Home Alone. I shall be doing my best Macauley Culkin impersonation and setting boopy traps in the house this weekend as Rach and Nelson go down to Recife leaving me "sozinho" to fend off any burglars. I have to teach on Saturday which is why I can't join them. So, it'll be a case of getting the beers in and watching some Premiership on ESPN... oh and I might go to see the new Simpsons Movie with teacher Diego. On Sunday I drive down to Joao Pessoa to pick them up and also see the latest addition to the family. Rachel's Uncle and Aunt have a new baby: John Barlow, born last week. With a name like that you'd think he'd been born to a family on Coronation Street. Still, everybody is very excited - except perhaps Nelsinho, who slips down one place in the "cute babies who need spoiling" league.

Plastic Bags revisited: Saving the world one bag at a time. A small environmental victory was scored today in the sleepy city of Natal, North East Brazil. Due to an unexpected set of circumstances (which shall be relayed later) we are now quite well acquainted with the Manager at our local Nordestao supermarket. Nordestao, you may remember, is our favourite local place to buy groceries. You may also remember (see blog entry for June 12) that it is here that we accumulate an uncountable and vast number of plastic bags. Well, Rachel expressed her opinions about the wastage generated at Nordestao to our new Manager friend and he assured her we could bring our bags back - (although, we are unclear if he means we can return them to the shop to be re-used/re-cycled or whether we can re-use them ourselves through the tills).

As he put it in his best English to me: "You must deliver your bags here. It is important for the world". It is, indeed, important for the whole world to re-use ones plastic bags...

Noise pollution second thoughts. After posting my comments on the fireworks outside out house (see Sunday's post), I realised that I should have mentioned how lucky we are here in Natal compared to my folks in Chad. At least we don't have a panel-beating garage next to us, farm animals at our bedroom window, the mosque minaret calling people to prayer at far-too-early-am or, for that matter, gunfire in the street. At least fireworks are pretty to look at...