20 of January - Wednesday

The end of the Mocks had finally come but, more importantly, the beginning of Term 2 has arrived.

Ah, I can tell some of the U6 are feeling it already: the expectations of the second term, the tension of the IB's and last, but not least, the uncomfortable sensation in the gut that this is our last term in St. Paul's...

Luckily after our Mock exams were over we didn't need to go to lessons...that's a fate destined for us tomorrow and Friday...

First lunch? Mixed Grill.

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!

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.

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!

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!

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!

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?

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.