Well- straight in with the business phase. Well, not quite. We said goodbye to our host families at a nice event organised by the fellowhip, there were lots of hugs and even a few tears, but luckily most fellows- myself included- have managed to meet up with their families since.

We took a half-hour coach ride to our next hotel straight from the farewell ceremony. I know for a fact that journey should´ve taken about 6 minutes but we meandered around Avenida Paulista for around half an hour so that Liliane could expliain various things to us, hand out packs for the next phase and try to whip the Cadbury/Kraft fellows (who would be flying away to Willy Wonka´s chocolate factory immediately) into shape. It was the first real chance I´d had to whap out the guitar, and it turns out around half of the fellows can play a song or two so we had some good singalongs at the back of the bus. I was embarrassed to find out that i know most of the words to ´Bad Romance´ :(

The hotel though... Wow! Once checked in with my new roommate Ashvin, everyone wentfor an explore round the facilites. No disrespect to the Hotel Vermont where we stayed in Rio- it was all you could want from a hotel, but the Hotel Feller goes above and beyond! The rooms are spacious and pristine, with working showers, which work! An inspection of the rest of the hotel reveals a roof with sun loungers and swimming pool, gym and sauna! After the podge which has building up a nightly trip to the top floor may be in order... Afterall, sun loungers!

Turns out i don´t have time to write anything else. Will try later, business phase blog next honest!

In the past few days we have visited the secretary for education in Sao Paulo state (37million people), visited one of the best public schools in the region and sadly had to say goodbye for now to our host families.

I'll start with Friday. We had a visit to Vila Bunzaga (sp?) and the nearby favela Sao Carlos. We had and early setoff at 7-30am, but for me this is a relative lie-in nowadays, I got up at the lazy hour of half past six. After an hour and a bit on the coach (sleepy times next to mum Charlie) we arrived to a few single-story white buildings surrounded by a tranquil green grass (real grass!) which was a big contrast to the urban jungle of Sao Paulo we'd been spending the past 2 weeks in. The air quality was a lot better too... it hadn't been noticeably smoggy in the city, but it felt a whole lot fresher 25 kilometres away from the city centre. We spent the morning in alternating groups, the first group going to visit the Sao Carlos favela and the second staying back at the centre to package fruits into 130odd bags of six bananas, tomatoes and oranges which would later be given out to the surrounding communities, something which is always done as part of the centres Catholic values. We, the first group, were such efficient packagers there was no work for the second group to do... Woe be them.

There was then the trip to the favela, which was really really interesting. First though, we had to all fit in the bus... the groups had not been of equal size, which left us with 18 fellows plus Tuna, driver and 2 other people who I'm not sure why they were there... Anyway, 21 to fit in a 15-seater minibus. It was fun, especially going through a checkpoint! The favela itself was not in a good state, it was far more broken-down and dirtier than the Santa Marta favela in Rio, which had been heavily invested in by the government. The sewerage system was inadequate and ineffectual, also overflowing in places. In fairness though this reflects the location of the favela: it is built on government land without permission. It has been there for a good few years and the houses there are beginning to sell occasionally, but the likelihood is that within a decade the government will be around to clear everyone out and reclaim the land for whatever purpose. Some fellows were interviewed and a national TV channel, Globo News. Sadly I wasn't able to watch this on the news that night... But I'm sure i looked wonderful ;)

Vila Bunzaga, as I have mentioned, is a Catholic organisation. In the afternoon we found out that the purpose of their centre is to liase with the community, primarily through the school which they have operating. It is a private school, but the tuition is offered for free to children in the surrounding areas. This provides a competetive level of education which would otherwise be financially and locationally unavailable. This obviously comes at huge cost to the Church, but going even further than this, if students don't make public universities they will actually fund 50% or even 100% of private university fees- a commitment mirrored by very few charitable education institutions in Brazil, and none that we've visited.

This was a really pleasent day after a pretty gruelling two weeks in Sao Paulo and we were all feeling nice and relaxed as the day went on, with a free slap-up meal (a Godsend for two of the fellows who hadn't been fed properly in their host families), sun all day and sports facilities. Muj lost the football but sshhhhh.

The day wasn't over however... Stevie, a good friend of mine, had been the victim of the third fellowship crime the night before, so along with Liliane i went to the police station with her. There is effectively no hope of catching criminals, so we were only going for the receipt of the crime to claim on insurance. The station was very different than the one we visited in Rio de Janeiro- there were very few people there, perhaps showing how little trust and respect the police have here and thus how reluctant people are to pay them a visit here. It was over much more quickly and efficiently than the only time i've reported a crime in Britain, although that was over the phone which would possibly explain why it took so long.

The next day me, Allexia, Aniqa and her host Julia went into town to buy a guitar which I'll be using in my final project. After a month without one, it feels really really good!! And at just R$80 (around £30) plus 10 reais for the bag for a second-hand guitar I thought I did pretty well!

After this Julia then took me to my second Brazilian party- this lived up to the first one... Free alcohol and absolutely mental. This one was better in a way, as there was free barbeque, and we didn't have to pay to get in.

This is actually about a week old, internet is really hard to come by, so this was just saved on Martin's desktop. New one soon, maybe... lots has happened!

My most inventive blog title yet... But i am very tired!

So anyway... Tuesday! Up bright and early at six as per usual for the drive to CSL... however bright is a lie. The night before had been awful, bed at one and then waking up every half an hour for no apparent reason. As a result i was shattered, so Prab and I went in search of the elusive ´cushion room,´ a room where students of Colegia São Luís can go for some down time and a sleep if its all getting too much... Why they don´t have these in British schools i don´t know!

