18 of December - Friday

In the interests of starting my holiday quickly I'll condense the last 3 days into a few words.

You know how last weeks are...uneventful. Many have already travelled and those that are still here are only getting lessons from teachers that are teaching half-hearted lessons because they are aware of the people travelling. Pfft....I think that people who travel early should be ready to face the consequences of having to catch up everything and keep up with their workload and not consequently punish those that are still here by making them have only partial lessons...

Happy Holidays

15 of December - Tuesday

Lucas wasn't the only one to get into an Ivy League University, though he was the only one to be shaved; for now, anyway...

Julia and Giovanna were accepted into Brown University! Congratulations to them!

14 of December - Monday

Lucas has been admitted into Columbia University in New York!
WE HAVE AN IVY LEAGUE PAULEAN IN THE U6!

Of course, Lucas wasn't gonna get off lightly. Break time was filled with the sound of electrical shavers are we shaved all of Lucas's hair off.

Photos are below but if thats' not enough for you, here's the video footage of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL9apVw4_c0

11 of December - Friday

Inter-house games for the U6 were going to take place. They were posponed until the first week after the Chirstmas break because:

• The weather was terrible. If it rained we would only have volleyball and no basketball or futsal.
• The L6 were not there.
• There were very few U6 there. There would only be 2 people in the Stuart team!

10 of December - Thursday

Uneventful day.

9 of December - Wednesday

It seems that without the 6th Form Centre U6 and L6 life tends to go very very dull. I know that for the next and and last week of this term we'll have the 6th Form Centre back, but most of the exams are in the Theatre! Why not just have all of them there and let us keep the centre?

8 of December - Tuesday

Other than the fact that this is the 80th post on my U6 blog, nothing interesting has happened today.

7 of December - Monday

With the L6 having to take many of their exams in the 6th Form Centre, we're not allowed to use it for the time being. "The time being", of course, spanning all week long.

Anyway, at least it's more quiet now: the L6 only come to school to sit their tests.

4 of November - Friday

Unfortunately for the Lowers, they've got their Ty-Out exams next week.

The school usually gives them a good study leave, where they don't need to come to school and stay at home studying, right?

Well, apart from only having to come to school to do an exam, the school offered them a generous study leave of.......half a day! They only missed a single period of science and a double of P.E.! I heard many Lowers saying that this "study leave" is about as pointless as having an air conditioning system in a greenhouse.

3 of December - Wednesday

Well, there's nothing to report today. Sorry if not every day has something exciting going on... :D

2 of December - Wednesday

With only a few weeks left until the Christmas break, the U6 decided to hold a secret friend game.

During lunch-time and a bit afterwards, during the Tutorial period, we drew names out of a bag.

In case you don't know; the rules are as follows: Draw a name out of a hat. That's your secret friend. Someone else got your name out of the same hat. Compile a wish-list. Each person gets what the other person wants (within a price range of course). At the day of the event, we exchange presents, basically.

Pretty good. It's gonna ge during the last tutorial of the term.

1 of December - Tuesday

Ah, French Day!
Croissants at break time and lunch time, French food for lunch, some teachers and some students wearing French berets.
There was also a way, at the front of the school, to get a subscription to a French magazine and I also heard about a reading going on after school in the Chapel.

Not too sure about the date though. Does anybody know why December 1st was chosen for French Day?

30 of November - Monday

Oh yes! The Sidecar Rider show took place tonight at 7:30pm in the school theatre. It was good that the lights from the school play were still up and they could be used.

Not only was there excellent music, but Alan, Sean, Murray and Pedro put on an excellent show to raise money for charity. The audio track from the show was recorded and the show itself was filmed. Don't forget to check out their website and purchase their CD that comes out quite soon; the 10th of December, if I'm not mistaken.

28 of November - Saturday

The final night is here. One more time then there's the cast party.

We came this far and we finished it great!

Even the lighting crew had loads of fun: after all, we painetd our faces to look like Gene Simmons and Starchild from Kiss! I'll post a photo when I have one!

27 of November - Friday

Tiring week. It was the second night of the School Play and we've still got one more waiting for us tomorrow. Here we go...

26 of November - Thursday

The end of November is coming up and so is the play.
Opening night.
Tense cast.
Tense crew.
Practically full house audience.
"The Dream" is finally here.

The can imagine how the cast and crew were. The extreme heat in the lighting and sound booth at the back of the theatre didn't help to relieve the tension.

Not surprisingly, though, it went very, very smoothly. The cast knew all their cues and what they needed to do. Similarly, the backstage, orchesta and lighting crews were prepared.

For a change of pace, the filming people recorded the DVD of the play tonight. It's usually filmed on the second night out of the three.

What else can I say? We kicked ass!

25 of November - Wednesday

There was no School Play rehearsal today. Since Monday and Tuesday were packed full of rehearsals and we had to stay late, we needed a break.

The opening night will be tomorrow at 19:30.

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare. Let's do this, guys!

24 of November - Tuesday

We had an ice-cream festival again today!

This time, though, it wasn't just an expensive ice-cream popsicle. This was more like the ice-cream festival we've had before. But you know what? Instead of telling you about it, I'll show you:

On another note; the opening night of the school play will be on Thursday. Due to this, there was a long, tiring and productive Dress Rehearsal. If we do as well in the actual play as we did in the Dress Rehearsal, it's going to be on excellent play!

23 of November - Monday

It's the play week today. Yeah. Rehearsals went all the way to 8:30 pm tonight.

Things are going very well in my opinion and A Midsummer Night's Dream seems like it's going to be a very exciting, funny and worthwhile play. Be sure to check it out, people.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

By the way, Mr. Mugan's band "Sidecar Rider" is going to host an hour long show in one week where they shall play songs from their first album. (The lights will be done by yours truly!)

Here is the link for their promo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcYf0fXw2QM

Hope to see you guys there!

