Flying Down to Rio

I just wanted to use the title, really.

We're feeling very carioca (as Rio folk are known) since just as we'd settled down to a coconut juice on Ipanema beach we saw our friends David and Pedro from London coming over the road. We'd no idea they were in Brazil, so this ranks as the trip's top coincidence.

David wrote a piece about travelling to the Amazon which was up on the wall during last year's Drama Centre workshop, and he and Pedro came round one evening when we discussed the Amazon (among other things) as part of the lengthy preparation for this trip. They're here for a couple of weeks staying with Pedro's family here, so we got a terrific introduction to Ipanema - including some extraordinary ice-creams. There's a lovely bookstore [link] where we saw some of Pedro's mother's books - she and Pedro's cousin turn out to have written books for children, including one set in the Amazon. So without even trying we seem to have stumbled on a whole new set of possible links to explore. Maybe a Unicorn Brazilian season? (We'll be having Swedish and Japanese seasons in the first couple of years so it's a possibility.)