Well it's Thursday night and tomorrow we're going to Rio! Selvia really wanted to go before she left Brazil (she was only going to be here for three months) so we organised to go this weekend and invited everyone. We've ended up with 13 people so it should be great. Tomorrow night we've got a local guy showing us the night life, Saturday afternoon most of us are going hang gliding across the city, Saturday night will be more fun out and about at some recommended locations and Sunday will be sightseeing. Kell and I are staying Sunday night too, then we're flying out to London on Monday afternoon. Then it's PAris fgor a few days, back to London and then on to Perth on the 28th. I'll be in Perth for three weeks waiting for ... read more

It certainly has been football, football and more football, but I’m not complaining as the literal translation is party, party and party some more. Australia’s final match of the initial round of the World Cup was against Croatia, not only a great game of football, but also an emblematic example of Brazilian best intentions not quite going to plan. Although this was set to be a fantastic game of football and would ultimately decide which team would qualify for the round of 16 it was to be played at the same time as Brazil vs Japan. That only meant one thing, no bar, restaurant or any other public venue with a television screen was going to be broadcasting the Aussie match. The only saving grace was that one of the cable television stations broadcasts two sports ... read more

Six weeks of living in a hotel room and we were very ready to move into our house. Luckily there was the short change of scenery in Argentina when the Belo Horizonte hotel room was replaced by one in Buenos Aires, so I wasn’t quite climbing the walls when it was time to move out. We were taken to look at a few places before we chose the house that we are now living in. We saw a mix of houses and apartments, they were all fully furnished, but none were places we were keen to live in (generally they were places people were about to move from and they had been their homes for the last gazillion years and when it said fully furnished it meant they were leaving EVERYTHING behind). As a result we ... read more

I was always excited about the prospect of being in Brasil during the World Cup, but I never imagined the experience would be so amazing. Brasilians are very patriotic people and nothing seems to bring that out more than futebol (I’m sure you can figure out that is soccer). In the weeks leading up to the World Cup the passion and excitement has become more and more evident. It started with every second person wearing “Brasil” clothing around and about (and what an array exists!) and has accelerated from there. “Copa da mundo” is now a staple component of my limited Portuguese vocabulary and is very useful for striking up conversations with taxi drivers. All of the shops are decorated in green and gold and selling every Brasil product imaginable, there are flags hung from buildings ... read more

Arriving in Sao Paulo was a strange feeling. Although we have only been away from Australia for five weeks (and in Argentina for the last one) walking through the airport on Brasilian soil there was a sense of ‘coming home’. Especially strange given ‘home’ is currently a hotel room. At least there are a lot more clothes here than in the one small suitcase we took to Buenos Aires with the intention of staying for the weekend. We left Buenos Aires on Saturday evening after collecting our new visas on Friday afternoon. You have got to love bureaucracy, we applied for our visa on Tuesday, effectively had them approved on the spot, they are actually stamped with Tuesdays date, but we couldn’t collect them until 4pm on Friday because they take three working days to be ... read more