However the cushion room is a lie. Some builders gesticulated and Portuguese-ed that we couldn´t get by, so no luck. However, it was only half 7 so we went back to the computer room where some of the morning fellows were congregated. With 2 hours left before scheduled activities I had nothing else on my mind but sleep, so i unceremoniously pulled 4 chairs together (im 4 and a bit chairs tall it would appear), put on the ever-relaxing XX and promptly fell asleep. Next thing i knew the room was full of people and the lovely Liliane was waking me up Brazilian-style, with a hug.

We then had a talk from Reinaldo Pamponet, the founder of website Electrocooperativa- his English was very good, and it was nice to have the presentation in our own language. The website aims to harness creativity throughout the world, especially in youth: it asks companies to pay to post their problems and questions to the admin. The admin set up a ´creation call´which will be posted on the site which users can tchoose to respond to this creation call in any way they see fit- writing, photos, video etc. Then the money paid by the company is shared by the most appropriate solutions, with the admin keeping 20%. This sounds like a really good idea doesn´t it! For the first half of the presentation the man was really good, and i was thoroughly enjoying it- he presented arguments i really agreed with and the website sounded far less selfish and more about giving back to the world than taking from it, as a conventional business model works. For the first half the talk was one of the best we've had and really inspirational... there was some nice idealogy in there as well as some really good lines. But sadly after this the talk deteriorated pretty quickly.

For example he talked extensively about not wanting to have to judge pieces of work over others, as all the work is important. Fine, nice. However it is one thing for everyone to be equal, but when one person´s spent days on their entry and another has spent 10 minutes and to be rewarded the same isn´t really striking a good chord. Then it transpired that infact only a proportion of entries would be selected, usually around a quarter. The winners then, a bit of a U-turn on the ideals, and still if the company only found one entry useful then it would be rewarded exactly the same as the others. He also made quite a few of the fellows angry, forcing his own opinions on us and making some stonking generalisations. My favourite quotes were ´we wont operate in China, because the Chinese aren´t creative" (two Chinese fellows in Brazil alone, and im sure one of the selection criteria was creativity...) and "what is the point in giving money to a man on the street, all he will do is spend it on beer." He also slated charities, despite the fact several of us have worked or have family who work for charities, and we´ve spent a good chunk of our time here visiting NGOs and seeing the truly phenomenal work they do.

The more I heard about the website, the less I thought it could actually work- it is a really nice idea but just completely impractical and the only bits that would work seem to be the bits that go against its ideals. I would really love it to work, I have registered to the website and will have a look when it starts in the UK in September, but when he told me there were just 3,500 users and he didn´t believe in advertising that was the nail in the coffin as to me being able to take the idea seriously. Good luck mate, nice idea, but there are doubtless hundreds like it on the internet- word of mouth can´t get you so far these days.

After a quickie lunch we then had a trip to a state school, and a very good one at that. The place was very impressive and clearly the subject of a lot of government spending- it is primarily a school but is open for the public to use its facilities. It had 3 outdoor swimming pools, huge abstract pieces of metal attached to the main building and long, meandering, garishly coloured walkways to each floor of the other building. There were stairs inside too. It is things like this which makes me wonder more about the government... Huge decadent redevelopments such as this are made whilst to either side there were slums, and in the film we watched about a state school the budget was just R$500 per month- under 200 pounds. Big front-page redevelopments like this win votes though, especially with the country clamouring for more to be spent on education.

The centre though was really interesting- we had gone during school time and in the main building there were children playing football and practising circus skills. Not your run of the mill juggling but some really impressive acrobatic stuff high up in the air. After that we toured the other, smaller building in which there were classrooms, displays and a really nice feel. Back to CSL, and then home, where instead of the sleep i knew i needed i decided on a blog til around half 12/1 instead... And I´m doing the same today. On that note!

I think i left the last blog on Sunday night, so off I go with Monday morning.

The day started off with the standard 6am rise, followed by breakfast. I haven´t talked about breakfast yet I don't think... Here breakfast is fairly similar to back home. There is cereal with milk, bread, jam, and cake. Cake for breakfast is a bit alien to me, but apparently it is like this across most of Europe as well so maybe the non-breakfast-caking Brits are in a minority in this one. Then, getting faster at the morning routine I was at Colégia São Luís early, making it in by ten to 7. We were making a trip to the Casa Convivencia homeless shelter, which has strong links with São Luís in two groups at half past 7 and half past 8, so there was just time to nip upstairs and re-touch a couple of my previous blogs.

The trip to the homeless shelter was certainly enligtening. I felt awkward right from the off in our large group, as if we were visiting a tourist attraction- it felt to me that the people in the shelter would think we were looking down on them, although I hold my fellow fellows in higher regard than that and am sure none of them were, I don´t think this would´ve been a nice feeling for the people in the shelter. On the flip side, this trip is all about us being prepared to move out of our comfort zones, and the shelter is used to visitors from São Luís, and there was one man who approached a few of us to talk speak in English about how he was an ex-university student but had still ended up on the streets. Similarly to England, it seems, people from all walks of life can end up on the bottom rung.