19 and 20 of November - Thursday and Friday

Dia da Consciência Negra holiday. No school on these two days.

Great for us and a perfect opportunity to catch up on all that coursework.

18 of November - Wednesday

Purple Day.

Anyone who had anything purple (or got the facebook message about Purple Day) was supposed to come to school today dressed in it. Purple shirt, dress, socks, tie, whatever.

Truth be told, I was pretty surprised by the amount of people who did. More than I had previously imagined.

Friday's gonna be "Dia da Consciência Negra", a holiday exlusively for São Paulo. So no school for us on Thursday and Friday.

We had our occasional Headmaster assemblies this morning. Guess what it was about? That's right! Dia da Consciênia Negra. We had a humanities professor come in and she gave us a talk about the origins of the holiday.

17 of November - Tuesday

Lunch was good today! We had hamburgers and french fries. Unhealthy, but delicious just the same!

With the school play just looking over the horizon the rehearsals are becoming more and more frequent. Next week: A Midsummer Night's Dream!

16 of November - Monday

It seems Mr. Mugan has set a new rule for the tutorial class: Monday is not Disco Morning during the tutorial period early in the morning. Beegees music filled tutorial and got us started for the week.

Oh, and it seems that the year group representatives finally managed to convince the PTA (after 1 whole year of waiting) to put a coffee machine in the 6th Form Centre. Yay for us.

13 of November - Friday

One of the many Friday the 13th's of this year.

The girls had a game against Chapel school in basketball. They won and are now champions for the second time!

12 of November - Thursday

Tomorrow the girls have a final game against Chapel tomorrow.
After school their ECA was specifically in order to prepare for that.

11 of November - Wednesday

Since it was Remembrance day today; there was a 1 minute of silence during our Portuguese lesson after break time. Mr. Woodward went outside and played the buggle in honor of the casualties of war.

The girls will have a football game tomorrow. Let's wait and see how that goes.

10 of November - Tuesday

This one's coming a little bit late. I have an excuse, mind you. The blackout. There has never been a blackout like this in Brazil since 1999. 9 States in Brazil were almost completely powered down and this affected everyone up to a point a bit beyond the Brazil / Paraguay border.

So that's it people. I was going to write this post a little later than usual but, oh no!, the blackout hit and the power only came back at 1:15 am of today.

The girls had a game of football against our traditional rival, Graded school. The game grinded on with both sides battling valiantly. The score was 1 - 1 so they had to go into overtime. The penalty shots ended the game. St. Paul's beat Graded: with a score of 3 - 2.

What I forgot to mention on the Monday post was that this is reading week! We had a whole senior school assembly with the Headmaster who addressed this information to us.

Mr. Mugan's "Bookaholics" video was finally presented on a big screen after, if i'm not mistaken, 10 trailers.

The game was mentioned and so was D.E.A.R. This stands for "Drop Everything And Read".

This is basically when someone walks up and down the corridors ringing a bell. Students and teachers are supposed to stop what they're doing, grab a book and read for 20 minutes. The only flaw I see in this is that whilst some teachers take this seriously, including when we're doing an important piece of coursework, other teachers do not stop to read no matter what we're doing; trivial work or not.

9 of November - Monday

Ask any student and they'll tell you that we get Yoghurt for desert way to much at school. Something very similar happened today, when the school menu said that we were going to have Donuts for desert. For some strange reason, about half an hour before lunch time; the lunch menu's changed to say that the desert was going to be yoghurt....again.

And, sure enough we didn't have donuts at all and we had to have the same strawberry yoghurt again.

7 of November - Saturday

It's Saturday, 7/11 and it's the International Day at St. Paul's.

If we, the U6, are going to maintain the tradition of having an U6 trip then we have to raise money. How, you ask? Well, we set up a tent along with the many tents from different countries at the event. The difference was that we sold Panico T-shirts, offered face-painting services (although that was a bust) and we sold raffles for an off-road dirt skateboard.

Sales were not going particularly well until we decided to satisfy a popular demand: you see, whilst the Sodexho staff was providing softdrinks, they were pretty much limited to Pepsi. Most people don't really like Pepsi as much as they do Coca-Cola. We went to the local supermarket and bought a hell of a lot of Coke.

Raising the price by 1 Real didn't drop the demand any bit and we were soon running out of Coke; as was the supermarket, Pão de Acúcar!

6 of November - Friday

I didn't go to school today so I have no idea what happened. Anyone offer to guest post?

5 of November - Thursday

It seems they got around the tree by just cutting up holes and wrapping it around the branches of the trees.

4 of November - Wednesday

With the International Day coming up this Saturday, the School's staff began to work on the enormous tent that will be used to shade everyone.
The field, where the tent is usually set up, is not available, as it will host a football game the week after that and the inevitable mess caused by the international day will not be cleaned up in time.
The enormous tent is being set up in the middle of the open patio of the school, much to the discontent of the pupils and teachers. This is because we are forced to take large detours around the field and near the covered area in order to get to classes. I also find myself wondering how they're going to get past the milestone of setting up a tent where a massive tree lies. Undoubtedly they'll find a way, or else they wouldn't have picked that location for the tent.

3 of November - Tuesday

The school looks...desolate...in the 6th form. It reminds me greatly of Rancho a few weeks ago, when a huge percentage of the 6th Form Students spent the week away.
This time, though, it was a Biology trip that left yesterday afternoon (yes, a holiday) and will only be back Friday afternoon.

The thing is, at least 60% of the U6 does Biology so the 6th Form Centre looks even more empty than it did a few weeks ago. The result is that classes consist of an average of 4-7 pupils. Interestingly enough, our English A2 class only had 4 people; but it always has only 4 people!

2 of November - Monday

There was no school today. It was Finados.

30 of October - Friday

The highlight of today was really the whole senior school assembly.

