Ok, so today´s my last day in Jacareí, as I head South to Porto Alegre, in Rio Grande do Sul state. ~I´m looking forward to it. I fly at 10pm, arriving at about 11:45. Sweet.

The only real problem is that I won´t get to see my mates up here for some time, particularly a certain female friend of mine. The less said about that just now in a public space the better, to be honest.

Anyway, I´ve had a ball up here, and I have realised just how much I love Brazil. I am seriously wanting to live here after my doctorate is finished. The food, the weather, the people, the language - it´s all good. I love Portuguese. It´s a beautiful language, and the way it rolls of the toungue is something magical. I have taken to drinking a juice called Açaí every day. Well, Açaí com leite (with milk). It´s quite possibly the most delicious juice ever. If I were an entrepreneur, I´d be shipping it to Australia within seconds, setting up a "casa do suco" or juice bar, and I know for sure that I´d be earning squillions within a couple of years. The juices here are fantastic - there´s a real culture of drinking juice here that is just amazing. There are juice bars all over the place - at least two in every block, it seems - and while some are better than others, the quality of the juice is sensational. There are mixtures that would boggle the mind, and two different types of juices - "vitaminas", which are generally much thicker and come with a greater mix of fruits than the second type, the "sucos" (juices), which are mostly simple mixes of juice with milk, with softdrink, or with one other fruit. My friend Horácio has a "casa do suco", called Tropical Sucos, and i have been frequenting it daily since I arrived in Jacareí. THat place is fantastic, and the "lanches", or burgers (i guess that´s the equivalent) that they make there are awesome. I won´t go into too much detail here, because it´ll just piss everyone off. Suffice to say that we don´t have burgers like these in Australia. Yum!

Anyway, I will have to find myself a casa do suco in Porto Alegre when I get there. Bugger. I´m looking forward to the South, because I´m hoping to go out to São Miguel das Missões, near the Paraguayan border, to see the ruins of an old missionary town that got into trouble with the Portuguese crown for being a little to independent... Damned Jesuits! No respect for regal authority! Heaven forbid that Indians get an education and a status well above what the crown deems appropriate! Anyway, that´s probably the highlight of my program down there. Will let you know what happens.

Gotta go. Bags to pack and all that...

Cheers.

Hoje sendo sexta-feira, decidi escrever um novo post. Estou no escritório das minhas amigas Renata e Ana Rosa, elas sendo amigas da Delma, uma grande amiga minha de outros tempos.

Estou ainda em Jacareí, cidade no Vale do Paraíba, interior do São Paulo. Faz mais que uma semana que estou aqui, e estou na casa de um velho amigo meu, o Horácio. Estou me divertindo bastante, pois desde que eu cheguei aqui, eu tenho consegido encontrar com todos os meus velhos amigos do tempo em que morei nesta cidade. Muito legal.

Ontem eu fui com a Delma, Renata, Ana Rosa e todo mundo do grupo da Nirvana para o Empório, um barzinho do lado do Fórum de Jacareí.

Agora, estou fazendo os meus planos para ir pra a festa de aniversário de uma amiga minha, em Jundiaí. Vou pegar o ônibus amanha para chegar lá antes do almoço. Ela vai fazer 30...

Bom, não tenho muito pra contar. Austrália está indo mal no Cricket, pois só fez 258 ou alguma coisa assim no primeiro "Innings" contra África do Sul. E Sydney conseguiu o quinto lugar no mundial dos interclubes de futebol, que não é ruim. Acho que Liverpool vai ganhar, pois são um time muito experiente, com muita técnica e habilidade. Não que São Paulo não tem, mas acho LIverpool melhor...

Bom, é isso. Peço desculpas ao todo mundo aí na Austrália que vai tentar ler isso e não vão conseguir.

Falei que não tinha muito pra contar, e realmente não contei nada - e o meu portugês 'tá ruim, ne?

Ok, so for those of you who don´t read/write etc portuguese, I started this blog yesterday (or at least signed up for it) so that I could send my sister a message, and for this reason, the title of my blog is "que saco fazer um blog", which means, "what a pain in the arse making a blog is".

Anyhoo, since I´m now involved in the "blogging phenomenon", I might as well post something, right?

I am currently in Brazil on a holliday, escaping the editing of a chapter of my PhD thesis. I just got back from a fantastic trip to Paraty, a magnificent historical city in Rio de Janeiro State. The place is a living, breathing 18th century museum, with some magnificent Portuguese architecture from that era. Paraty was the end point in the "Estrada Real", or Royal Highway from Ouro Preto and its rich, rich goldfields. From Paraty, all the gold was shipped off either to Rio or to Portugual, where the royal family filled its coffers. Hooray!
So the area around Paraty is fantastically beautiful, surrounded as it is by the Mata Atlântica, an amazing, dense forest hidden in the mountains that form the Serra do Mar. The mountains and the forest stop, quite literally, where the beach begins, and where there is no beach, the forest stops at the water´s edge. Stunning.

Paraty is also home to an amazing array of islands and hidden beaches, formed by the irregular peaks and troughs of the Serra do Mar. This, you can imagine, makes the area a wonderful place to take boat trips and go swimming in the verdent ocean. Oh, yeah. I did just that on Saturday, diving off the Schooner into the bay with wild abandon. No nasty sharks to worry about here, just starfish on the bottom of the sea, fish (which are all delicious eating, it would seem), and a water temperature that never appears too cold or too warm. Some guy in the 18th or 19th century said that "If Paradise were to exist on earth, it wouldn´t be too far from here" (translated, of course). I think he was spot on.

Yesterday I wandered around the mountains for a bit, checked in on a couple of great waterfalls, and then wandered around (illegally, it would seem) on the old "Caminho do Ouro", or Gold Road, which is a cobbled path that, as said before, goes all the way to Ouro Preto. It´s currently undergoing restauration, and I wasn´t supposed to go there, but i was only there for a bit, so no worries.

Anyway, that will do for now. As you can see, I´m really not that Angry, but I like the moniker Angry Panda. Some bastard took that one before me, so I´ve had to go Angrier. Dammit. THAT makes me angry... :-)