SPFC

I just got back from the wildest game. It was a beautiful day. clear skies. sorta hot, but totally bearable. last game i went to was corinthians; they're a SP team, but it was a super cold day and it was the middle of the week. Lotta fun, but poor showing

not today. oh no. the stadium was PACKED. everyone was wearing white jerseys and singing and stomping.....

<<-**-# 5-0 #-**->>

what more can i say? Nautico got raped. In the first half SPFC had lots of shots on goal, and nautico was fouling left and right. straight up. it was 0-0 at half time, but after the second goal nautico just stopped playing. the third goal was a penalty shot (which apparently is goalie v goalie..wierdness). for christ sake, the fourth goal looked like an accident....the ball jsut sorta bounced in when the goalie wasn't looking. and the 5th goal happened with about 5min left.

awesome, awesome game.

i've got to admit, it's getting better...better, all the time...

the other day i was kinda bummed because one of my favorite students told me he wouldn't be able to continue lessons. he's a lawyer who wants to get an LL.M from Columbia so he can start teaching law on the side, but he's currently in a masters program and he jsut foudn out that his 200 page masters is due in october. so i definitely respect his priorities, but hey, i need work!

In his place, i've taken on a new student, a 54yo real estate mogel who is like super rich and married to a singer named Fortuna who is famous enough taht my mom's heard of her. to squeeze him in (he wants 4 days a week, which is great for me) I had to bump my uncle out of a time slot we marked down the day after we finally scheduled his classes. so that had me pissed with myself too.

But today has been a good day. I bought 2 new books: The 6th harry potter book in english, and Paul Feyerabend - Against method in portuguese (which apparently only recently just got translated). I taught both of my newest students, 2nd lesson with one and first lesson with the guy i just mentioned. after my first lesson with guilherme (the younger kid) we traded music like crazy, which was fun.

i was really gunning to go out tonight after working a bit and taking HOURS of public transportation, but i started practicing guitar and now that i'm starting to pick up the samba beat i'm really getting into it. like, i'm in the zone you know? you can't drop the ball when you've finally got it!! i met a kid at a fejouada last weekend who would trade me samba lessons for english lessons, but he's gonna teach me percussion i think. so today i realized that, "hey, i bet i could find some good guitar lessons on youtube..." and well, let's just say i've been watching this video repeatedly over the past hour. after practicing this guy's technique, this whole samba thing seems much more doable. i can really see the beat now!!!

back to the axe.

Guitar Notes

The other day I spent all day wandering around Av. Teorodo Sampaio, a street where there are tons of music stores. I foudn a few guitars i liked and marked down the names of the stores. Shopping for a guitar made me realize something though: in the meantime, seeing as i'm not making enough money to justify that kind of purchase, why not borrow one?

So now I have a guitar to play!! my cousin Flavia is lending me hers, a beautiful little classic guitar with quite a history. It belonged to my André, my aunt (one of those complicated relations that i call "aunt" out of convention) Celia's son. He died....probably more than a decade ago in a car accident. If I ever met him, i'll be honest, i don't remember it. I really only know the guy through a memorial CD-rom Celia made with images and some of his music.

It's always nice to play an instrument with a little history, you know? adds personality to the instrument. I finished changing the strings last night; Flavia hadn't picked up the guitar in years. There's something meditative about the ritual of replacing guitar strings, i really enjoy it.

Time to learn some samba--and maybe eventually buy that spanish guitar I saw on Teodoro Sampaio....

having a borrowed guitar is makingme really want to have ownership of one. I want to take the guitar out, you know? go practice by the lake in pq. Ibiriapuera in between bouts of reading....

really, i'm just happy to have a guitar to fool around with again.

to sleep....

awwwww man.... so last night was fun, but what a night....
so yesterday after a whole lot of nothing i went out to Av. Sumaré to meet up with some friends of nayara's, the girl i met at the PUC party. do to a ginourmous miscommunication, i ended up walking up and down the street for about 1.5 hours only to eventually learn that the restuarant was in fact not even on that street. so round 11:20 i finally met up with her friends who were pretty cool, but after working up a huge appetite walking up and down the street, wouldn't you know it, the kitchen closed. meh.

