This weekend we celebrated Festa Junina here in Brazil. It is my favorite Brazilian tradition so far. We learned about the tradition in my Portuguese class. It is thought that the origin of this festival is in France, Spain and Portugul and it started by celebrating the birth of John the Baptist. People dress up like poor country folk, have parties, play silly games, and eat specific traditional foods many of which are made from corn.
On Friday, the boys had a party at school. Isaac learned a special dance for the occasion, and he had a girl partner. He performed his dance for the school and Ethan got to see it. Ethan said when he saw Isaac he shouted, "Isaac!".
Isaac was very conservative, as usual, about dressing up. We went to the store to buy the hats and Isaac said, "I'll let you buy me a hat, but I'm not going to wear it." Since the hats only cost $1.75 I took my chances and bought him the hat. Luckily, my friend Sue had some pictures from the party last year, and we went to her house to look at them. After seeing the pictures of the boys from last year, Isaac was convinced to wear the hat and paint on a mustache. Ethan was gung ho from the beginning ready to get all dressed up.
I asked the boys if they wanted a "crazy cool" mustache or a "normal" mustache. Ethan went for crazy cool and Isaac went for normal. Owen got the "Cuban drug dealer" look as noted by Scott. Isaac looked in the mirror and commented, "I look like Grandpa Korte!" They were all smiles when I got them at school, I think it was a really fun day.
The fun did not stop there...We were invited to 2 Festa Junina parties and a birthday party on Saturday. It felt so awesome to have a packed schedule. The first Festa Junina party was at Marcia's house. Marcia is our translator and the owner of our language school. This is a picture of me with Julie, a Porguese teacher who is really fun and Marie Alice, Isaac's Portuguese teacher.
The boys are drinking hot chocolate. Owen got his cup and sucked the whole thing down without taking a breath. A traditional adult beverage for this occasion is Quentao, which is hot wine with sugar, cinnamon, cloves, many similar things as hot apple cider. Scott and I really liked it, and plan to learn how to make it.
Here is Owen getting his hot chocolate from Marcia. Marcia helps us so much and she is really fun, too. She is also a mother of three boys.
We played lots of silly games, which got everyone laughing. One of the traditional games is musical chairs. Scott was on fire and knocked several girls on the floor while nabbing a seat. In the end he lost to the guy in the grey sweater, Christian. Christian is from Germany and will be heading back there next month. It has been really fun getting to know Christian here, too. He is such a sweet and interesting guy.
Here we are at our second Festa Junina party. This one was organized by people that work for Scott, so it was all John Deere people. The first thing we had to do when we got there was get our picture taken by the sign. Brazillians like to take lots of pictures at parties.
Here is a picture of some of the guys Scott works with. The crazy guy with the tie works directly for Scott. Scott has a really great group of nice fun guys that work for him. The flag decorations are very traditional and were all around town this week in all the stores and stuff.
They had a little fishing game for the kids. Where they "caught" a fish and then won a prize. Leave it to Ethan to get help from the model. Scott was just trying to take a picture of his son...yeah right.
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