some new shit

today is my friend and apartment-mate's (?) birthday! he is turning 22. his name is nick leo. we are having a sweet ass party for him tonight and i am excited. carly and i are going to paint our faces and i am going to wear my bulls shirt. to me, life cannot get much better. we went to the store today and got a lot of stuff (booze, 2 kilos of oranges and peanuts) and we were all very excited. i also got a pack of uno for the party and uno=fun. carly and i decided to sacrifice our lingua class and clean instead.
the weather the past twoish weeks has been amazing and its so great. its been in the high 60s/low 70s and super super sunny almost everyday. we have gone to the river a lot and hung out down there and we went to the beach again last sunday. it is still very cold at night in our apartment and i still have to wear long underwear (2 on the top one on teh bottom), sweatpants and a wool sweater but its okay beacuse the days are so nice.
tomorrow carly caleb and i are going down to lisbon to meet my PARENTS! i am very excited. my brother is coming from italy on saturday night. there should be some good eating. i am a little nervous because everyone else in my family has been to lisboa except me and i feel as tho i should be the one showing htem around, not the other way. on sunday we are coming back here to coimbra and htey will stay until tuesday. here are places that i am going to take them and have little or no meaning to most of you: campus, the baixa, the river, either the jardim botanico or another garden off of the praca de republica annnddd drum role....PEDRO NUNES my old dorm! i am going to take them there so they can realize how ridiculous it is.
right now i am sitting outside in a square in front of the cathedral a block away from my house and while i may have some issues with the portuguese people-it is really really awesome here.

today in class

i just got out of my conversation and composition class. the teacher in that class is really ridiculous and you are often put on teh spot and have to answer questions which really are too simple to be answered or discussed about. but it is a class that is really focused on improving our normal, day to day, portuguese so talking is beneficial. today we were talking about stress (for the entire 2 hour class period) and she was asking what things make us stressed out. i decided that since a lot of small things make me stressed out this would be a good oportunity for my first time talking out of my own free will. i started saying how a lot of small things make me stressed out in normal activities but that it usually doesnt last for long so its okay. i said this MUCH less eloquently in portuguese and had to stop a lot to think. then she asked me what and i realized that a lot of the thigns that make me upset would sound ridiculous in front of a lot of people who dont know me, not the mention how foolish i already sounded speaking. so then i was like umm....i dont know cracks in the street (i did know how to say this so it came out more like lines in the road) and then paused a long time and said i was just superstitious. then my friends in the class started chiming in with other things. it was somewhat ridiculous but was way more amusing to me then embarrassing.

i moved!

on thursday we moved out of the dorms and into an apartment! its really really awesome because we are about a 3 minute walk from out building on campus. the apartment is very big and smells like shit. we havent found out what is causing the smell but we have tried hard. i also bought 2 birds yesterday. they are loud. last night we had people over for dinner which was fun but a little hectic because we didnt have enough plates, chairs, table space, cups, silverwear or food. we did have enough wine though.