so afterwards, we left to go find a bar in villa madaleña, where we met up with nayara and some more friends of hers. we had a chill time, and nayara and i finally got to eat something which was a good thing, believe me. we hung out at the bar until like 4am, sharing rounds of beer and sipping some nice cachaça (all the kids were from Minas Gerais, an area renowned for good food and good cachaça).



allright, here's the real story: after the bar they drove me a ways towards home and dropped me off with a cabbie. dude was asleep inhis car, and it smelled like he msut've been living in there for days. i mean, his cab really smelled like straight up ass. pretty...pretty nasty. dude woke up and said he'd give me a ride, but damned if he wasn't snoring and driving in-between lanes the whole way home.

so finally i get home, and i try to get in.....but the door wouldn't unlock!!! my uncle had left the key in the top lock, making it impossible to get my key in!!! so what could i do? i walked up the street, took a piss at the gas station, came back, laid my map on top of the stones of the garage and slept in front of the car for about an hour. cold, cold ngiht. a little before 6 i woke up freezing and decided that may need for sleep overwhelmed my guilt at waking them up early, so i rang the doorbell and was let in.

I passed out immediately and slept till about 10 when i woke up for no good reason. I did a little work, arranged to take on a new student, and read for about 2 hours until i finally got tired enough to go back to sleep. and sleep i did. when i woke up, it was DARK out. i slept all fucking day! i had thought earlier, "hey, i'll jsut take a nap until i'm rested enough to go to pq. ibirapuera and read there and maybe pass out on the grass in the sun...that sounds nice." nope. when i woke up, i had to feel around the bed for my book just to make sure i hadn't dreamed up the small amount of productivity i'd experienced that day (which thankfully i hadn't).

so now it's a little after 9, i've got no plans, and i'm concerend about my sleeping patterns. i really hope last night/today doesn't throw me off too much. i kidna wanna get to bed early just to set myself straight, but on the other hand tonight is the 2nd of 3 nights out of the week i can get my friends to hang out.

oh well. next time i'll set the alarm or something. ridikolus.

bored....BORED!!!!!

gaDAMN i'm bored. yesterday i had my first day of paid work. I taught for 1.5 hours, and arranged for another calss next week. my student clearly doesn't want many calsses, and regardless of how many ig ive him in the short term, he certainly does not want classes to continue past september.

after class, i walked to av. Teodoro Sampaio which has a bunch of stores on it, and just wandered around listening to my music. when i finally i got to the music area, i wanderd from instrument store to instrument store looking at guitars i can't afford. I'm actually thinking of buying one and i foudn 3 i liked that are reasonably cheap, but i can't keep blowing money like this without having a steady in-flow, you know? it felt raelly good to play again though; yesterday was probably the first time i'd picked up a guitar in about 2 months--at least a month without a doubt.

but walking and reading and watchign tv get old. i'm prob gonna go chill at the park for a few hours, but man...i need a job with mroe hours and some friends with more free time.

Lost in translation

So not speaking portuguese great can be fun, but sometimes making language mistakes ends up resulting in....real world mistakes.

When I was in rio, the shampoo in my cousins bathroom said "PROTEÇÃO" in big bold letters on it and said somethign about hair breaking. i thought it was for split ends. I liekd it, so i bought a bottle when i got back. Today i realized it's an anti-baldness shampoo. I've got enough hair already: i really hope this shampoo doesn't turn me into sasquatch.

funy, but not quite as funny as when ben and i saw that youth group perform thinking it was gonna be a huge party with live music.

blogger, orkut, and sleeze

for some reason, there is like a city wide, possibly countrywide problem with blogspot.com domains. there's a sizeable thread in google groups about it, so i'm not the only one having problems. translation: chances are, none of my friends in sp could read my blog if they wanted to. i made an orkut account mainly to satisfy people i've been meeting down here. honestly, not a fan and i like facebook way more. but still, i posted a blogger link there and i bet none of them can read it. so this blog will remain with zero readership minus i, but hey, at least i'm motivated to keep a journal of my trip.

also, i think orkut is going to make me look like a slut. in general when i go out and start talking to strangers, i go up to girls. so consequently, i've been meeting more girls than guys. i'm not saying i don't have an agenda, but i wanna make normal friends too! but yeah, i feel like there's gonna be tons of pictures of girls on my friends page, and kids round here will stop calling me "gringo" and start calling me "slut bag."

or maybe "pimp."

