Squirrels striker Razak Omotoyossi says his country can make it through the group stage of the Nations Cup…. From BBC News. Full story

This site may contain information about: soccer games. The blog is also related to: england football.

Excellent news – a taxi service will begin operating in Luanda on 26 December. 150 taxis will be available from the following 19 taxi ranks across the city:

Airport domestic and international terminals, Centro Comercial Chamavo – the square in front of IMIL, main post office, the square in front of the Ministry of Agriculture, Sagrada Família (in front of the Hotel Luanda), Hotel Trópico, Mutamba, Hotel Presidente, Hotel Continental, Hotel Alvalade, Dhália, Clínica do Prenda, Hospital Américo Boa Vida, Hospital  Maria Pia, Maternity hospital Lucrécia Paim, Maternity hospital Augusto Ngangula, the  Ilha , and  Belas Shopping.

Registration by foreigners to compete in  the 31 December São Silvestre run has now closed. Registration for Angolan runners continues. No Brits registered! Que pena! The 10km run starts at  Largo da Mutamba (baixa de Luanda)  and finishes at the Estádio dos Coqueiros. Expect traffic chaos as roads are closed from midday onwards on the 31st.

Young Angola striker Manucho is picked by the hosts for the Africa Cup of Nations, despite recent disciplinary problems…. From BBC News. Full story

This site may contain information about: brazil soccer. The blog is also related to: england football.

Live the Journey now offers tours to Angola

Live the Journey Pty Ltd
PointBreak Building
Vineyard Office Estate
1st Floor
99 Jip de Jager Drive
Bellville, Cape Town
Western Cape
South Africa
Tel +27 21 912 4090
Fax +27 21 912 4099
E-mail: info@livethejourney.co.za

P O Box 4347
Tyger Valley
7536
Western Cape South Africa

The Angolan authorities have now published detailed guidance on how to obtain a visa if you are planning on visiting Angola for the CAN 2010 football championship in January. I’m not a visa expert and my Portuguese is not perfect (expecially when reading legal Portuguese), but it looks like visitors will need a letter of invitation from the various football authorities (CAF or CAN and/or a travel agent). But please do not take my word for it as I may have mistranslated some of it.  The relevant extract of the guidance is “

a)  Documento da CAF, COCAN ou outra estrutura do COCAN, que funcionam como carta de chamada e de validade da empresa de turismo, onde consta os seguintes elementos:……………..

The full guidance is on the COCAN website

What is clear is that if you plan to travel to Angola for the CAN you need to apply ASAP for your visa.

If you can help with a more authoritative interpretation of this particular paragraph of the rules, please let me know.

Europcar car rental is now available in Luanda

Luanda – From magazine covers to billboards, messages of “Viva Angola” and “Proud to be Angolan” in Luanda mark the war-scarred southern African nation’s rising international presence. Read on………..

Tickets went on sale on Thursday at branches of the Banco Africano de Investimentos in the host cities of Luanda, Cabinda, Benguela e Lubango. In Luanda at least, there were teething problems and few tickets were sold.  From 5 January, tickets will be sold direct from the stadia.  Sales are limited ot 6 per person.

The officialcompetition website gives the addresses of the bank branches where tickets are being sold and also has two .pdf attachments (in English and Portuguese) giving details of prices for each of the games.

The Banco de Poupança e Crédito joins Banco Bai as an authorised ticket seller.

Photo courtesy of http://www.istockphoto.com

As a person who has lived in several countries, I adapt relatively easily to new conditions. Over the years, my peripatetic life has seen me adjusting to life as an ethnic minority, learning new languages, deciphering new cultural codes – both written and unwritten, getting accustomed to different food cultures and different codes of ethics for journalists  to name a few.

Moving to the United Kingdom this year, however, brought me a “first” in terms of acculturation. It challenged my long-standing attitudes towards wrmed war.

I spent the first fifteen years of my life in the East African country of Kenya. Famously known as an island of peace due to its relative stability, I enjoyed a rather sheltered and safe childhood. Television news broadcasts would show me images of war and its adverse effects on neighbouring Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda,and Sudan, and Angola. As devastating as they were, I never had to take a strong ideological stance beyond the usual “war is undesirable” .

I maintained the same ideological stance when , at the age of 20 and living in the second most peaceful country in the world, Norway, bore witness to demonstrations against America’s decision to invade Iraq. I, together with an overwhelming majority of young demonstrating Scandinavians who have never known war, reacted from a purely theoretical standpoint.

Moving  to yet another extraordinarily peaceful country, Denmark, which together with Norway holds the aforementioned title of being the second most peaceful country in the world, did very little to challenge my long-held stance on war.

Now, here in the UK, I see firsthand the grim realities of a country at war. Barely a fortnight goes by, without a news package showing me the personal and very real consequences of war. The reports vary, with some depicting local communities and families of dead soldiers receiving the Union Jack-draped bodies of their fallen loved ones. Most end by mentioning the fact that 2009 will be the bloodiest for UK troops in Afghanistan since the war began in October 2001.

For the first time in my life, I am forced to discard my black and white attitude towards war and develop a more nuanced stance. I have found myself asking questions such as: Is war always undesirable, or are there instances where war is not only necessary but morally justified?  Can one support soldiers causes, such as The Poppy Appeal , yet still be opposed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? If one is for the war in the aforementioned countries, how do you deal with the fact that the Afghan war is this year the deadliest for UK soldiers since the Falklands War?

