Volunteer in Brazil: The Blog

Polly: Well we have arrived! and Rio is everything we expected and more! It is huge, it has taken us a week to get our bearings!Santa Teresa (where the convent is) is a lovely part of the city, it has a few boutique shops, some friendly restaurants and bars.

On our first day we settled into our room in the apartment, which is nice and spacious, and has a fantastic view! (you can see in the picture below the view from the kitchen window!) We also met the children for the first time. They are very friendly and seemed keen to meet us and ask us lots of questions!

Wednesday was Joe´s birthday (23 years young) so we celebrated in the evening by going down to Lapa to a fancy Samba bar called Scenaruim. Although it looked modest from the outside, the place was huge, with multiple floors, all of which had a central balcony to look over the stage and dancefloor. So we had our first taste of the Samba scene watching couples strut their moves!

Thursday we went along to the Children´s music performance, which they had been practicing for months. They have music classes every Friday, and we were told that many hours of work had gone into producing the final result, which we were very impressed with! (see picture below).

Joe: Friday we did a bit of exploring to try and see a bit more of Rio, we went to Copacabana and watched a bit of beach volleyball and drank coconut water on the beach….lovely.  We realised that despite its size the city is fairly easy to get around, with a well organise public transport system which will make getting around cheap and easy. one of mine and Polly´s jobs is to get a computer room at the project up and running, so the afternoon was spent surrounded by old computers and wires, we manged to get 6 working and hopefully can get a few more going with a bit of TLC.

Saturday: We went to the botanical gardens in the morning, which are basically a huge park covered with exotic trees and various flora and fauna, they were built by the Portuguese royal family when they were seeking sanctuary in Brazil from Napoleon. They were beautiful and the wildlife was great, with amazingly inquisitive little monkeys getting close for better views of us. That evening me and Polly went to Lapa for a few birthday drinks for myself, we had a great evening sat outside drinking Caiprinha´s listening to the music.

Sunday: for some strange reason we both woke up late and were feeling a little fragile so had missed are lift to the beach. instead we lolluped around until the afternoon and went to Copacabana for a swim, the waves were nice and big and we had fun getting knocked around by the swell.

All in all our first week was great, we´ll update you on the next blog how are first week of teaching went!

 Tchau for now xx

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