Sampa it is

so i made up my mind: i'm staying. sp really ain't such a bad city, even if it is filthy and has no beaches...it'll be like LA all over again minus the snoboarding and natural parks (yes, LA has beaches, but they suck so i never went).

when it comes down to it, i'm sure i'll have fun wherever i live, sp or rio or dc for that matter, because i want to and i ahve that outlook on life right now. i originally came down here thinking i wanted to live alone and be in a situation where i was uncomfortable and unsure; i was concerned that living in a small apartment behind my uncle's hosue in a city where i already have a vast network of family might be too....comfortable and easy. i was afraid sticking aroudn would be a cop out of sorts.

but when it comes down to it, living in brazil is not just an opportunity to find myself and try someting new (which is stil the case in sp), but also an incredible opportunity to get to know and spend time with family who i normally see once every few years, if that!

my family back home isn't that close, so it actualy feels wierd making family a priority like this, but you know what? i'm at peace with my decision. also, i feel that having gon ethrough this dilemma i may enjoy sp all the more, having turned down the opportunity to live in rj. in making that decision, i recognized staying as worthwhile and the city as a good place to live. it wasn't jsut a decision, it was a declaration of confidence in my future here.

also, met a cool girl on fri who i went out to dinner with on sat night. we didn't hook up or anything, but she turned out to be a really cool chick and we jsut spent hours talking, and then i made my decision to stay on sunday morning. so yeah, maybe she had something to do with it, or at least helped instill the "são paulo ain't all that bad..." attitude in me

Rio vs. São Paulo

So I really have to decide now, am I going to live in RJ or SP? I've been invited to 2 different peoples placees in rj, so housing is not a(n imediate) problem. i've sorta made a few friends down here, but they're not like great friends, more like college kids who know where the party is at. I feel like I shouldn't have any trouble making friends up in rio, maybe even less than here.

the big issue is: what will I do if i can't get a job? my mom has already offered to send me extra cash basically as long as i'm doing something moderately productive with my time and am enjoying myself (so basically i'd be supported even if i was just taking classes), but really i don't want to have that financial crutch. as if finding work teaching wasn't hard enough already, the second semester started about a week ago; i'm looking for a job teaching in the middle of the school year. not good, not good at all. at least here in sampa i've got a call back interview and a private tutoring hook-up.

honestly, i'm not really sure what's holding me back. maybe it's the people. i've got lots of family here in SP, but i barely see most of them anyway, and my friends shouldnt be holding me back. the job issue might be an obstacle, but really it shouldn't get in the way of my living in a more interesting area. maybe I just find the possibility of failure in job search so concerning because i really really don't want to go begging my parents for money. in fact, i was udner the impression that that life line was severed after graduation.

rio is gorgeous. the night life is wild and kicking basically every night of the week, and the weekends are off the hook. the beaches there are fantastic and there's at least one within walking distance of pretty much any part of the city (did I mention SP has no beaches?). the girls are gorgeous and are all over the place. the bottom line is that I would probably enjoy myself more if i lived in rio. I guess i'm just concerned that even though I came to brazil to be largely on my own, rio might force me to seek financial support. would that be so bad? probably. but i mean...maybe i could just put up flyers and tutor college kids or something. or hell, who knows, maybe even find a job doing something other than teaching! I feel like i maybe haven't pinned down exactly what's bothering me about this move.

I've probably repeated myself alot, but hey, i was out all night at a party at PUC and i'm really tired. the party was pretty sick by the way, started outside the school, then eeryone went to this gym where there were like a thousand people or so. i met this cool chick at the school who i lost at the gym, but i found basically the whole crew from the bar from a week ago! also, the school batucada (drum band) played for like 2 hours, just churning out rhythms while the students chanted their school anthems. tiny little carnival contained in a school gym. fun night, but had to bail to teach my cousin's fiancee some english, and mofo is LATE! i left the party early and woke up for this foo! anh, whatever, he's gonna teach me how to drive a bike, so we're cool. man i'm tired though

rio part 2

So we didn't end up staying in buzios. Ben and i got trashed our one night there, and just hung out in this bar talking philosophy, which was fun. The enxt day was really jsut a day of traveling, going back to rio. The next day, tues, Ben and I went hanggliding in Tijuca national forest. that was SICK. hanggliding over rio was definitely not in the original plan, but it was totally worth it. The wind on tues wasn't great, so there was a long line to jump, and we had to wait for like 3 hours. finally, the wind got better, and ben and i got to fly. we were lucky enough to be in the air at the same time, and were actaully the last people to get to fly that day.

