OK, so that’s Christmas and New Year out of the way – let’s turn our thoughts to Carnival shall we? This year it starts in early February but some years it doesn’t start until March – I’ve heard several Cariocas say that it doesn’t feel like the year has really started until after carnival. Personally I’m […]
During my time learning second languages I have found certain word combinations seemed stubbornly unwilling to make a home in my memory banks. Back when I was learning Spanish, I used to have terrible trouble with ciudad (city) and cuidado (care/careful). You can see the issue can’t you? They look pretty similar and when you […]
Learning Brazilian Portuguese (or any other language for that matter) isn’t just about words and phrases, conjugations and tenses, pronouns and prepositions. All those things are important of course, but there is something else missing from that list. Body language! Or “non-verbal communication” if you prefer. Whatever you choose to call it, it’s not something […]
As my good friend the Bearded Wanderer put it, I was a bit of a tease recently: I mentioned on Facebook that I’d just discovered my new favourite Brazilian dish but then instead of saying what it was, I just signed off with “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow”. Well, tomorrow was yesterday and I didn’t tell […]
A friend just sent me this link and I thought today (Christmas!) would be a great time to share it with the rest of you. Some amazing images from around this beautiful city. My favourite part is the bit with the planes taking off! Feliz Natal! If you want to get all full-screen on […]