A quiet weekend

This weekend was mostly a relaxing one. There was a holiday on Monday (Children's Day) which apparently was a week long around here, so it shut down the buses to Limeira as well as pretty much everything in the town. So it would have taken a lot of effort to try to get out of here on Friday night to travel anywhere in the area (and the buses don't run on the weekends either). So we stuck it out at Iracambi, which is pretty normal for me now that I'm 2 weeks in and haven't really seen much beyond the Iracambi grounds.

Saturday was hot. I mean really hot. Like that one day in August in New York that you close the shades and crank up the air-conditioner and don't go outside. No such luck here, so we took it easy most of the day. Surprisingly the WiFi signal was really good in the morning, so I thought I'd do some quick fixes to the Iracambi website. The WiFi is very hit or miss here, so you need to take advantage when you can.

After lunch, Toni, the nursery manager invited Cliff, Jet (our newest volunteer from Australia) and I up to his home. Outside of having the greenest thumbs I've ever seen, Toni is also an amazing painter (with a studio I'm envious of), and apparently teaches acting classes as well. Even though he doesn't speak much English, and our Portuguese is quite limited, we had a wonderful afternoon - discussing religion, philosophy, homeopathy and happiness over homemade lemonade.

There was a drastic change in the weather on Sunday. It had rained over night and we awoke to overcast skies, fog over the mountain tops and much cooler weather.

It's funny, when it's drizzling and overcast here it's almost the same feeling as in London - the cold sticks to you due to the humidity and makes you feel much colder than the temperature should dictate. So all day I was piled in layers of clothes and still couldn't get warm. Even the cats were huddled together for warmth.

But in the afternoon, Imran got us digging holes in the nursery so we can build more tables to hold more seedlings, which got us warmed up pretty quickly.

He also bribed us with alcohol, so hole-digging was followed by wine and cards, followed by dinner, which was followed by some Gabriellas (which are some sort of hot drink that includes cinnamon and cachaca) and a few rounds of the "Who am I" game - which when played with a bunch of young idealists at an NGO you will almost certainly be given some sort of an activist or political figure.