Let's get underway

Welcome officially to 'Eddy in Brazil', a blog I intend to maintain while I go on a cultural exchange to Brazil for most of this year. Some quick facts about the exchange:

Duration: Year programme (10 months). I leave on January the 27th, and am scheduled to return on December the 4th.
Destination: a medium-sized city (pop ≈ 300,000) called Vila Velha. It's located South-East of Vitória, which is the capital of Espirito Santo. To let you see exactly where it is I uploaded this placemark for Google Earth. My host family live 'downtown', for lack of a better word, and I'm promised it's only 1.5 km from the beach!
Flight: It's a big one: I fly from Adelaide to Sydney, early on Friday the 27th. Here I'll meet up with all the other Southern Cross exchange students from Australia wide, who are going to Brazil. I'm guessing around 10-20 others. From Sydney we fly to Buenos Aires via Auckland. Then to Rio de Janeiro, and from there each student makes their way to their individual destinations, and many (like me) will have to make another domestic flight because Brazil is so big. I'm flying Qantas to Sydney, then Aerolineas Argentinas for the major flight and then TamAir to Vitoria.
Adelaide --> Sydney --> Auckland --> Buenos Aires --> Rio de Janeiro --> Vitória
School: As part of the exchange I will do another year of high school whilst I'm there. Whilst academically it doesn't count towards anything, going to school will give me the opportunity to make friends and socialise more than anything else. Oh, and to learn portuguese, because that could come in handy. Anyway, Centro Educacional Michelangelo is the name.
Host family: I was first notified of my host family when I was driving into Canberra, on the 20th of December. I was to stay with a couple who have two young girls. When we got back from holidays however, there was a phonecall indicating a family had dropped out and some people were being shifted around. No biggie, although I would have preferred siblings, my new family is a young couple with no kids: Uziel and Daiane de Jesus (24 and 28). She is an English teacher and he is a Pastor. Upon hearing this I began to think my student exchange was somewhat turning into a Holy Crusade to the 'Promised Land'. I'm going to live in the state Espirito Santo (Holy Spirit) with the de Jesus family and my father is a pastor. I only have one picture of my host parents, but its a dodgy print-out and it wouldn't do them justice to scan it and thereby further reducing its quality.