This blog post is dedicated to Maggie, because she told me I should blog again. However, I probably can't just leave it at that, so now I have to find something to write about. So I clicked through the photos on my camera that haven't been shared, and realised I could tell you about last weekend. It wasn't terribly exciting or anything, just a pleasant weekend.

Friday was a public holiday, I think because of Brazil becoming a republic (is there a word for that? Republicising?), so there was no school or anything, and my family went to visit relatives in Planalto, an even smaller town about an hours drive away. There isn't actually all that much to say. It was just a lovely weekend spent outside in the sun (living in an apartment gives me a newfound appreciation of just sitting outside) reading books and chatting with people and swimmming in Eliandra's sister's backyard pool. Oh and the 15th birthday of a cousin (15th birthdays are a big deal here)

Sitting in the car on the way home, watching the world flick past my window it struck me again what a beautiful country this is. Sometimes it's a neglected, broken sort of beauty, but it's beautiful all the same. New Zealand will always be my home where I belong, but Brazil is the perfect place for an adventure.

Hello my lovelies, it's been a while. So I'm going to try to make this an extra long post to make up for it. It is yet to be seen whether that will actually happen, but I have good intentions.

So, what have I been up to? The day before yesterday I travelled to Porto Alegre (the state capital) with a group from my school, to visit a big art festival thing and a book fair. It was about a 7 hour bus ride away, so we slept on the bus two nights in a row so that we could spend the whole day in Porto Alegre. I say slept, but that's a bit of an exaggeration. It was a nice bus, as buses go, but no bus is ever going to be an ideal sleepng place, especially not with 40 teenagers on it. (There is a time and place for a screaming competition. On a bus at 3 in the morning is not it. Just in case anyone was wondering.) The day was spent wandering around art galleries and the book fair, which was nice, but exhausting. It was cool to see some conceptual sculpturey stuff (i've missed talking pretentiously about art :p ), though nothing particularly stood out. By the end of the day the more important question became 'is this a work of art or a convenient place to sit?' But Porto Alegre is a beautiful city, and at the end of the day we visited a mall and i watched Thor 2, which was fab, so no loss there.

 Pretty mueseums

 And parks with art in

 We were allowed to take photos of the art throughout, but I finding taking photos in a gallery weird and somehow disrespectful, so this is the only one I got. And now thinking about it, it was a kinetic sculpture, what I hoped to achieve by taking a still photo of it I don't know. But I really liked it.

Yarn bombing! (I am so annoyed at this photo. Or more accurately, I am so annoyed at blogger, which will not let me rotate, however hard I try, and forced me to create a google+ account in the attempt to rotate it and then that still didn't work. So I give up in despair and you'll all just have to rotate your heads intead.) EDIT Hey look, it fixed itself. Now it's just weirdly squidged. You can't win...

Then on wednesday evening we had our school halloween/day of the dead party. For this we had to decorate altar thingies celebrating famous dead people. So this is my groups one for Elvis Presley.

My only actual contribution was the skull, but it was fun.

In which Sophie was wearing makeup, an unheard of, and probably unrepeatable event. Sorry, it's a terrible photo, but I thought there should be some evidence.

Other than that life has just generally been plodding along like life tends to do. There a good days and boring days and bad days, and I suppose I'm learning stuff, though I wouldn't necessarily be able to identify what. I feel like now that I've been here for 3 months i should do some kind of post about where I'm at, and how I've grown a person and whatever, but I don't know if that's simple enough for me to articulate it in a simple blogpost, and I have my doubts about what should be on the internet and what shouldn't. That's all for now I guess. Sorry it wasn't all that long after all.