Watching football in Rio. We get more football here than at home - today Bayern vs Barcelona (2-0) at the moment! Hugo and I leapt for joy at Luis Suarez's 97th minute equaliser for Liverpool vs Man City at the weekend. Of course we also saw the famous biting incident - though didn't pick up at the time why the Brazilian commentator was referring to Mike Tyson!!
In the same week, Hugo became the first Corbett to score a goal against Brazilian opposition. His Corinthian great grand father would be very impressed!! We have a picture of the young 'artiliero" on the latest blog album. He went back to UK yesterday with a good tan - and landed at Heathrow to blue skies - what bad weather?

Patrick had a trip to Natal last week to establish links with another group. It rained there - briefly - twice - for the first time in 7 months. Clearly they will hope that I have many excuses to revisit! It is another seaside resort like Maceio and Aracaju - the difference being sand dunes that you can see at the eastern end of the beach!
Bayern 3-0 up - my attention's not really on what I'm doing so I'd better hand over to Kate.

Not surprisingly, we're going to miss having Hugo in Brazil. It was an unexpected bonus of being in Rio to have an adult child living with us again for 4 months. His adventures kept us entertained and having him around certainly normalised life out here.
To help break us in gently to just being 2 old fogies on their own again, we've got Flora Carmichael and her boyfriend Malick coming to stay for a few days this weekend which will be nice.

What else have we been up to? We visited the new modern art museum in Rio which is has been built in a dodgy but fast up-and-coming area of the city and is well worth visiting both for the building itself and its collection. It was fascinating to see how they'd gone about displaying the material they'd got.

We've been to another birthday meal with our Venezuelan friends in Barra. It was Beatriz's birthday this time (21 again!) and, as before, a real spread was laid on. We feel very privileged to have been 'adopted' by the Romero family in this way.

Another weekend we were out at Vila doing tree-planting on Onda Solidaria's eco-site. Ricardo had managed to get a real army of workers together and we were very impressed to see how much progress had been made since our last visit. This is definitely a project we'll be following with interest even after our return to the UK. Patrick now has 2 palm trees and a pergola he can take personal responsibility for as well as the saplings we helped plant on our first visit.

I had an unexpected treat the other week when I found out that there was a international documentary film festival on in Rio -with free entry to all the films. My idea of bliss although it did remind me how much I miss quality cinema. It was bad timing that Hugo was on the Amazon but I went to 3 films on my own and Patrick joined me for another at the weekend.

Our new English teaching project is still continuing at Re-Fazer (www.refazer.org.br) although we've had to change to a Friday as it was just too hectic on a Wednesday as that's one of the days the families come to pick up their supplies. It's only a small group but they seem keen and committed and I think Tanya and I are both finding adults easier than teenagers. One of the group has very good English so we take it in turns, week by week, to chat to her or work with the beginners.
We're also involved with a Re-Fazer data-inputting project to record the medicines and other supplies needed by each child each month - it's proving good for my Portuguese although inevitably the vocabulary is a bit specialised.
We're still having Ana come to the flat to teach us once a week and are now on Book 2 (!) but we've still got some way to go before we're fluent I hasten to add!

The weather is lovely at the moment. Blue, hot and sunny most days but no longer oppressively hot and pleasantly cool(er!) at nights. Long may it continue like that.