09.08.16 - Rio dos Camarões

Greetings from Brazil, already in the throes of Olympic fever after an opening ceremony already being described as "quite good, actually".  The only fly in the ointment so far is the men's football team drawing their first two games against South Africa and Iraq, displaying almost England-esque levels of haplessness; but I'm sure they'll get it together against Denmark tomorrow.

One of the factlets I learnt during the athletes' entrance on Friday night is that Cameroon is called "Camarões" (or "Shrimp") in Portuguese - it turns out Portuguese settlers got there first and named the country after the "River of Shrimp" that ran through it.  So there's that.

Back in São Paulo, we went for a whistlestop tour of the city on Friday afternoon with a friend of Gaby's from Maceió (although they met in London) - we took in a huge pastel at the Mercadão and red velvet cake in Vila Madalena, prior to a gridlocked shuffle down the Avenida Paulista just as some anti-Olympic protesters got going.

Then on Saturday Ridaut and I dusted off some bikes and went for a ride around the Campo de Marte airfield, on the much-maligned but actually quite nifty cycle lanes; on Sunday the city had laid on more temporary lanes, so we went for a cycle around the Parque da Juventude, former penitentiary grounds which have been transformed into a rather nice park. We also found time to take in an all-you-can-eat ice cream festival in Pinheiros, which wasn't all that great, but the surrounding flea market was pretty cool.

This week I'll be working on my driving, watching vast swathes of televised sport, applying for reviewing jobs, and trying to breathe some life into this seemingly DOA event we're organising in October; in the meantime I've cooked up another pukka mix for your listening delight.

Hope all well, and let's speak soon-ish.

I'm A Fred of Americans