupiry (which is this cheese that had the consistency of a foam and that I didn't like much, despite it having only a mild taste).

Oookay, I think pizza is a good spot to finish. This turned out to be a bit longer than I thought. But maybe that's all right.
I realised today you will soon have longer days in Finland than we do here. Actually they already might be. The length of the day today is 12:05, and it's only getting shorter the whole time I'm here. Shortening by about 7 minutes in the next three months.
I was supposed to finish here.

So bye.

~matu