Abby, Zoë and Enzo

We took the bus, 5605, to Manaira Shopping (map), which is a large mall.  As we were walking to the bus stop we needed, we saw our bus pass us and ended up having to wait a lot longer than usual for the next one, which meant we got to the mall later than we'd hoped.  The lay out of the mall is pretty confusing and I'm not sure we've figured it out still, we didn't even get up to the top floor as all of us were ready to get back and get some dinner.  The food court was large and had lots of choices, though most more pricey than home and definitely more pricey than elsewhere in the area.  Abby and Zoë begged and begged to eat at the mall, but we put it off for another time.  We checked out a few stores, a department type store with bedding and cooking stuff on the bottom floor and all sorts of baby gear as well as towels and such on the top floor.  We also went into the Hello Kitty store and saw a bunch of cute things, very overpriced - a pencil cost more than bus fare for one - and finally found the store we'd come for.  It was a book store called 'Siciliano'.  Abby and Zoë enjoyed the little chairs and table and I saw some really cute children's books and work books, but we'd come for an English-Portuguese dictionary and phrase book so we had to be done with the cute kiddie stuff and pick something out.  I've noticed at many stores that things don't have prices on them, and it was the same at the book store.  We had three little dictionaries and one regular sized Portuguese dictionary for kids that we were contemplating getting as well so we took them all to get the prices checked.  The kids dictionary was over R$40, so I decided that was out.  The little dictionaries were all pretty close in price to each other so we chose the one we liked best and went to pay for it, for R$19.90 = US$12.17.  Books are very, very, expensive here. 

We ended up taking the 511 bus back towards the apartment, simply because it showed up first and we knew it would take us close to the apartment and we didn't want to wait for the 5605.  With it being dark, Chris was having a hard time seeing far enough ahead to figure out where we needed to be left off and when we did get left off he was a little uncertain at first if we'd gotten off too soon.  All was well though, we spotted our apartment building and ended up that we were just a couple of blocks away.

We've been enjoying juice made from frozen juice pulp while here.  There are many, many, different flavors, which come in these little packs that you cut open and add to water in a blender then just blend it up and and add sugar to taste.  Some flavors we've found you don't need to add any sugar at all to, like the tangerine, but others do well with a bit of sugar to bring out the flavor.  It's really easy to make, the juice pulp is just that, with no additives or preservatives, and we can add more or less water and control the sugar ourselves, so we're really liking it.

This morning after the girls and I got back from our morning beach time, hot from our yoga, wave jumping, and walk back, we made some gaviola juice.