But despite my whinging, I think this was one of the most important visits we´ve had in São Paulo: there were 15 staff, all paid, who help provide free meals for 120 people as well as a social space, internet access and help looking for jobs from 7am to 4pm. I was surprised to find that it wasn´t possible for people to sleep here, but thinking about it it does make at least a degree of sense. Whilst São Paulo does get a bit nippy (we ourselves have been feeling the difference from Rio, the Southerners especially!) it is not life threatening temperatures at night, and as the organisation is funded by the municipality (state) they obviously don´t see this as a priority. Though there are many other shelters which do offer beds at night, I still see a lot of people bedding down for the night in the streets when i walk the mile or two home, probably 6 or 7 times the amount I would see in Preston in a walk of a similar distance. Instead of providing beds for the night, the objectives of this centre seem to be social: allowing homeless people a space in which to meet people and make friends, allowing free shower and clothes-washing facilities, and rehabilitation: internet access for job hunting, classes in craft so people can generate their own sources of income are the kind of things that go on here.

It was surprising, then, to hear that 80% of the people who attend the shelter simply do not want to be rehabilitated. They are happier on the streets, and it also surprised me to hear that a lot of the homelessness is optional. Be this younger people who can´t live with the limits of home life and would rather cut their cloth on the street, or homosexuals who are kicked out of home. There is a lot of stigma against homosexuality in Brazil as I have mentioned before, not at all confined to religion: we have been warned by people on the trip "be careful going down that street, there are lots of gays" or similar. Mainstream society seems to genuinely believe that gays and transvestites are dirty, dangerous or what have you. Adults too are reluctant to go through the steps of rehabilitation. There are similar reasons for this to the younger homeless people- they don´t want to have a job, have to answer to a boss etc., and there is also the fact that the minimum wage here in Brazil is so low- R$500 (about 180 pounds) per month, and the cost of living is only very marginally if at all lower, in the central area where I´m staying it is higher than where I live in the UK. It is apparently easy to make more money begging on the street, and of course possible to make that much in even a single mugging.

We had a really good debate when we got back to CSL about what we´d seen, all of it was really constructive and a lot of it is included in this blog... so... errr... not all my own work. Mainly there was the issue of globalisation and whether it has effected the levels of poverty in São Paulo. Most people seemed to think there was a link but I wasn´t so sure. With the minimum wage here being so low there is not a large influx of foreign workers that displace locals from jobs as in parts of the UK, if anything industrialisation is more to blame, as farming jobs are lost to machines people flock to the city for work. Globalisation has the potential to at least partly reverse this as Brazil has plenty of fertile land that will be worked more intensively as world demand for food and other arable products rises, and also as the number of tourism jobs in Brazils undeniably splendid beach towns/cities and the Amazon rainforest increases.

I think that a certain level of homelessness will always be synomynous with big cities- the 18million-strong São Paulo (bigger, depending on how you count) is a prime example of this. As Brazil is a less developed country than the UK there will obviously be higher levels of homelessness due to the government having less money to spend on a benefits system, council houses, homeless shelters etc. I also think being warmer will have an effect- is the depths of winter and temperatures in Rio were not going below the high teens at night, making shelter a bit less of an issue for survival. I think there are links to globalisation, such as jobs coming from abroad into cities attracting more people than are needed to fill them which will create unemployment and raise house prices, but these links are I believe too tenuous to deserve attributing the whole complex problem of homelessness to globalisation.

And then the afternoon, like I say a big contrast- which I think is well organised even if coincidental- to Universidade de São Paulo, the University of São Paulo. We waved at Shyam and his host Naara's house on the way past! This is a public university, and in reverse of the pattern with schools, public universities are better than private ones in Brazil. USP is infact commonly acknowledged as the best university in Latin America and is consistently ranked among the top 200 in the world, as high as 32nd in one study. The obvious unfairness in the public University programme is that the places go to people who can afford to pay for University- to get a good enough grade to make it you will have almost certainly needed private education as well as extra tuition outside of school. There are just 7,000 places per year at USP to share between 115,000 applicants, and entry is given based on a single (mammoth) test on a single day- futures are decided in the space of just 5 hours.

In an attempt to get more poorer people into universities, the government is bringing in quotas, but as I understand (I may be wrong) it these will only work on race. The majority of university goers are white, as white people in Brazil are to put it bluntly richer- I've noticed this at São Luis with the majority (this is more true with day students, who pay) of students being white. However I don´t think this´ll effectively tackle the problem.

Say (these are not real numbers) there are 100 university places. 90 are taken by white Brazilians, 2 by Yellow Brazilians and 8 by black Brazilians. The government brings in a positive discrimination quota that says 5% of uni students must be yellow and 10% black, minimum. 5 white students with scores that would formerly have gotten them a place in the university now miss out, but 2 extra black and 3 extra yellows students with scores that wouldn´t have got them in before the bill get places. If these people were coming from poor backgrounds then there is at least a small justification for this racism (no need to dress it up), but if, as i suspect, the extra black and yellow students are coming from affluent backgrounds anyway then nothing is gained. Although there are more rich white people and I hope this changes within the country, there are more than enough rich black and ´yellow´ (as northeastern Brazilians and Central Asians are known here) people to fill the university places.  The effect will be rich people still getting the places, and social mobility not being improved, but some cleverer students being turned away in favour of still very clever, but not as clever black or yellow students, purely on the basis of their skin colour, to the detriment of both interracial relations and the economy.

Like I say I may be wrong and this may be done on a public/private school quota, but even this would have flaws. As in Britain some public schools are better than others, and with the level of corruption in Brazil i can see the middle classes infiltrating the best public schools and thus gaining the less competetive quota university places with relative ease. So how do the government here, and governments across the world as this is an issue in many countries, address this?

