Today's the day I discovered a rich seam of Heriot-Watt IPE graduates. It started when someone in the lift to BG's office said "Hello Patrick". It was Umberto Borges who is a drilling manager with Petrobas and has an office 7 floors above ours! Later on I discovered Stuart Kennedy, Nigel Robertson and Mark Laurie ( one geo, one PE and one REM) all together in the same team! I now know of 10 alumni and rising. Our flat-to-be (contract arrived today) has a party ...

Not sure how many UK papers featured pictures of Ipanema beach under a sea of umbrellas at the weekend (thanks Gwil!) but today's photo shows the same beach looking slightly less busy.. It certainly was crowded - and very hot - on both saturday and sunday & we retreated indoors after a few hours. It's also very noisy with a constant stream of vendors shouting their wares. One nice feature of staying so close to the beach is that Patrick can go down for a ...

A few days have passed & we've made some progress. We've been onto letting sites & viewed some properties. There was one we particularly liked that had stunning views but we don't know whether the formalities are going to hold us up. Patrick is due to visit BG tomorrow so will try to find out what happens next. We have also been trying to register with the police which took us on a wild goose chase ending up at the airport to be told that we needed to co...