On Sunday last, as I was incubating my cystic acne (ouch! OK! No more fish!), I did something out of character.

I got up at 8.30.

For São Paulo Steph, this isn’t common. But I had a noble goal: I wanted to shower and do my hair so we could get out the door by 9.30am… and catch the MC Escher exhibit down town.

I joined an expat group here (but haven’t actually *done* anything with them yet), and had gotten the heads up about Escher from them. I had also been warned that the line ups were crazy if we didn’t get there *right* when it opened at 10am.

Unfortunately, my “wake up early” day became a day in which Marcella chose to have a lie-in. I had sympathy for the lie-in. Sundays were my favourite lazy-morning-days before, too: Saturday was the buffer between the work week and weekend, and Sunday was my one shot to make up a little sleep. Plus, in Brazil, winter doesn’t mean a respite from allergies, and Marcella was sneezing madly. Even *I* felt the effects for the first time, getting burny, burny eyes. By 11.30, I had given up on Escher. Life’s too short to stand in line, you know?

So instead of Escher and culture, we went for lunch (better forgotten, frankly: LEAVE GERMAN FOOD TO GERMANS, BRAZIL!) and then the mall. At the mall, I did something wonderful.

I bought a dictionary.

My language training is coming along now. I can describe who I am intrinsically (“Eu sou“) and what I am at the moment (“Eu estou“—because there are two forms of “to be”), but I will not be allowed to own anything until chapter 10, when I learn the verb “to have”.

Now, I like words. So the absence of a dictionary (besides my Kindle one, which turned out to be *only* English-Portuguese, and not the inverse as well… how weird is that?) has been seriously impeding my ability to build up an arsenal of nouns. Adjectives. Verbs.

I bought this little beauty:

And began reading from it to Marcella and Renato. Because that’s just the kind of friend I am.

Lucky that I did, I have to say, because that’s how we found out that the dictionary was bad. Not like when I took the leftover uncooked fish out of the fridge and it was sticky, but still pretty unfortunate.

Pay attention now, because we’re going to play with language and culture:

What’s this?

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Did you say “pineapple”? Because you’re half right. Pineapple, or “o abacaxi” (a-bah-ca-SHEE). However, it’s also this:

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A pickle.

How’s that? WELL. Do you know the expression of “in a pickle”? (Sidebar: can anyone *not* just hear Ned Flanders’ voice saying, “that’s a dilly of a pickle!”?) So, “a pickle” is also a problem, according to the expression, right?

Well, based on the Portuguese equivalent to “a pickle”, the word “pineapple” had already shown my dictionary to be a “lemon”.

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Heh.

And by that I mean, it translated abacaxi to mean “pineapple” (check)… and “pain”.

Eh?

I mean, sometimes having a problem *is* a pain, I’ll grant you that, but the problem, ipso facto, is still just A PROBLEM. As was my dictionary, it turned out.

And so my dictionary was promptly returned, which was, itself, a pain (“o abacaxi?” Não!) and exchanged for the Oxford dictionary, which correctly translated pineapple as “pineapple”, as well as “problem”. And then all was right in the universe.

At the mall, I also got a comforter. People will tell you that winter in the southern hemisphere is worse than in the north. Now, I’m sorry to break this to you, but there’s just no bloody way that -30°C is *BETTER* than 8°C. For those of us who like Fahrenheit better (and it makes this so much more dramatic!), I’ll ask again: do you think that -22°F is better than 46.4°F?

That’s a difference of about 1000°F, or 38°C. Seriously. How could it be better??

The problem is, if you don’t insulate your house, and you have NO MEANS of heating any of the water (I’m not joking: the water for the shower is in a tub on the roof, heated by ambience—see that on the left?—so when it’s warm out, I just scream while standing in a NUCLEAR HOT shower, and when I actually *want* a hot shower, I stand there, sobbing, because I’ve made a bad sitch worse), and you have the world’s SECOND coldest tile on the floor, and you keep your windows open all the time, you’re just asking that 8°C to make you unhappier than you ever could be at -30°C—when in a heated house, with insulation, curtains, wool blankets, hot showers, space heaters, and a puffy vest.

The southern hemisphere practices winter denial. From denial is born suffering. And then acceptance. And then, just when the temp hits the 20s again and all that pain (“o abacaxi?”) is forgotten… you go to the mall and buy a comforter.

I’m sleeping better with it, in all truth, but that just leaves me in denial over something else.

This is my bed:

This means that, except for my 7 nights in Vancouver, I’ve been on a series of air mattresses since 21 May. Do you see how there’s a ridge in my bed? It started with a bump… which graduated to a full-length ridge, because one of the “pleats” busted out. (Hey Steph? Time to spend more time at the gym, eh?) It doesn’t stay fully inflated all night, and I had to start sleeping with my head at the foot end because there’s an upward curvature at the top end, and I think that + cold weather = spasms.

Marcella is totally aware of the fact that one cannot sleep long-term on an air mattress, and we’ve been working toward finding her a couch / bed type piece for the living room since April.

That’s not a typo.

The criteria are, “it must look nice as a stand-alone piece”; “it must be functional as a place to sleep”; and “it must be functional for people over 6′ tall to sleep”. She has a tall friend from Brasilia and a tall father—also from Brasilia—who will need to bunk down from time to time.

Well! This was certainly a pickle! (“O abacaxi?”) But not an unsolvable one: after much deliberation and store-room visiting, this past weekend, we ALSO made a special order for a piece of furniture that I cannot for the life of me show you. Let’s try this. It’ll be in… in 40 days.

Technically, it’s a foot stool. A very loooooong footstool. It’s also really, really firm, which excites me beyond reason. And it can be dressed up with awesome pillows, covered with a fitted sheet for naptimes, and is 10cm longer than either her tall friend or her father, so: win, win, win.

And that, my friends, is the story of how the pineapple became a star(fruit).

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