little recap of the experience. First, waiting. waiting in line was ok, waiting on the ramp, ready to start runing as soon as my pilot gave the word was wierd. we were super high, with an incredible view. The camera on our glider died before we jumped, so i don't have any pictures, but ben has a few which i'll post later. finally, the wind changed, so we started running balls out. then the dive. the dive off the platform was so cool, like a roller coaster. it was too fun to hold back, so let out a pleased "WOOOOHOOO!!!!!" i had total confidence in my pilot, so i wasn't worried that we wouldn't pull up, but we definitely fell for a little while. when we came up, it was like we were floating. after a few seconds, ben followed us intot he air. at one point we crossed behind them and the lag of their stream caused us to dive a little, which was alot of fun.

we soared over the city, over the water...at one point I could see corocvado and pão de açuca in teh distance between these two moutnains that had a large favella between them (might've been cidade de deus). flying over the water was gorgeous. the way the sand got churned up into the water made the whole coast look like some sort of abstract/fractal painting.

the ride was only about 15min cause the wind was low. coming in for the landing was strange, first the pilot touches down then you just start running on the beach.

so yeah, hangliding was awesome. it's now two days later. Ben left for the airport about 2 hours ago, so now the only friends i've got aroudn ehre are my family and a handful of kids i've met in bars and in the city. I still think i wanna move to rio. if i do, i need to decide FAST, because i'm on the verge of solidifying some jobs around here, and it would be really uncool for me to do that and then bail, since 1) the jobs are at schools and they will start to form schedules based on the assumption that i'm around, and 2) my family has helped me land these jobs, so it would reflect very poorly on them.

so now i'm hitting the phones, getting ready to teach, and evaluating my priorities. i'm pretty sure partying is high on the list; if so that's Rio: 1, SP: 0.

Rio

On the 2nd, ben dand i left for rio. bus ride was pretty but long, no big deal. My cousin Ricardo is the PR director for the rio orchestra and we're staying in his apartment, which is awesome and in a cool neighborhood.

the day after we got in, we decided to do some touristy stuff. After walking along the beach for awhile, we wanted to get a cab from Ipanema (the beach we were at). as we stood by the road trying to hail a cab, some guy walked up behind me saying "excuse me sir, you've got some shit on your shoes." i like down, and there's this HUGE GLOB of gunk on my shoe. on the top of my shoe. the bottom was totally clean. it looked like someone had dropepd it on, or spat a ton of ice cream on. and the shit was...not the consistency of shit. and wouldn't ya know it, this nice fellow jsut happened to be a shoe shiner! what a fucking con. what could i do? it was obvious what was going on, but my shoe was filthy, ya know? i let the jerk clean my shoe, and then he charged me $15!!! i tried to get off paying him 10, but he made a gigantic fuss, and did i mention that he introduced us to a small group of his friends while he was cleaning my shoe? i didn't want any trouble...

so yeah, geting conned my first few hours in rio was not cool. afterwards went to the top of Pão de Açuca, then took a cab all the way up corcovado to see the giant jesus, which was really cool. great views of the city, i'll put up pictures as soon as i can.

the nightlife in rio is insane. we went to this area called Lapa one night, met some very cool people....the whole area was a giant club. there was music in the streets, vendors selling beers and food. youd dindt' need to go inside to meet people or dance. we did anyway, and well....sat night was alot of fun. i'm running out of time at the terminal here so i'm moving on. sat night was a story in itself!

so yeah, now we are in Buzios. it's this peninsula near rio, with a ton of beaches. real ritzy area, so we1re not sure if weere gonna stay...fuck, gotta go.