That, avid readers, is the million dollar question ;)

I promised Unica would get a blog and true to my word, here it is!

Unica are a Brazilian sugar cane company who speak on behalf of sugar cane producers around the world, primarily in Brazil where they represent around 60% of the US$28billion sugar cane sector. They primarily deal with ethanol, sugar and bioelectricity, but have also been branching out into bioplastics (such as those used in the Coca Cola in their new range of 'eco bottles') and even jet fuel.

Unica came about when they saw a market opportunity: in response to the first oil crisis in  the 1970s the Brazilian government launched the 'proálcool' (pro-alcohol) scheme, which stipulated all petrol must be blended with 5% ethanol. This ensured long-term demand for the product, thus spawning many more sugar cane farms and thus Unica. The figure of 5% has since risen to 25%.
The interest in ethanol is so great because it can be used as a fuel for cars- with oil stocks dwindling and world demand for petrol ever rising, this is obviously an avenue worthy of exploring. In Brazil especially this isn´t just an idea, but a reality: all petrol stations by law must offer at least one pump that puts out pure ethanol. Ethanol costs around R$1.25 (45 pence ish) per litre compared to the R$2.25 (80 pence ish) for a litre of petrol. On top of this, by law all petrol is 25% ethanol- Ethanol as a fuel when is sustainable and produces around 90% less carbon emissions than traditional petrol, meaning that Brazilian cars are some of the greenest in the world. Surely driving a car on ethanol is a no-brainer then? Not necessarily. Ethanol is less efficient as a fuel than petrol- the figure given to us in the Unica presentation was a litre of ethanol will get you as far as 0.7 litres of petrol (which is, remember, 25% ethanol in Brazil), however there is probably a degree of positive spin in this- my host Allexia believes the figure to be more like 1 litre of ethanol= half a litre of 75%petrol25%ethanol, which at current prices wouldn´t be a viable economic choice for consumers.

The majority of new cars produced in Brazil, 90% are now 'flex-fuel' meaning they can run on either ethanol OR petrol- and these are not crappy Brazilian cars we´ve never heard of, almost all major carmakers produce flex-fuel motors: GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, (these are everywhere in Brazil for some reason) Mitsubishi, Audi, BMW, etc., and along with this the first flex-fuel motorcycles are just being brought out. 40% of all cars on Brazilian roads are now flex-fuel, and a small fraction are ethanol only, and the 10 millionth flex-fuel car was sold in Brazil in March of this year.

Brazil is a country that takes climate change and greenhouse gas emissions more seriously than most- this is reflected by the above government policies (obligatory ethanol pumps and enforced ethanol blending with fuel) and by the energy matrix of Brazil, which has been shown to us at both the Unica and Petrobras talks. The matrix is as follows:

1. Petroleum- 38%
2. Sugar Cane- 17% (renewable)
3. Hydro Electric Power- 13% (renewable, and free once installed)
4. Wood and Other Biomass- 11% (renewable)
5. Natural Gas- 10%
6. Coal- 6%
7. Other renewable energy sources- 3%
8. Nuclear Power- 2%

This amasses to 46% of Brazil's energy being renewable- this compares favourably to the world average (29.7%) and very favourably to the average of OECDs, which is languishing down at just 6.7%. (This was wrongly quoted by both companies as the greenest in the world. I thought this was Iceland due the fact 100% of its electricity is produced from Hydro Electric or Geothermal power, but a bit of Googling has put Finland at the top of most lists of industrialised nations)

So obviously, using ethanol as an alternative to petrol is a good option if you want to save the world, and make cities less smoggier, and it can work out financially for the consumer. But what other benefits are there. (can't make question mark on this keyboard work!) Well, quite simply, employment. The sugarcane industry in Brazil employs just shy of 900million people directly, whether it be through the physical growing of the crop, refining it into sugar, fermenting it into ethanol, marketing it, transporting it etc etc. What i found really interesting about the presentation was the potential of growing sugarcane for ethanol in areas of Africa. Brazil has given loans to countries in Africa such as Angola and Mozmbique (who they are linked to due to shared language, Portuguese) and also Ghana and Nigeria. The potential for this as a tool for some African nations to haul themselves at least partly out of poverty is immense- Ghana has already signed a deal to supply Sweden with 150 million litres of bio-ethanol a year, and well-known Africa-campaigner slash (sadly slash work on this keyboard either) singer-songwriter Bob Geldof has spoken out in favour of biofuel production in Africa. This is an example of how globalisation can positively affect third world and developing countries, as well as the environment.

