Well, I'm back. It's been a while since I blogged (no suprises there) but I'm not apologising because I've done that enough times. (I wrote that sentence nearly a week ago and only now returned to it. I'm not so good at this blogging thing.) I spent christmas and new years this (well really last) year with friends of my host parents in Rio Verde, Goias, which is more or less right in the middle of Brazil. We drove around 20 hours (over 2 days) to get there- to me an incredibly long way, yet we still hadn't crossed even half of Brazil. I think in New Zealand we have no concept of scale. Or perhaps it's that Brazilians don't realise quite how far everything is. In New Zealand you drive 2 hours and chances are you're in the sea; in Europe you drive 2 hours and end up in another country. Here in Brazil you drive 2 hours and you haven't actually gone anywhere. That aside, the drive actually wasn't so bad- the scenery was incredible (yeah, this photo doesn't really say incredible, but I promise that it actually was and I just didn't take photos of everything)

 The first few days there were pretty much spent just relaxing, exploring the city a bit, sleeping in, that kind of thing. The big christmas dinner was on christmas eve (I appear to not have taken any photos on christmas day itself)

 Sooooo much food. Very very good food. Panetonne! Why don't we eat panetonne in New Zealand?  It's amazing. Like cake and bread at the same time. Christmas day was spent at home, with some presents in the morning, churrasco for lunch (I think, i don't perfectly remember...) and the afternoon was spent drinking beer and chatting.

 The day after christmas we visited a place with pools. Yep, super duper descriptive there. But it was great. They had one of those bars that you don't have to leave the pool for. Yet again my descriptive muscle fails me. You know, like in the movies. Only the movies don't show the bit where you fall off the seat into the water. Repeatedly.

World Cup stadium in Goiania. The World cup possibly deserves a blog post of it's own, people don't seem to be all that optimistic about it...

On New Years (still at the same place, but with more people) I was introduced to a bunch of different traditions. I feel like New Years is more important here than Christmas. Maybe just more different. Apparently it's good luck to wear white on new years, which i didn't actually know beforehand, that just happened the dress i'd packed. Does that make it extra lucky. Also lucky is eating seven spoonfuls of lentils and seven different kinds of fruit. You're allowed to just take a bite of each fruit, but after a large dinner at 10pm (I don't think i'll ever get used to eating this late- i used to be in bed at 10pm!) the lentils and fruit were a bit more than i really wanted to be eating. But hey, it's good luck, you gotta do what you gotta do. Also the lentils tasted good.

That's about me for now. Since getting back I've been doing almost nothing at all. It's getting a bit dull, to be honest, but I guess that's just life. Looking forward too seeing all you New Zealand folks THIS YEAR!