OK, OK, you win....

... residents of Cuiaba, I admit it- your city is possibly the hottest place that I have ever been to! After a week of the temperature hovering just over the 30 degree mark in daytime and dropping as low as 24 at night, it really out-did itself yesterday by topping the 37 degree mark. And if I wasn~t so cheap, I would have sat it all out in a nicely air-conditioned room. Unfortunately I am that cheap so just paid for a room with a fan- which just seemed to waft the hot air towards me.

For most of the week I have been alone in my dorm so had sole control over.. well pretty anything that there is to control in a dorm.. but then a new girl came in. One who is oblivious to the heat and so likes to sleep without the fan on. We haven~t spoken yet but have communicated through the medium of the fan controls.

But I am leaving today (though this internet cafe is nice and chilled and at R$1.50 an hour (or around 30p) I am tempted to sit the day out here). It has been a pretty mad week. The problem with arriving on a Monday is that you have to wait until the weekend before your friends have any real time to spend with you- which in this case meant that we went out every night during the week so were too tired to do much at the weekend.

I have been here with Daniela who is one of my original friends from when I moved back to London three years ago. When I first started teaching in London I was way more interested in spending time with the students than the teachers. After all, the teachers were just English and the students were all fun and exotic. Plus the teachers very rarely get drunk and tell me how fantastic I am! Since coming back from Colombia I have spent more time with the teachers (and worked out that it is possible to get a compliment out of them if you fish enough).

So Daniela was one of my first drinking buddies in London but she came back to Brazil two years ago- can~t believe that it has been that long! We have really had a lot to talk about. I have spent most of the week then either in the pub or sleeping off another hangover and avoiding the sun as much as possible. On Monday we went to a pub and only left when it closed, Wednesday we went to a night club, Thursday was another pub, Friday was a barbecue at a friend´s (massive) house, Saturday was necessarily quieter so we went to a pub and last night.. well pub again.

Yesterday we went to a big shopping centre near Daniela´s house with her mum and teenage brother. The shopping centre (or simply shopping as it is in Portuguese) had AC but seemed a bit shy about using it. They were getting ready for the arrival of Papai Noel next weekend- the grotto was nearly ready and even included some fake snow- though for many of the residents here snow is an alien concept. I am tempted to stay so I can tell Santa what I want for Christmas but figure that he will probably be appearing in other shoppings too.

Dani´s friends have been awesome at trying to communicate with me. There was a girl at the barbecue who can speak fluent Spanish after leaving in Spain for two years so we had quite a long chat- though, don´t tell her this, I didn´t always understand much! And everyone else has tried to talk to me which is enormously sweet- even Dani´s mum tried out a couple of words!

What I like about visiting my Brazilian students here in Brazil is the amount of time that I spend hanging out with goodlooking young doctors, pilots, lawyer, pharmacists etc- in London most of my English friends are English teachers and my foreign friends, well they take what work they can get really. It is a whole different world for me... and the houses!!! Oh my god, my flat in London would nearly fit in the barbecue area of the house that I was in on Friday night. Not everyone here lives in such splendour of course but it is really interesting to see.

And Cuiaba is quite different from Salvador- well the people are different from those that I spent time with in Salvador. For starters, most people here pay in cash and in Salvador it was a constant merry-go-round of passing out the chip and pin machines for everyone to pay, once they had all got out their phones and used the calculators to work out their share of course. People here don´t spend as much time in beachwear- we are a long way inland here- or seem to spend as much time in the gym or getting tattoos as the people that I saw in Salvador. And they kept asking me why on earth I was in Cuiaba, not a reaction that you usually get near a beach. But I loved both places and met some really cool people in both.

But it is time to move on. I am catching a bus to Campo Grande later- having not quite made it to Chapada during my time here- we wanted to go but things conspired against us and the last person to offer to take me there (a rather goodlooking young surgeon who had just had a fight with his girlfriend) quite rightly realised that taking an English girl who he met last night in a bar out to the countryside for the day probably wasn´t going to do his relationship any good. So Campo Grande it is and the Southern Pantanal. Then Bonito- which I am really excited about- you will understand why when you see the photos.

And as for a photo update here, I brought all the relevant equipment with me only to find that the PCs are locked tightly in cages under the desks so I guess that they are not keen on letting you near the USB ports.... another time, dear friends, another time!