There are three main obstacles to large-scale biofuel production in the world´s poorest continent:

1. Demand. There is no certainty that demand will be high enough to make producing it worthwhile. Brazil experienced a huge drop-off in demand for ethanol in the 80s before a resurgence in the 90s, and few farmers would be willing to abandon a crop that has already made them money in preference for one that is highly perishable and has the possibility of not even being bought
2. Commodity status. Ethanol is not currently classed as a global commodity in the fuels sector- this is a big problem for trading it, as global tariffs will affect its trade more without the commodity status that Unica so craves for it. Oil companies are keen to stop this from happening and maintain it should only be traded as a food, and although it sounds cynical to call it 'blocking' ethanol's trade, and the speaker at Unica refused to be drawn (much) on the issue, we could tell he was a little bitter about this.
3. Stigma. There is global stigma with growing fuel as an alternative to growing food, especially in Africa, and rightly so! However a mix of common sense and the Unica presentation can effectively counteract this argument. If a person is a subsistence farmer then they are unlikely to swap crop if they are growing enough to feed themselves and their family- if they do it would only be because they could make more money for a better quality of life by doing so. If harvests of sugar cane are poor then the implications are less of those of food harvests being poor- a poor food harvest means not enough to eat; a poor sugarcane harvest is likely to be nationwide, even continentwide or worldwide, which would drive up the price of ethanol meaning the smaller quantity of sugarcane would still sell for a reasonable, if not good price. It is also widely believed that in Brazil rainforest is cut down to make space for sugar cane plantations. This is simply untrue, most sugarcane is grown in the southern-central regions of the country- rainforest ground is far less fertile and is protected by far more laws these days.

Obviously there are more benefits and negatives to ethanol production both in Brazil and in the whole world, but i feel I´ve had a good stab at summing up some of the main points of what i thought was a really interesting presentation and interview- thankyou for organising this one GF staff and British Council!

Friday kicked off with a reflection session... We have one of these every Friday and use them to collect our thoughts and what we´ve learned throughout the week. I understand that they are an important part of the programme, and i´m reluctant to criticize them but I don´t think pushing the group to make conclusions of what we´ve learned is the best way of going about things. Each fellow goes through different things, has different experiences even moreso now that we´re all living separate places, sees different things, interprets things in different ways and has a different take on life- of course the whole group isn´t going to be able to come to the same conclusion together. For example there is one fellow that lives a few minute´s walk from Colegia São Luis, gets in at 7am and goes home at 5-30; compare this to another fellow who lives 2 hours of unreliable bus rides from the College, gets in at 9-20 and leaves at 11. That means waking up at 6 and getting home at 1 every day! None of us are jealous of Jonny!

My point is that whole group can´t compare Brazilian education to British education wtogether the British educations we´ve received are all so different. There are fellows from all over the country, some are from private schools, some haven´t spent all their lives in the UK etc... So i think its fair to say we´ll all have different thoughts about how Brazilian education stacks up against British. It is really interesting to hear these, but expecting the whole group to agree and come to a joint conclusion is pretty ludicrous.

Anyway... rant over... sorry... And the second half of Friday. After lunch, in which some fellows went to pick up tickets for a samba show in the evening, we visited the Museu do Futebol which was really really interesting! I like my football, and similarly to the fellow-organised visit to Maracana stadium, this fellowship-organised visit was a really great way to compare the English and the Brazilian game. The stadium had an exhibit with a ball from every world cup, video of black-and-white blunders and an abstract room with nothing but a radio on an oddly-shaped plynth blaring out Portuguese commentary. In addition to this was  a really interesting setup of 4 table football tables. For example there was a table with only one striker, a table with 5 midfielders, a table with two sets of 2 midfielders and thus 5 handles- each one took a different strategy for playing. My favourite exhibit however was a darkened room up high underneath the actual seating in the stadium with surround sound of crowd noises and huge TV screens in different parts of the room: these kept turning on and off giving the illusion of getting closer and further away, and the direction the crowd noise was coming from kept changing, making the cavernous dark room and its echoes really quite intimidating- just how the crowd at a football match should be!

Then back to CSL and home for the morning students, whilst evening students stayed with their hosts for night school. As my host has left school I get to choose whether to be a 'morning' or 'night' student. I've so far opted to be a morning student (I need my beauty sleep), but will be going to some night lessons next week to see how class atmosphere in morning/night students differ. I arrived home to find my host dad, Flavio, back from Rio de Janeiro, which was nice as I´ve not had much of a chance to speak to him yet. He doesn´t speak much English, so I still haven´t really, but we both love football and really don´t like Maradonna. He sympathized when my beloved Southampton lost their season opener against Plymouth (Martin won´t let me hear the end of it...) the next morning.

From what I´ve heard the fellows then all had very different nights- some of the evening fellows went out with their students after school, with hilarious consequences; some fellows and some hosts went to a samba show and unfortunately one of them got mugged on the way home; and I opted for a quiet drink at a bar near my house with Aniqa´s host who lives nearby.

Saturday followed, and still devoid of a host I latched on to Stevie and Aline to take the quick metro trip to another part of town. The place includes a huge multi-story indoor shopping centre dedicated to rock, hippy and gothic products. The place was incredible, you could buy anything from a tattoo to a giant stuffed Garfield to a DVD of U2 playing some obscure Brazilian city to a Hamas or Hezbollah T-shirt, should such things take your fancy.

Arriving home at around 7 O clock, me and my host mum, Lu, cooked some dinner together before her and Flavio went out to collect Allexia from the airport. She had been away with her work at a photo shoot near the Amazon rainforest, on an island the name of which has escaped me, and came back full of stories- wierdly there are African Buffaloes on the island- she´d done the epic double of both riding one and eating one! We had an hour or so to talk before setting off to a party of an ex-student of São Luis, Lou, who hosted a fellow last year and unable to do so this year decided to invite us all to her birthday party. This is typical of the Brazilian attitude we´ve encountered so far, out-of-the-way friendly to almost total strangers. Everyone who went, around 20 fellows had a brilliant time. It was an absolutely crazy party, held in a club with a loud downstairs, for dancing, and a quieter usptairs, for sitting/talking/singing/bellowing across the room. I can tell i had a good time because I arrived back at 5am this morning and i think i´ve lost my hoody.