Mr. Rowe, our Headmaster was back from the HMC and was pleased to anoounce all of the sporting triumphs that St. Paul's had achieved. All of the Rancho awards and all of the excellence at the Athletics Day.

There was one detail though. The counting of the Athletics day points was incorrect. Turns out that it wasn't Stuart that won first.

The results are:

3rd Place - Stuart

2nd Place - Tudor

1st Place - Windsor

29 of October - Thursday

It seems that we didn't have one week of Brazilian food at school, it was only the first three days of the week. This time we were given the regular macaroni.

The Commom App reports are due in for tomorrow; similar to most deadlines this is when people are gonna start to rush.

28 of October - Wednesday

Oh yes. It was a pattern. Today the food was from Goiás. The main course was similar to the regular meat we had except that it was chopped into rectangles of different sizes. The desert was ice cream with an optional banana cream to put on top of it.

After lunch, during the tutorial period, Mr. Thomas gathered all of the U6 in the 6th Form Centre. We were told that our IB's had been confirmed. All that was nescessary of us was to check our information to see if everything was correct. I believe that, for most people, it was.

27 of October - Tuesday

I think I'm spotting a pattern here.

Yesterday we had food from Minas Gerais. Today we had food from the Northeast of Brazil. This included some form pie, similar to the regular meat pie that we have every once in a while. I think they added carrots this time, though.

At any rate, we also had the Chester breasts promised to use yesterday. The desert, however, was a mouth-drying peanut mixture called paçoca. It's great, but as it's mouth-drying, a large glass of water is needed afterwards.

26 of October - Monday

Well the Playstation 3 isn't in the 6th Form Centre anymore, but of course we can't expect someone to leave their PS3 there every single day. Oh well.

I was a little bit surprised with lunch again today. The lunch menu said we were going to have "Chester in Dark Sauce" as the main course with "Ice Lolly" for desert.
Let's just say that they completely changed what we had. It was food from Minas Gerais (or at least they said it was). From Chester in Dark Sauce we had Roast Chicken that was similar to the usual one except they added some quiabo to it. The "ice lolly" which I assume was meant to be popsicles was changed to Queijo Minas with some Doce de Leite on it. Probably, though, the strangest thing in this lunch was the menu. It was more than clear that they used a simple internet translator when "Doce de Leite com Queijo Minas" was written as "Cheese and Mines".

23 of October - Friday

Two surprises were in store for us today.

1) Rafa Rocha left St. Paul's today. I'm fairly certain that we will all miss him quite a lot and we all wish him the best. Make sure you keep reading this here, Rafa, so that you won't forget all of us! Best of luck at the Film Academy!

2) After school yesterday, Bia and Olivia set up and entire cork board dedicated to us Uppers. It's fantastic, inlcuding photos of us when we were little kids all the way until photos of last week. They even went got to the point of getting last year's annual review, cutting out all of our photos and stapling them up to the bottom of the board. Basically it consists of enormous, flashy titles at the top, photos down the middle and at the botton, a row of each of our individual photos. I have already gotten permission to take a photo of the board to use it as the main photo of this blog. I'll be sure to get to that on Monday.

22 of October - Thursday

Joy rained down from the skies this morning, when the kind soul of Eddie came to school today. He was bringing us a wonderful gift. It was a complement to Zé's PS3: FIFA 2010!

Oh yes! Eddie brought us the full game! Now players won't be stuck only playing with Barcelona and Chelsea. We'll also have more stadiums to play in, other than the muddy and rather unkept one from the demo. What else can I say? Hell yeah!

21 of October - Wednesday

Unfortunately for Jacobs University in Germany, the talk was scheduled during our morning maths lesson. I'm sure that most students (if not all) were unable to miss out their maths lessons for a college talk. Yes, as incredible as it may seem, nobody went to the Jackson University talk.

On the other hand two very prestigious and renown universities came to talk to us during our after-lunch tutorial period: Duke University and Brown University. ITB, the computer room where the talks too place was absolutely stuffed! I don't think we've ever had a university talk with so many people! of course, the L6 were present as well as the U6.

The lunch name today also gave all of us a scare when they gave us what was called "Kung Pou Chicken". It was quite comic when many students, including myself, went to Google Images to sort of predict what sort of chicken it actually was.

Turns out it was the same chicken that we get with the Yakisoba: chiken chopped into small chunks, surrounded by vegetables and some other spices. It was pretty good; though the Meringue that was for desert still looked like it was going to sprout legs and walk off our plates. As usual. I've still never had the guts to try it. Mark my words, by the end of U6 I'll have tried it.

20 of October - Tuesday

For the first time in the term, our TOK lessons took place in the classrooms. Up until now, all our lessons took place in the Chapel downstairs where we had the students doing their oral presentations. The orals shall continue but in the classrooms.

This seems to be college week! Only today, we had talks at lunch time from Boston University and Chaplan University. After school there were 6 Universities including Babson, Hofstra and the University of Miami.

I say it's college week because of the fact that tomorrow and Friday are also going to host a series of other colleges.

19 of October - Monday

The week long Half-term break is over. Everyone has to get back into the groove again. Was a week too long? Or was it too short?

At any rate, the 6th form was not any less enthusiastic. I'm not sure who the good samaritan is, but a PS3 was brought in and people took turns to play FIFA 2010 on it. Since, if I'm not mistaken, it was a demo game, there were only Chelsea and Barcelona available to play with. Or, at least, those were the only teams that people were playing with.

Well...that's pretty much it. No breaks after the holidays, of course, and the teachers went straight into what mattered.

9 of October - Friday

I think it's pretty interesting that the last post before the Half-Term also happens to be the 40th post on this blog. It's pretty weird to think I've actually been managing to write one post per day!

Oh, right: why do Sodexho insist on giving us FISH and YOGHURT on the last day before a holiday?! Do they want us to leave with a bad impression? I don't look forward to my last lunch at the school...

