This post is just to signal I haven’t been swallowed alive by an anaconda or eaten alive by piranhas or any of the other things people living in Brazil are supposedly prey to (as well as to lighten up the tone of this blog).

It’s been a while since I last posted, and since then my family and I have moved from a formerly ritzy neighbourhood of Salvador that’s becoming more and more commercial to a formerly poor neighbourhood that’s currently up and coming (at least two bus stops from where we live) thanks to the construction of two major apartment complexes and a shopping mall down the road.

The World Cup has begun, without any of the doom and gloom predicted by Anarchist graffiti – a win for bread and circuses – and winter is not only coming, it’s already here, at least in this hemisphere.

More later.