THE PLACE
Caruaru is really nice, a James Bond style ramshackle tropical town, loads of BBQ's in the streets, samba music in all the bars and everything is so cheap. Meals for 50p, fruit for next to nothing. The school seems really nice. They've got about 8 PC's, 5 classrooms and it all is really well organised and structured. They've even got our photos up everywhere!!
The apartment is cool, marble floors, fairly basic but nice, only one problem there is no water!! It hasn't rained here for two years so once every other day they turn the taps on for an hour so you can fill loads of buckets with water. The water stinks as well. In order to wash I have to stand in a bucket and pour a saucepan of cold stinking water over myself so that should be fun. It's so hot I have to go through this palaver about three times a day but that's about as bad as it gets so I can't complain.
All 3 of us teachers are now here and we went to the market today and wandered round drinking sugar cane and coconuts. Weather's steaming hot and I keep getting bitten by mosquitoes, bit worried about getting malaria, but apparently there isn't any round here.

DAY 3
Life here is cool, we've just had our first induction meeting type thing. Gone through our schedules and stuff. I've got 3 groups of T3's which is 13-16 year olds and 3 groups of adults and also a Fluency class where I talk to the class to find out what they want to do - very student-centred. The staff are all really friendly and the students too. We are going to be taken to beach-houses for carnival and for meals.
One of the 'students' is a doctor, it's strange calling the adults students as they're 30 or so but he is a Director of a health club, where we had the aqua-aerobics and he said we can use there for free when ever we like. We're also going to join a gym place just near us, it's only a tenner a month and they've got hot showers!!!
Last night went for a mental meal we didn't have a clue what we were ordering but this bloke brought out about ten plates of noodles, meat, rice, salad and beans and lots of beer and it only cost us a couple of quid each.
Days are pretty easy at the moment we don't start teaching for another week so we just wander round drinking and exploring. There's two big footie stadiums in the town so hopefully we're gonna watch a game this weekend but apparently everybody just fights at the end of the game!!! On Monday 'work' starts. We've got a week of inductions and training, learning exactly what resources there are, how their testing procedures work, how our lesson plans should be laid-out and all that stuff. Money and every thing seems fine, nothing particularly official, but I'm happy with it and the school is brilliant.

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