Anyway...

It finally happened! The Athletics Day! Due to the dull weather today and for the past couple of days there was only a 40% chance of it happening, but that 40% pulled through, causing only minimal problems with the events.

Now, being a Windor, I didn't spend too much time (read: at all) in the areas of the different houses. But I do know that even the younger kids got into the whole thing: wearing blue wigs, waving blue pom-poms. The F5, L6 and U6 limited ourselves to blue facepaint: either a blue spot or blue lines on our cheeks.

Slipping in the races didn't bother people much and at least three people slipping and falling straight on the floor at the end of the race just added to the comedy of the whole thing!

The results were as follows:

3rd - Tudor

2nd - Windsor

1st - Stuart

Now the whole school's got an entire week off! Happy holidays to everyone and take your well-earned rest!

8 of October - Thursday

With the Athletics Day coming up tomorrow (if the weather improves, that is) the pre-contested events are over and here are the results:

Boys :

1st Stuart
2nd Tudor
3rd Windsor

Girls:
1st Windsor
2nd Tudor
3rd Stuart

Overall:

1st Windsor andTudor
3rd Stuart

In rather unrelated news, the Rancho teams have arrived back home today. I look forward to finding out the results of the tournament tomorrow. I'll be sure to put them on here tomorrow.

7 of October - Wednesday

Although this was unknown for me until right now, I discovered that Mr. Bolland's wife gave a talk to all the senior school (except the 6th form) about nutrition.

Other than that, this week continues to be dull. No real news today. We did have baked potato (along with bacon and cheese) for lunch today. It's not a new food on the menu, but it was the first time they put it up this term.

Yeah...I need more to talk about. Any pictures for me to put up, anyone?

6 of October - Tuesday

It's amazing how different the year group is when so many of us are at Rancho! It just seems to empty, so...forsaken.

Pretty much the only event today was Cate's and Ve's presentation during TOK today. It seems that the TOK teachers weren't very happy with our essays...

After the Pasta Festival, it seems that the lunch crew reverted the name of macaroni to its normal "Pasta in Various Sauces", though this time they were more specific and called it "Penne in various sauces".

5 of October - Monday

Even asking around I couldn't find much to talk about today. Well, what can I say? It was just a normal, uneventful school day.

Yesterday, though, everybody who was either in the basketball or football teams left for the week to go the the Rancho, a tournament where schools compete against each other in a vartiety of different sports.

That makes up a great deal of the L6 and the U6. As a result of that, the lessons today and for the rest of the week will be quite empty.

2 of October - Friday

Having missed school today I am writing accounts of what my fellow U6 have told me.

First off, (and I didn't need to be at school to know this) but it was very, very hot today! São Paulo weather is so random isn't it? It's pouring one day, then it's the hottest and dryest day the next!

The U6 were entertained by Giovanna today when she sang a song she composed herself to both the L6 and the U6 in assembly today.

Oh, and did I mention that today was the deadline for the first draft of our TOK essays? No? Well it was. The rush was the same as when a draft of our Extended Essays was due a few weeks ago (you guys remember, right?). A lot of people did it at the last minute. That's us, eh? Always doing things at the last minute.

Lunch was "Beef Stew" apparently.

1 of October - Thursday

Oh man, what a day!

The main news was that the ENEM exam was apparently leaked by someone so, instead of having it on the weekend, it has been posponed for what should be a period of 45 days.

What was most tiring today was what happened after school hours were over.

At night, our teams went to Graded school to play some football (or "soccer" as Graded must call it!).

For those that stayed behind and were going to do their ENEM (depite it's cancellation) were welcome to a talk from Mrs. Viegas about techniques on the exam and ways to go well.

At 6 'o clock at night, the Handel concert began. It was a great hour of wonderful classical music in the theatre with a lot more people than I expected, to be honest. It was also the perfect opportunity to train Gian, the newest member of the lighting team, how to work the lighting board in order to be my replacement when I leave school at the end of the year.

30 of September - Wednesday

The end of the second month of term is pulling up. Expect to get a lot of "A pinch and a punch and the first of the month!"'s tomorrow, my dear readers!

Both the Form 5's and the Upper 6th Grade round was today. In tutorial this morning some students got terrible news, some got fairly normal news and some got spectacular news. Those who were not in the morning tutorial for any reason (such as myself) received them after lunch in the tutorial period then. (By the way, I imagine that the Wednesday tutorial period which has been around since probably ever is to consider the tutorial period lost once a week for assemblies.) Your guess is as good as mine but I think it seems like a logical explanation for it.

Pre-contested events today included the popular hurdles and the oh-so-longed-for high jump.

During the lunch break, Walsh University came for a talk although, unfortunately, very few students attended the talk. Although we are going to be getting some more college talks soon it does seem that their number is decreasing, what with all the college applications and all.

Following straight after the Walsh talk we had Mr. Mugan explaining to us and giving us more information about the dreaded Extended Essay. The presentation focused more on the actual details of it, like the layouts and the abstracts...

Oh, and as as final note: Sodexho concocted a new desert for us today. Actually, it was more of a change from one of the regular deserts. Instead of using "Sonho de Valsa" bomboms to coat the pavê we have, they used "Negresco" cookies. Whilst I do prefer the Sonho de Valsa Pavê I confess I rather enjoyed this new desert. Oh, and why do they insist on mixing the best deserts with the worst main dishes and vice-versa? We had pavê for desert but the damn battered fish as the main course!

29 of September - Tuesday

Since our headmaster Mr. Rowe is off to the HMC (Headmasters Conference) next week, the entire senior school had a meeting in the Theatre this morning, where Mr. Rowe pointed out all the good things that have been going on in the first few weeks of term. This included practically everything, from the School Play, to the Sports games against other schools.