Today has been Father´s day in Brazil which has been a really lovely family event. After breakfast the whole family stayed in the house and at quarter to four there was a meal of garlicky fish, potatoes, salad and rice- absolutely delicious, and as a tribute to their cooking I managed to eat nearly as much as the rest of them combined :) One of their friends came around and she speaks some English, and along with Allexia this means I´ve been able to really come out of my sign-language shell for the first time with the family. I´ll be really sad to leave, as they´ve been really lovely to me, and luckily and Allexia insists I´ll have to visit at the weekends when I´m on my business placement with Pearson.

Now off to an Italian street festival of some sort... Not sure what this is but it can only be interesting!

So, I´m going to sum up yesterday and the day before, but in the wrong order just to keep y´all on your toes.

Yesterday was a very long day! But still enjoyable. The 6am starts i could do without, but arrive at school for 7am I did, and spent the time writing a blog, listening to a wee bit of music and pondering the ominous ´final project´ that we´re all becoming increasingly terrified of. We were then in a 2 and a half hour session in which we discussed "being young in Brazil," before having some generic but still enjoyable icebreaker style activities, followed by some drama activities all organised by a Brazilian therapist/psychologist whose name evades me... Infact he may not´ve been a therapist/psychologist, just a guy someone found somewhere. We also had a good whinge about how we don´t like racism, but the session dragging on a little bit towards the end.

In lunch, needing a fix of food, Prab, Charlie, April, Hannah, Gillian and I found a bargain of a restaurant where you weigh your meal and pay on that basis. Prab is ill and has no appetite so as designated fatboy i essentially got two meals! The food allowance is not stretching to anything else, so the philosophy is not to turn down any free food in the hope of saving enough money to buy a jumper or something... São Paulo is a very different to Rio, the temperature skulking at the chilly end of double figures and occasionally dipping its toes down to 8 or 9 at night. This is made worse by the fact the Brazilians all complain about how cold it is but leave their windows open all night! Packing for the beach was not a good idea anyway.

After this the whole group was taken to be part of the studio audience in a Brazilian show for teenagers, Altas Horas. The show incorporates live music with various "teenagery" topics. Unfortunately as the show was in Portuguese we don´t really know what these were, although we had Brazilian students from Colegia São Luis with us, some of whom had an admirable stab at translating for us though. The whole audience thought Tatenda´s name was hilarious, and Martin got quite a bit of attention for laughing very loudly about a minute after a joke due to only just having got the translation.

Now for the day before yesteday, Wednesday. In the afternoon we visited the Ethanol, sugar, bioelectricity, bioplastics etc company Unica, but I think they´re worthy of their own blog so I´ll leave them out for now. In the morning we had a really interesting presentation from Tuna about some of the attitudes of Brazilians. I´m mostly going to regurgitate some of the statistics from that, which i found quite shocking- they are taken from the book "A cabeça do Brasileiro."

We were told the story of a gay couple who were told by a security guard to stop kissing in a shopping mall- this received national condemnation from both people and the media, and afterwards there were thousands of gay couples making the trip to kiss in the shopping mall, which is now something of a rainbow hotspot. So it sounds like a silly mistake by the security guard in a sexually tolerant and accepting nation, yeah? No. A staggering 81% of the population are totally against male homosexuality, with another 8% slightly against, and only 5% totally in favour. A similar 78% are totally against female homosexuality with 10% slightly against, and just 6% totally in favour. This probably has some roots in the country´s official religion of Catholicism (which along with most religions condemens homosexuality) but the prejudice obviously runs deeper than that- only around 90million people, half the population, attend church but it is four fifths who oppose homosexuality. Another interesting statistic was that half of all Brazilians totally disagree with pornography- not something you would expect when walking through the streets, as the metal shacks that are on most pavements are literally full to the brim of porn magazines, with explicity blaring from all sides in most cases, regardless of who may be walking by- children etc.

Now for a Brazilian joke, accredit this one to Tuna. A rabbit escapes from someone´s garden and runs into some nearby woods. The police are enlisted to help recover the rabbit. Were the American police used, the rabbit would be recovered in 1 hour in perfect condition. Were the British police used, the rabbit would be found in 2 hours, a bit shaken up. (Personally i think they should switch us and the Americans, but remember we have a bad reputation over here after the Jean Charles de Menezes scandal). However if the Brazilian police were sent to find the rabbit, they´d return 2 days later with a pig, with the pig squealing "i´m a rabbit! I´m a rabbit!."

I´ve spoken enough about my opinion of the police here... but it would appear that a worrying large proportion of Brazilians support the methods, if not the force themselves. Torture is, of course, illegal in Brazil, but it still goes on and a staggering one in five Brazilians think that torture should always be used to until suspects  of crimes confess ("i´m a rabbit!"), and less than half (46%) believe that it´s always wrong. Fifteen percent think that police should kill robbers after they´ve apprehended them, and again, less than half (48%) think that this is always wrong. The same proportion, 15%, are totally in favour of lynching suspects (just suspects!) of violent crime with just over half (52%) always against this.

The statistics get a little less shocking after this- just 5% and 3% think it is acceptable to take the law into your own hands, or pay someone else to do it. But in a country of 180million people, remember that is 9 million and around 6million people respectively. One such case we have heard of is the high-profile story of Flamengo goalkeeper Bruno, who allegedly (and this is no old wives tale, he is in custody now) paid people to murder his ex-girlfriend, chop her into pieces and feed her to dogs whilst he watched. Horrific. And we thought John Terry and Wayne Bridge´s girlfriend was a scandal!