These are questions I could blissfully dismiss and move on to other more pleasant thoughts when I lived in Kenya, Norway and Denmark respectively. Here, even something as commonplace as attending my university classes – where I have a classmate from Afghanistan – and grocery shopping at  the local Tesco’s, where children dressed in army attire are collecting money for the troops, serve as stark reminders of the realities of war.

OPEC’s decision to hold oil supplies steady on Tuesday played out the story of a meeting foretold. Three of OPEC’s twelve ministers – Venezuela, Iran and Kuwait – didn’t even see the need to make the trip. More……………

By Henrique Almeida. LUANDA, Dec 22 (Reuters) – Angola will not hold a bidding round for new oil concessions for at least another year, the head of state-owned oil company Sonangol said on Tuesday. Continues…………

See the 2010 African Cup of Nations football tournament featuring World Cup finalists Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon, live  on Setanta Sports (limited countries only)

Angola is a country in south central Africa bordering Namibia to the south, Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north, and Zambia to the east, and with a west coast along the Atlantic Ocean. The exclave province Cabinda has a border with the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A former Portuguese colony, it has considerable natural resources, among which oil and diamonds are the most significant. The country is nominally a democracy and is formally named the Republic of Angola

Over most of Angola the weather and climate are typical of a tropical plateau, with a single wet season at the time of high sun between October and March and a long dry season. The table for Huambo shows this very clearly. Here both daytime and, particularly, night time temperatures are reduced by altitude to produce a pleasant variety of tropical climate.

Above 5,000 ft temperatures around the year are temperate rather than tropical and frost is not unknown. The dry season shortens by a month or two in the north of the country, as compared with Huambo, which has five virtually rainless months. Over most of the interior the mean annual rainfall is between 40 in and 60 in, being greater at higher levels.

The coastal region of Angola has a most unusual climate for the latitude. Temperature and rainfall are much reduced in a strip about fifty miles wide, as a direct consequence of the cold Benguela current, which flows from south to north along the shore. This current is responsible for the almost total absence of rain on the coast of Namibia to the south.

The same extreme dryness prevails in the southern coastal district of Angola as shown by the table for Mossamedes. The coastal region is desert or semi desert as far north as Luanda but there is a gradual increase of rainfall northwards until, in the far north, it is over 24 in per year.

Angolas economy has undergone a period of transformation in recent years, moving from the disarray caused by a quarter century of war to being the fastest growing economy in Africa and one of the fastest in the world.

You will find beaches near the cities, with or without coconut palm trees and some almost deserted of people, but in all beaches the sand is white and the water clear, clean and warm.

Hospitality has not changes in 30 years of war has not changed this characteristic of the Angolan people.

Good fish, good meat, good shellfish, strong spices, many culinary specialities and competent chefs, results in one of the best gastronomes of Africa.

Dance and Music includes sensual movements, hot African Caribbean rhythms and kuduros, strong emotions along with what there is of best in the African Continent.

Souvenirs of ivory, wood ceramics and metal of great beauty and originality. Painting is very developed.

The evolution of Angola is very specific that originates situations, behaviours and an atmosphere rather unusual.

Luanda – The Ministry of Energy (MINERG) aims at improving the supply of electrical energy of the country’s capital, Luanda, with the start operation, soon, of a 400-kilovolts supply line. According to a communiqué from MINERG made available to ANGOP this Monday, the 400 kV line Capanda/Lucala/Luanda will guarantee a better reliability in the supply of electricity to the city of Luanda.

The document also informs that the energy sector successfully carried out, on Sunday, an interconnection operation of the new 400 kV circuit.

This programme is part of MINERG’s plan aimed at strengthening and improving the system of producing and supplying electricity to the population of Luanda

This is the first high-tension transformation line of 400 kilovolts in the country, but other activities are being carried out in order to better profit from the capacity of this same power network.

This story—mostly true barring the vagaries of memory—is something that started as a Christmas letter.  Now, with the Africa Cup of Nations about to begin,  the author has  re-written it in hopes a few fans of the game might be interested in some experiences of Angola outside the stadiums. Read the full story here…………….

As Angola prepares to host an Opec meeting for the first time, the country has done its best to welcome fellow nations of the oil cartel – a new convention centre, a five star hotel and villas for the ministers on the outskirts of the capital, Luanda. More…………..

Luanda – A 71ª reunião da Subcomissão de Monitorização da Organização dos Países Exportadores de Petróleo (OPEP) realiza-se esta segunda-feira na capital angolana (Luanda), um encontro que acontece um dia antes da 155ª reunião extraordinária da conferência ministerial da Organização. Mais……….

First post – I will add as many as possible every weekend, etc.  In addition to loose stamps, envelopes, postcards, etc. there are several stamp albums in the collection. I’m just going in order – the first album is called “The New Ambassador Album for Postage Stamps of the World”, published by H. E. Harris & Co. in 1952.  Here are stamps of Angola:

Season’s greetings to all readers of Atlantico Weekly!

Atlantico Weekly is proud to present a short forecast for Brazil, Cape Verde, Angola, South Africa and Surinam in 2010.

Read The South Atlantic in 2010

The book is scheduled to be available from US retailers such as Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com from Tuesday 22 December. It is already in stock in the UK, Portugal and Canada.