Speaking of sports, the Pre-contested events for the athletics day gave us Long Jump! I filmed most of it and it's enough to say that I got footage of some great jumps...and some great falls!

28 of September - Monday

Due to a thunderstorm we had near the end of the school day, we had blackouts every three seconds at school. This did not stop when night arrived and since my internet connection was going completely haywire on me, I was unable to post yesterday.

The Pre-contested events began today with Javelin and Triple Jump. I heard that a girl in F5 beat the school's javelin record!

I'm not sure as to how the points are going yet so, for the present time, the Athletics Day is anyone's game!

Windor, Tudor and Stuart...good luck to all of you!

25 of September - Friday

Our weekly Friday assembly was hosted by none other than Mr. Cooper Blanks!

2012; the end of the world? The presentation was about that. No conclusions were truly reached about what would happen in December 2012. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

24 of September - Thursday

Another puff war broke out today at lunch time. Unfortunately I wasn't there to witness / participate in it.

However, I did hear that Brian threw a puff at Pietro's legs in a way that he tripped over. Makes me sad I missed it.

Puff - R$40

6th Form Centre - R$ 5000

Using a puff to knock over (and maybe injure) your good friend - Priceless.

Oh, and it was Peach's birthday today! As he told us himself, it should be a school holiday! Hey, after all, the School Captain's birthday is only once a year!

23 of September - Wednesday

It was a quiet day until about 13:00; during lunch time. Oh yes, the 6th Form Centre was active today. Not long after I arrived there after lunch, Zé and Matheus put a couple of chairs in front of the door, to barricade it. Of course, that wasn't much of a barricade so Zhao and I joined. Pilling up chairs until they were about 2 metres high. Some chairs at the bottom were there for support. It wasn't long before I got a bit carried away: I put a small table in front of the door. Then I lifted up a sofa and put it on it's side, against the chairs.

What many of us didn't notice was Mr. Thomas standing there, watching us, just waiting to leave through the very door we were barricading. Well, suffice to say that we got a "Put-everything-back-in-one-minute-or-you-are-all-banned-from-here!"

Well, we managed to tidy it all up, Mr. Thomas was set free and we started reapeating the events to the other people that passed by. The only shame was that we didn't do it again and didn't get to see the effect on other people. After all, the whole point was to see people's reaction when faced with an enormous barricade!

Today was also the first House Assembly. Windsor got together in the Art Centre, Tudor in the Theatre and Stuart in the Cafeteria. With the Athletics Day coming up all the signing up was important. I'm not sure what happened with Tudor and Stuart, but the house meeting for Windsor went very well.

22 of September - Tuesday

The grand mystery of the day was the so-called "Pasta Festival" for lunch. When it was first discovered in Mr. Mugan's tutorial, people were repeating the name; turning over the idea in their minds just wondering what it would be...

Of course, most of us believed that it was just going to be the regular macaroni meal we usually. After all, they did change the name once before! From "Macaroni" it went to "Pasta in Various Sauces".

But it turned out to be so much more than that! We walked into the cafeteria, the tables were riddled with cloth similar to those seen in a Festa Junina. What was more, we had all the sauces from before and not one, not two but THREE different choices of pasta! The only thing that was left was for the Sodexho staff to dress up like they've done on two or three other occasions.

Score one for Sodexho! I (and I'm sure many others) enjoyed todays lunch!

21 of September - Monday

Since my tutor Mr. Mugan was in sick and didn't come to school, my tutor group didn't get their fancy, flasy pass cards. Other tutor groups did but I didn't get to see them in action. Hopefully tomorrow I'll get mine and I'll take in a "test drive" and see how it works.

Now Sodexho made me laugh real hard today: thing is, every once in a while we get ice cream for desert. Either it's in little plastic pots or they're popsicles. In this case it was the latter, however, instead of naming it "ice cream" like they usually do, they decided to go with "Fruit Ice Lolly". I just loved that and I'm sure that anyone else who read it before lunch also gota kick out of it.

19 of September - Saturday

Whilst a few members of the senior school came to school on Saturday because they wanted to (mainly due to the school play), a lot (read: ALL) of the U6 had to come in. The reason? The IB Sciences Group 4 Project.

It basically involved having groups made up of students who study different sciences. The groups would have pupils that study Chemistry, Biology and Physics. The purpose was that each group would come up with their own project that evaluates a topic from all 3 perspectives.

Whilst the variety of experiments was very interesting, with topics ranging from measuring the heartbeat of a microscopic animal to measuring the temperature of a flame, arriving at school at 9 am and leaving at 3 pm on a Saturday was not exactly pleasing to all.

18 of September - Friday

We were told in assembly this morning that, as of Monday, every student in the 6th form centre was going to receive an identification card that will be used to get in and out of the school grounds during lunchtimes. I'm not sure exactly how this will work, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see on Monday.

17 of September - Thursday

We had our first fire drill of the term today. It was after break, about halfway through our maths lesson. The procedure was as normal; everyone leave all their stuff behind and go directly to the field.

Well, it seems that we didn't learn very much with previous fire drills: apparently we were just as noisy, unorganized and rampant as in previous drills. But hey, we are only teenagers after all!! If a bunch of friends gather on a field during classtime, how can chatting between themselves possibly be prevented?

Oh, and people have been ripping off the pictures put on the U6 wall, including the one I put up. If every person has the right to put one picture and it can be anything I'm going to keep mine there!

16 of September - Wednesday

Halfway through the week and I already feel like I'm going to collapse...oh well, fazer o que, né?

Anyway, we had two Varsity victories yesterday: the Boy's team beat PACA 3x0 whilst the girls beat PACA too with an impressive 6x0.

The science Group 4 Project began today. It'll be very, very annoying having to come into school at 9 am on Saturday to do our project. An entire triple period was devoted to getting into our groups and deciding what we're supposed to do. The positive side is, of course, that it will only take Saturday to finish it; as soon as we're done on Saturday the Group 4 Project will be over.

