Dear friends, family and random websurfers!

I thought it best to make a posting before we set off on our ride as, having now seen the terrain which we are expected to master with our bicycles there is a fair chance I will be physically unable to write again in the near future.

We arrived in Sao Paulo early on thursday morning, well rested, as Mord managed to swindle us the fire exit seats (mmmmmm....leg room!) by quickly signing us up to the Varig frequent flyers club and then claiming it was a disgrace for them to treat frequent flyers in such a way!

Our hosts in Sao Paulo were the exceptionally hospitable Friedlander family, who live on Sao Paulo´s equivalent of Oxford street, and treated us like kings. Using our ever improving Portugese we managed to navigate ourselves around the city, and landed up in the ´Instituto Butantan`, an area so densely populated with snakes that poisonous venom literally runs freely in the streets........well not quite, but it does have more poisonous snakes than pretty much anywhere else in the world. They are all stored there so scientists can extract their venom to make the antidotes for diseases such as Yellow Fever (which I have had, but Mord has not, causing him some serious concern every time we see a mosquito!)

The local Brazilians are really friendly and seem to have no problem talking to us for ages in Portugese, even though we have made it perfectly clear that we don´t understand. Normally I respond to them in hebrew just to maintain the illusion that a conversation IS taking place. Yesterday I responded using ´´Bendigamos Alatissimo´´ which proved particularly effective.

Dan Freidlander showed us a really great time over shabbat in Sao Paulo which has a big (and pretty afluent) Jewish community. What was nice is that it seems really unified. We davened in the Bnei Akiva bayit, alongside about 10 black hatters all happily davening by a sign which read `´barech et medinat yisrael reishit smichat geulataynu´´ - and similarly, Dan happily goes to the Satma shul down the road - something we don´t see too much in London unfortunately. Dan also told me about some pretty interesting ´minhagim´they have there but I realise as I´m writing this that I have too much to say to be able to write it all here...(ask me later boys!)

We have now left Sao Paulo and joined the cycling group in Ouro Preto where the weather is mouldy. Grey and drizzly. Most of the group look ridiculously keen on cycling, super fit, and some genuinely appear to be giants. One in particular has caught our attention, and Mord believes him to be Og melech Ha´bashan in disguise.

Most of the Brazilians we met over the weekend found it VERY amusing that we were going to do this bike ride. Apparently the route we are taking is EXTREMELY hilly, and seems to be a bit further than we expected. All in all, I´m not too confidentof our chances, but as I said many times before we left - its all in the mind!

Anyhow, I must dash, as we caught a tremp into the city (sorry mum and dad!) and the lovely lady says she´ll give us a ride back to the hotel (sorry again mum and dad!) in 10 minutes.

Missing you all, so please drop me an e-mail, a text or I think you can even leave comments on this blog!

Gidz and Mord