A few other stats of note are that only 53% of Brazilians regard paying a police officer a small amount so that he won´t give you a larger fine for speeding or something is corruption, and getting skipped to the front of a surgery queue by a doctor who is your friend is regarded as just a favour by 16% of the population, whilst half think of it as ´Jetinho´, a Brazilian word for "you scratch my back i scratch yours" or similar, which is considered acceptable by most.

Firstly...  I´m still enjoying Brazil, a few fellows and a few Brazilian students went out after school yesterday for pizza (they had one with chocolate and strawberries... odd but really nice!) and then cinema. We saw a film called... Explosivo... something in Portuguese. The film itself was in English however, with Portuguese subtitles. I´m told it had Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruise in it... well I didn´t recognise them. It was a very enjoyable evening, followed by my lovely host mother Lu coming and giving Raadia a lift before taking me to a lovely Lebanese restaurant! We used the phrasebook for a while and then discovered we both spoke a tiny bit of French. A really tiny bit, but hey.

Education: as you may know all 30 Brazilian fellows are spending two weeks with host families and attending Colegio São Luis throughout this period. The institution is Catholically run and is a private school, but offers many scholarships (hundreds) for children from less affluent backgrounds.

The most striking difference from British education is the time at which students attend school- morning students start at 7am and end at half past 5, a heavy day by anyone´s standards, and then the evening students begin at 6:35 and end at 10:45. The way the school works students who have scholarships or bursaries always attend in the evening, which doubtlessly contributes to or even spawns the amniosity between morning and evening students. From 3 days´ experience, they simply don´t get along- morning students look down on evening students, believing them to be ´less civilised, poor and dirty,´ or so the evening students tell us. The fact that they wear different uniforms can hardly be helping the situation, bad move by the school I think. Incidentally, all of the morning and evening students i´ve spoken to have been completely lovely- really eager to speak to us both to improve their English and to learn about England.

Fellows are split up so that some are with morning and some are with evening students... The evening fellows get the rough end of the deal, starting at 9-20 and sometimes 7 and ending at 11, whilst morning fellows start at 7 and usually end by 5-30, although today it will be 9 o clock. I´m in a lucky position as i´m staying with an alumni student so i can choose to attend whichever session i prefer- so far I´ve gone for the shorter day, mornings, but often stayed behind after 5-30.

We´ve had the chance to sit in on some lessons and see how classroom work, in a nutshell:

• classes are around 40 students
• the classes are much noisier and less formal, and at first glance it seems that nobody is listening, but the Brazilian kids seem to have the ability to take notes and take in information without any interruption to their social lives!
• quite a few fell asleep when there was a lesson in a dark room with comfy chairs!
• attitudes to learning seem to be the same as at an average British state school- avoid learning until the last minute when you cram like anything for exams 
• the amount of progress seems to be quite low each lesson, this is probably because lessons are just 45 minutes long and the first 10 of that is spent chatting
• students are not put into ability groups, and stay in the same room all morning whilst teachers move around. The examination and subject structure is different in that it is impossible to drop any classes, and you are examined in all lessons at the age of 17/18. This exam is pretty inconsequential however, the important one is the admission entry exam from Universities, again in all subjects.
• The level of pressure on students to perform in this is just as great as the A-level pressure in the UK.
• It is possible to re-sit years in Brazil, unlike in the UK. The standard of state schools is in general apalling: we watched a documentary about one on Monday, although private schools are generally very good, and although they are expensive, poorer families are often willing to go to great lengths to make the money to get their children in... this again adds to the level of pressure on the kids. Job prospects without a good education are pretty bleak.

The facilities of this one are amazing! Sports pitches, swimming pool, big library, cinema and museum complete with stuffed amazon animals! Bearing in mind this school is also right on one of the most important streets in the middle of São Paulo, it´s certainly somewhere you´d want to send your children... The fees are astronomical but as i´ve mentioned scholarhips and bursaries are availible. Conversely to this, it is the public universities which are better than the private ones, but to get good enough grades to go to a public university you´ll probably have had to have gone to a private school.

Firstly- I have already said i´m staying with my host family- Allexia and her parents. This has been really nice, if a little challenging at times. On Saturday, Allexia and I went firstly to meet her friend Tomasz, the intention being to meet up with his American exchange student so... this didn´t work out as she had seemingly disappeared into central São Paulo, however Allexia and I got to know each other a bit better in the 50 minutes it took us to find a parking space outside Ibirapuera park. The park is the second-largest in São Paulo, and according to Allexia the nicest place in the city... Then again she is biased, as a Carioca (person from Rio) she tends to talk down São Paulo in favour of her birthplace, Rio de Janeiro. We explored the park a bit, including the Museu de Arte Moderna (Museum of Modern Art, believe it or not) which included exhibits of famous Brazilian photography, garden with multi-coloured cameras instead of flowerheads and a video of a McDonalds slowly filling to the brim with water. I can´t say i´m a great art fan (i am northern remember) but I found the place really interesting and was sad to have to leave before the eerily quiet McDonalds was completely submerged!

