Short Update from Manaus

While I could go on at some length, here are just a few small updates.

The most surprising thing about Brazil is that Coke Zero is popular here.

I am staying in a dorm room in a hostel.  My room has an air conditioner.  It's one of those air conditioners where the cooling comes from a long rectangular box attached to some fan elsewhere -- most likely on the roof.  This situation poses several challenges.  The first is that whoever installed the air conditioner did not account for draining its condensation.  Thus each night over a gallon of water drips from it and falls about seven feet into several buckets lining the floor.  This is not a noiseless process.  Secondly, one's roommates have varying concepts of how to manage a room with an air conditioner.  To some, it is appropriate to only mostly close the eight foot tall door to the room or, when coming into the room at 6am to rifle through their possessions, leave it open entirely.  If it were not 85 degrees and so humid you expect at any moment to see fish floating by, this might be a viable strategy.

But this petty complaint is hardly representative of my time here.  I have made industrious use of the hammock on the roof deck, and have almost cleared out my Yahoo inbox (down to 24 unread messages!)  Today's adventure will be trying to rent a suit in Portuguese.  Can it be done with the words "Please" "Thank you" "Sorry" "Yes" "No" and the numbers between one in ten?  We'll find out!