Mrs. Obi gave us another one of her interactive lessons today. It seems Mr. Cooper Blanks is not feeling too well so Mrs. Obi stepped in. It was all about currency exchange with Cashflow money representing the currency of one country and "Class Bucks" representing Mrs. Obi's money. Everyone had different amounts of money but the Cashflow money was only used to buy Class Bucks. Class Bucks, on the other hand, were used to buy chocolates. Clearly there was a mad dash of people wanting to get Class Bucks. Whilst the original cost of 1 Class Buck was about 1500 Cashflow Dollars, by the end the demand for Class Bucks was so high that I bought a Class Buck for 4 Million and 100 Cashflow Dollars whilst Brian bought it for 17 million!

Of course, in the interest of fairness, everybody got a chocolate at the end regardless of having bought Class Bucks or not.

15 of September - Tuesday

All that happened today was a set of games.

Football games, basketball games, etc...

I believe that we were up against Graded school but I'm not sure what others, if any, were there too.

I'll try to get results tomorrow and put 'em up here.

14 of September - Monday

What a day! So much work for a Monday. Economics, we had a test. Chemistry, a practical and lots of exercises. Maths, don't even get me started...

As you've undoubtedly noticed, this blog is aimed at writing about Upper 6 life and not about the lessons but, to be honest, lessons are practically all that's been going on.

I'll just write up 3 things that I've learned today.

First off, a few of my classmates have gone on a Geography field trip. They'll be back on Wednesday. I'll be sure to ask a few of them what they went through and post that here later.

Swine flu has been slowing down at school it seems. Whilst in the first week alone we had at least 3 infected pupils, now in the 4th week we're still at (I believe) 10. Unfortunately it's spread to the Lower 6 so now infections don't seem to be limited to the prep and pre-prep school alone.

Apparently the school is looking to recruit new teachers too. In the Estadão newspaper, there was an enormous add sent by school looking for new teachers. Someone sent an e-mail with a photo taken of the newspaper and they even printed out a copy and put it up on our Upper 6 board! Go figure!

11 of September - Friday

The end of the week arriving and most of the school already turning on their "relax" gears.

Today was a pretty normal day with nothing out of the ordinary happening, though I must say that Vicky's stretching exercises during P.E. though were spectacular and extremely envigorating. I don't know exactly how to word this because describing pain as "good" without sounding like a masochist is extremely hard. Hmm...despite it seeming like every cell in my body was screaming in agony when I was done, it was a "good" pain because it was one that left me (and I'm sure the others as well) with the feeling that we had improved our fitness.

It certainly was a healthy and good alternative to dodgeball, an activity that I've been wanting all week but never seem to find enough people willing and able to play when P.E. lesson finally arrives.

10 of September - Thursday

I must say that the only interesting thing that happened today was the Northeastern University talk that we had this morning at 9 am. Pity there's not much to be said here again.

One minor change though; at the start of the term, the school used to post the school lunches from Tuesday to the following Monday on the school's Intranet. That was great since we knew what to expect for that day and the following week. Now that's been changed and now we only get the daily school lunch. Now I have no idea as to why they changed that but....you know....

9 of September - Wednesday

It sure seems this week is being quite uneventful.

During maths today (our first lesson) many of my classmates came in to talk to Mr. White in order to get a permission slip to go to Graded. I didn't go, so I'm unsure how the talk went, but I'm pretty sure it was some sort of university talk too.

Lunch time was a tense one where, all of a sudden, one of the puffs would come out of nowhere and smash you or the person next to you on the head. Yes, it was an all-out war of puffs. It sort of reminded me of how dogs fight. One second they're just staring at each other and, out of the blue, they're tearing at each others throats. Similarly, there we all were, just sitting on the sofas when one person would get up and randomly attack another. This usually led to a collective attack on the surprised, assaulted individual.

Suffice to say that all was going great and it was lots of fun until some people came down, decided to lie on the puffs and spoil our fun. Oh well...c'est la vie.

Ah, yes. I might as well talk about something I read in the newspaper this morning. Well, today is the 9/09/2009. I read in the newspaper that a hospital near my house has 23 caesarean sections reserved for today because some parents think that it will be cute for their children to be born on the 9/09/2009....999.

8 of September - Tuesday

What happened today? Hmm...a big load of nothing, really.

Apocalyptic weather was really the highlight.

This morning the sky was darker than usual. All was good until people started arriving in school. Then the rain started. The sky darkened until it seemed it was 10 at night. Sometimes the rain would stop for a few minutes but during most of the day it seemed like the end of humanity was arriving...and in a lot of style I have to add.

7 of September - Monday

Holidays!

The 7th of September is the Brazilian Independance day and, as usual, no school for us today. Yaay for us.

4 of September - Friday

Three main events happened today. First off, Alberto told us, in assembly, a little extract of the speech he had given the McCann Society the day before. It was about Economics and credit. I think we will all agree with the fact that this was a very good speech and we hope to hear similar extracts from the other speakers in the McCann Society ECA.

Film today was quite unique experience: no teacher came to the class to teach us. Robbie, Zhao and myself stayed in the classroom and worked on our Film Courseworks. At 9:15 (15 minutes before the end of class), Mr. Burnside, our film teacher, walks in and asjs us what we are doing. We were then asked what lesson we are supposed to be having. The answer? "Film, sir...with you..."
All 3 of us were given Bene's by Mr. Burnside; I think it's my first Bene in about 3 years...

Extended Essay's were due in today and many people were in a drastic hurry to finish them off and hand them in. 4000 is a lot more than it seems, for some people.

With the large amount of rain we had, P.E. was a very limited class. We had the option of Table Tennis, Dodgeball, Futsal or work in the 6th form centre. Dodgeball and Table Tennis were abandoned as nobody showed up for them.