After this we nipped home before returning to the park, this time to Ibirapuera Auditorium, a building which looks like a big which a mixture of something off robot wars and a giant white triangle blowing a raspberry. Inside, we saw Silvia Machete and her accompanying band... she can only be described as a less electrical Lady Gaga from the jungle who sings in Portuguese and dresses less shinily. Her wonderfully eccentric performance peaked with getting the whole audience to sing about mangoes, some trapeze tricks (no safety ropes) on a chandellier suspended from the ceiling, a slightly disturbing sexual act with a double bass and a rendition of Cyndi Lauper´s hideously catchy "girls just wanna have fun." The fun didn´t stop there however... Allexia, as a producer, has contacts everywhere and is good friends with the bassist, Pedro... This resulted in us going backstage and meeting the whole 5-piece band and nattering away in Portuguese for about an hour... I´m learning to tell what people mean from their facial expressions.

Spot the difference? Sylvia Machete and Lady Gaga. (Sorry for the Private Eye style)

Now I´ve mentioned Lady Gaga, shamefully, i feel i should talk about her... She is a big thing in Brazil! She´s all over their magazines, TV, every other other song on the Radio is by her (i keep thinking saying ´Telephone´ in an American accent at intervals- not good), and the gay bar which was a local for some of the group in Rio´s playlist consisted of Lady Gaga, Lady Gaga, and the occasional remix of Lady Gaga. Also some Ke$ha, who from what i´ve gathered is the slightly slower and for want of a better word ´chavvier´ Lady Gaga. She´s easily as big here as she is in the UK, which, bringing it nicely back to the Global Fellowship, shows the global nature of the music industry and how easily culture from other countries, especially the US can influence fashions overseas.

Despite the music not being particularly my cup of tea and being shattered from the 2 weeks in Rio and minimal sleep/catnapping the day before, i really enjoyed the evening... All the same it was a relief to meet the fellows on Monday: it sounds wierd, clichéd and a little sickly but we are the closest thing we have to family out here, and have bonded a lot in just two and a bit weeks. I won´t lie i´d been struggling a little to adapt and was getting a bit inwardly frustrated by not being able to communicate well, and speaking english and being fully understood as well as fully understanding felt very nice!

English at all is going to be a privilege from now on... Allexia is going away to do producery stuff in Rio de Janeiro, and her father also works there during the week, leaving just me and her undescribably lovely but completely non english-speaking mother until Saturday. It´s been fun so far, no sarcasm, we get on well and don´t have to communicate anything too complex.

Another point I´d like to add about my host family is how trusting they are, after just 2 days they have given me house key and i was alone in their house for a few hours, and i´m not alone amongst the fellows in this scenario- i doubt many families in England would be willing to give a relative stranger such unrestricted access to all their hallowed electrical items... This seems to be a common theme across the Brazil we´ve experienced so far too- you pay for your food after you´ve eaten it, in the majority of bars and clubsyou pay your bill at the end of the night, in the São Paulo food court you´re given full cutlery and luxurious trays to take where you please on the condition you´ll bring them back and street traders will often leave their stock unattended. This along with the approachability, helpfulness, different customs such as kissing when you meet someone and every time you meet them thereafter, silly things like the way ´thankyou´ and ´don´t mention it´ (Obrigada, De Nada) rhyme, politeness and general all-round friendliness makes interaction in Brazil really pleasent. Whether our approachability is partly the Gringo (an affectionate term for a foreigner) effect I don´t know, but even if it is I´m certainly enjoying it!

Blog on the Brazilian education system vs. the English one tomorrow.

Just a quickie:

Had a really good last night in Rio- met the ´global changemakers´ for a meal in Ipanema before moving out to Lapa for a night out. This didn´t go exactly to plan... everyone started freaking out, i nearly got robbed and we ended up back home by 12-30, but then a few drinks in the good old Mexican Bar who threw us a little party, to bed, then woke up at 5-30 (obscene) to watch the sun rise on the last morning along with about 7 other fellows.

Then there was the battle to get sand of all of my clothes before packing them in the bag, which has put on 6 kilos... this can´t all be sand but it sure does feel like it!

A quick word for all of the fellows who´ve been affected by some kind of illness! Global Fellows are dropping like flies but we´re all looking out for each other. The plague is rushing through the group like wildfire- there´s been vomit, diarrhoea, dehabilitating sore throats, dizziness, chest infections... you name it. We are all having a great time but the trip is seriously no walk in the park: very little scheduled free time, late nights, early mornings, travelling... blazing heat and tap water is undrinkable meaning you have to carry around big bottles of water to stay hydrated and the it is extremely challenging mentally with a lot of listening to do and a heck of a lot to take in. It´s really no wonder people are starting to get worse for wear. Hopefully now we are all with host families and thus living separately it´ll be harder for the bugs to spread, and we are starting to get more used to the pace and conditions.

That brings me nicely to the next point: host families. After a moderately frantic rush to the airport after goodbyes to Roberta, Dani and Teddy, there was the 45-minute plane journey from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo. The views from the plane we immense! It was really nice to see Rio disappearing behind us, picking out places we´d visited and I´m told that the scenery for the whole journey was amazing as we flew next to the coast. I say I´m told, as along with most of the fellows I fell asleep for the entire journey, even missing the food! :(

Yes, host families. There was a quick talk before hosts started to arrive. In typical Brazilian fashion, most were a bit late (it is customary to show up anything between half an hour and 2 hours late here). My host is Allexia Galvão, a 19-year old from Rio who is living in São Paulo for university. She hasn´t spoken English in around a year but there is enough to get by! Her parents are very nice as well and they´re all trying really hard to make me feel at home.