It’s warmer weather (Brazil) and no flies! We’re used to the weather, it can get more than 40 degrees in Rio. But it’s close to the beach so we have that breeze from the ocean.

It’s quite a quiet town (Inverell), and I don’t mean that in a bad way, it’s a good thing. My wife and I are used to being home people, so we tend to stay at home and just have dinner and watch movies and we weren’t two people that go out too much, so we’re not missing that.

A good thing is that we have a lot of fresh food here. So when you go to the supermarket to buy beef or lamb or whatever, it’s usually local and it’s a good thing.

I have a passion in sports physiotherapy and I’m probably going to do some masters degree and PHD, I don’t know when but I probably will. One of the reasons that made me come to Australia was the opportunity to grow in my career.

I worked with the Italian beach volley ball team that went to the Olympics in London and in Brazil. I used to work in a sports club there for eight years. I had my own business which was fully booked every single day during the week and I worked 10 hours a week. I thought that that thing is changeable. If for example the economy goes down, and it was a private practice so I would be without patients. So I needed to get a new step in my career, so I decided to come to Australia to study and also to improve my knowledge in that area, in musculoskeletal and sports.

There’s a lot of new researchers from Australia and New Zealand, so when you think of sports physio at the moment, it’s Australia that you think about. So that’s one of the reasons that I came here.

My wife and I, we did good research about Inverell and the surrounding areas there.

It’s a lovely town and I used to make a joke with my patients here saying that ‘I think that the only thing that Inverell doesn’t have is Aldi. But we don’t have Aldi in Rio, so I’m not missing anything!’ We have everything here. So we have Harvey Norman, we have Bunnings and Big W and everything is close to you. That’s one of the reasons.

One of the things was the funding that I got from the government, from NSW Rural Doctors. I was coming from Brazil to here and I didn’t have much to bring. You can’t have much luggage to bring, and you can’t bring everything that you want in our changing lives, so it was good to have that support. So we were able to choose here also because of that.

I started wanting to be a - I think you call it exercise physiologist here, but we call it physical educators in Brazil. I think I thought of being that and my mum, she’s a personal trainer, she’s a physical educator, and she told me not to. She told me to go into physiotherapy.

It was a profession that was in demand and it was growing. So I took a look at the subjects there and I decided to go into physio. And I love the sport field. That’s why I wanted to be a personal trainer.

But I think that once I started doing physiotherapy, I really enjoyed it. So that area of musculoskeletal injuries and orthopedic rehabilitation, sports injuries, I like that.