3 of September - Thursday

The second draft of everyone's Extended Essay is due in tomorrow. From what my friends have been telling me and from what I've seen lately, Extended Essay drafts are very similar to the TOK essays. We're given ages to do it (in the case of TOK essays; a month) so people who don't do it immediately end up forgetting about it until the week (or weekend if you're lucky) before it's due when a friend reminds you about it. Then most people react in a "Holy Sxxx" attitude and work their sorry little asses off to get it done. Yeah...this Extended Essay deadline is not the final draft; but people are scrambling to get it done nonetheless.

On a lighter note; we've had a visit from a great friend of ours today! SteVe came by to visit us in the few weeks he has left before he goes back to England to face another brutal term of school. Hell, it's great to have good friends who live abroad suddenly come to visit the school again. In case you're reading this Steve, your surprise visits are awesome! Keep 'em up! And this blog is just as much for you as an ex-student as it is for us current U6.

Basketball game against Chapel today after school. I don't know the results yet again; but here's a photo to inspire you guys.

2 of September - Wednesday

With the Brazilian Independance Day coming up, we had the usual annual Assembly about the important date. It was pretty much the same as every year; an address by the Headmaster, a video about the country, the inspiring speech by Mr. Assis and, finally, the singing of the Hino Da Independência.

We won't have classes on Monday; but we will have them on Tuesday.

It seems our U6 board is going to constantly be under changes. We've had another picture added today. Matheus together with Hugo Chavez. (Matheus is in the place of Evo Morales; well, Matheus is Evo Morales) It looks great. I'll try to put the picture up here some time! No offense meant, of course, Matheus!

Yeah; I also got the scores from yesterday:

Girls won 1x0.

Boys lost 0x3.

1 of September - Tuesday

It seems someone didn't like Megan Fox being put back up again without Michael...she was kidnapped once again. This time, though, there was no random note, and no indication thatshe will ever be put back.

In fact, it almost seems she's been given up on: Matheus put up a picture of his idol Wormtail (Peter Pettigrew) from the Harry Potter series in her place.

We had 2 football games today after school against Graded School. Unfortunately I'm not aware of the results yet. They shall be put up in tomorrow's post.

It seems also that there was history test going on sometime during the day. Apparently, Teti just got up without saying anything, walked up to Mr. Thomas and did the good old "A Pinch and a Punch for the First of the Month". It was random. Random, but brilliant nonetheless.

31 of August - Monday

Economics is usually a good way to start the week; except when we have a test at 8:15 in the morning...well, that's what we get from convincing Mr. Cooper Blanks to put the test forward from Wednesday to the next Monday...

We had a college talk today, we had nuggest for lunch.

Other than that, nothing went on today? What news? No news. Boring...boring day; boring beginning of the week.

Oh...by the way; today's word of the day is Quizzical.

28 of August - Friday

Okay. Today a felony beyond imagination happened. Megan Fox was kidnapped. Yes, that's right. She was stolen from our U6 Wall and the thief left a note in her place.

It only said "Return Michel and I'll put back Megan".

Now I'm not sure which of the two happened but either someone printed another identical Megan Fox picture and put it back up or the thief just put it back. In any case, Michel still hasn't been put back up.

OH YEAH! And our library door was opened again today! Okay, lemme explain this to whoever doesn't know: there is a passage from the 6th form centre straight into the school building through the library. This, however, had been locked for just about a year since the librarians complained about the excessive noise cause by us...

After a whole year of whining, moaning and general complaint they finally listened to us and opened the door to see if we can control ourselves. If all goes well, the door will stay opened and we won't have to hike outside just to get back into the building through another door!!

Starting the week with economics is great; but it's also great to end said week with P.E.! Some of use decided to try out a new sort of game: Dodgeball. I claimed that the only real way to play dodgeball was to use a ball that hurts on impact! I mean, what else could encourage people to avoid getting hit?! Well, suffice to say that whilst we didn't get a steel-hard ball like I'd have enjoyed we also didn't get the soft, spong-like balls that dodgeball is usually played with at school. Despite the ball not being so hard though, the other team still mentioned that I played somewhat like a maniac, making the game personal and throwing the ball very hard. HAHAHAHA! I mean, what's the fun in any sport if you don't play to win? ;)

27 of August - Thursday

Probably the most interesting thing that happened today was the confusion over lunch. We had grilled chicken today, but many people thught it was strogonoff. Others thought it was Chicken Nuggets.

Let me clear up the confusion:

• We'll have strogonoff tomorrow,
• and chicken nuggets on Monday.

Other than that, not much happened; so I'll just stick a random photo down here...

26 of August - Wednesday

At many points last year, when we were in the Lower 6, we had periods when we were locked out of our centre. These periods lasted from a couple of hours to a couple of days. These depended on both Mr. Thomas's mood and what exactly we did to deserve the punishment.

Well, suffice to say that our messing around started today when we decided to play some Dodgeball indoors. The game didn't seem to last very long after I was hit in the face by Steiner soon after the start of it. Anyway, Lucas put the ball away soon after, and that was that.

We pretty much had a normal day today with the exception of another UBC visit. Few people attended as it was pretty much dedicated to people actually wanting to apply there. A lot of questions were answered and the guest speaker was brilliant and charismatic.

Oh and by the way....battered fish is just another fancy name for "Fish a la Milanesa". It's getting rather annoying Sodexho trying to trick us into thinking there's new food when all there is are new names for old food...

25 of August - Tuesday

I believe that with most things in life, long-term planning is key even if, when the thing you planned for finally happens, the plan goes to hell and things happen completely differently.

That's exactly the process we started this morning at break time. Most of the U6's gathered in Room 301 to discuss some important future matters.

We divided the year into 4 teams, each one in charge of a specific section.

