Bom

Good afternoon, readers (mom),

Hope all is well in the states. The rest of this week has finished out rather calmly. The pistol range went well (I hit 9 our of 15 targets, which, while sounds terrible, was my first try on a timed and graded event for 3rd year cadets here. Further, the range operator was issuing us commands in Portuguese) and I earned a B on a scale of 5 grades; (I for Insuficient, R for Regular, B for Bom, MB for Muito Bom, and E for Excelente) Overall, not too shabby.

We've been sitting in on 3 different classes this week. Our longest class is Brazilian Law (Direito do Brasil), which sadly is just about as interesting as American Law except in American Law I can understand what's going on. We spent about 4 hours (quatro horas) in this class on Friday. Quite possibly my favorite class so far is Didatica Aplicada a Instrucao Militar (paraphrasing here, "Military Instruction/Psychology"). From what we've been able to garner from the class lessons, it is the Brazilian version of PL300 (for my non cadets out there, essentially a leadership psychology class) that also dives into effective methods for teaching and instructing. Interesting but the language barrier makes it somewhat challenging at times. Our final class is much less a class than it is scheduled free time for the study of Portuguese and Brazilian culture. I have generally split this time between practicing verb conjugations and surfing the web (I changed the language on Firefox and Facebook. Totally counts)

I think there's some kind of character limit on these posts which is why I had some difficulty earlier this week getting them up on the site. I do have some insight into what a night on the town is like (last night) which will be added here shortly. Portuguese for the day is, "Sempre Frente" which means, "Always forward" which is the direction firearms need to be pointed at when on the range. As I was reminded. Tchau for now!