• Yearbook - the preparations for our own, private U6 yearbook. A tradition started last year.
• The U6 trip - where we will plan the U6 trip during the second term. Things like where we will go, what we will do, etc...
• Fund-raising - for the aforementioned trip we'll need all the money we can get. This team is in charge of doing everything they possibly can to make the amount that we have to pay for the trip as reduced as it possibly can.
• The U6 Party - traditionally, every year there is the U6 party where we host a party for (usually) F4 and up. Preparations needed include finding a suitable location, reserving the place, choosing dates and selling the tickets, and other stuff like that.

It's weird isn't it? It seems only a few weeks ago when I was looking at the other U6's and cowering under their immense size, longing to be able to go to their parties and hearing tales of their glorious U6 trips. It's hard to imagine that we were once the size of the current F1's, who now cower before us and want to go to our parties...

Tomorrow we'll be having UBC over to talk about applications. That'll be something to look forward to!

The bad news about tomorrow though: we have "battered fish" for lunch; whatever the hell that is anyway.

To Readers / Short Posts

First off I'd like to say that I really appreciate all my readers. I'd especially like constructive criticism, comments, guest posts, etc... Feel free to send me photos or anything else you want to put up really.

Second of all, I'd like to apologize if my daily posts are a bit short. I'm sure that many of you will understand all the work I'm having to put up with in this crazy, crazy year called the U6.

Other than that; enjoy and, to the present U6: may you enjoy this blog and (hopefully) look at it again in years to come and remember the great times we all had together!

24 of August - Monday

I sort of like starting the week with Economics. I mean, it's sort of a pleasant start to the week and not something like starting straight up with Maths or Chemistry...at least with Econ there is the option to go slowly, slide by slide or even just working listening to some music!

Today we had some college visitors! Yale, Princeton and Columbia Universities all came by with one speaker each to talk to us. This was their first visit in their College Talk tour so, as they said themselves, they were completely ready to give us information on the colleges and hand out pamphlets and fliers with more info. I don't think that missing one period of Chemistry had much of an influence here. I think it was a fair trade for the info we got.

HEY! I forgot to mention that a good friend of many of us came by! Aryssa! She visited last week but now she's returned, participated with us in the Yale/Princeton/Columbia talk and had lunch with some of us.

It's great having old friends come and visit again, isn't it? Some friends just aren't forgotten and are always missed, no matter how far they go or how long they stay away.

"Pasta in Various Sauces" was halted by and a double period of Portuguese was followed by a talk by Mr. Thomas on writing UCAS College Applicatations.

21 of August - Friday

Last year the assemblies for the 6th form were on Thursdays in the Chapel. This year it's been changed to Fridays in the Theatre.
The assembly team (made up of Veronica, Celine and Marina) told us that they the plan for the day was to have 2 new teachers and 2 new 6th form tutors tell us a little bit about themselves.
It started with Mr. Case, followed by Mr. Loveland. Mr. de Luca and Mrs. Machado have already been teaching here for more than a year. They talked a bit about themselves because they were new tutors.
Lessons followed normally during the day. The free period that many U6th people had before lunch was used to take advantage of what was rightfully ours. At the entrance of the 6th form there is a cork board. That particular board belongs to the U6 but it's been empty for all of the week for now. We decided that the best way to use it was to give every member of the U6th the right to put up one picture on there. After a while, the board was filled with pictures of female models and/or actresses put up by the boys and pictures of male models and/or actors put up by the girls.
Not much else happened except for the short, 10 minute talk we had before P.E. lesson. The new head of P.E. was introduced and the different style of P.E. was explained. Since the U6 knew all this after an entire year of it, we were pretty much just scenery in the 6th form centre.

10th August / 17th - 20th August

For starters, I didn't really know how I was going to write this blog. Was it gonna be about me? About life in general? About the lessons and the knowledge trying to squeeze itself into the minds of young people?

I ended up doing a mixture of these. Just read and find out really.

I had told my good friend SteVe that I had an idea to write this blog. I ended up forgetting about it for most of the holiday but have now remembered it! Forgive the lateness here, as each day is supposed to be a separate post. I'll write the first 4 days in the same post. Don't worry dear readers, as I'll correct my error as of tomorrow!

August 10th was when the term was supposed to start. It didn't due to the overreaction over this disease unoficially called "swine flu".

We had 7 more days of frolick and fun but when August 17th finally came along, we had to go.

So...what can I say about the first day of term? Well, the 17th of August was a memorable day, to say the least. 11 new members of staff, even more new students, new faces in the 6th form centre. The only new student in the 6th form (Lower 6 and Upper 6 for those who don't know) is a foreign girl from Portugal in the L6th.

A regular tutorial was followed by a talk in the 6th form centre for the U6 and, as usual, we have the assembly. You know, the event where the headmaster has the long speech discussing the holidays, events of the year, swine flu, etc...? As of after break time, students had normal lessons. Ending the first day with maths! Here we go...

Oh, and the new spiralled fancy diaries were a nice touch in my opinion...

The 18th of August was not very eventful. Other than the bucketload of homework we got, not much really happened. TOK was pretty depressing though when our first lesson informed us of our final oral presentations and essays already.

Oh, and of course! The U6 organized a meeting next Tuesday to decide where and when our U6 trip will be!

The 19th of August was pretty fun as my friends finally taught me how to play that card game they play. At least I'll be able to join them instead of just watching! It's not hard to see why they get a kick out of the game.

We did get some news though. It's great news for her but bad news for us. One of our Upper's, Stephanie Nascimento, was accepted into Mackenzie college! It's great that she got in, unfortunately she'll be leaving the U6 at the end of the week.

20th of August; today. I finally remembered about this blog I was supposed to write! Seriously, guys. Other than that, not much was interesting other than the cool Yakisoba we had for lunch!! Bruxinha for desert rocks too!!