Wednesday, July 2
Capitol Reef National Park, Utah
So, I'm recycling pictures from my old website until I get a new camera. New pictures of Brazil should be up by next week.
Yesterday, I wrote about a few quirks in the Brazilian language. I knew that I had three to write about, but I forgot what the third was. Well the long wait is over, I remembered! Here it is:
#3. I was talking to a girl at a party and she told me that she was going to visit the United States at the end of the year. I asked her if she was going in December, and she said, no, that she was going in January. OK, so I thought that was a little strange and I asked her why she said the end of the year if she's going in January. Well, she explained that the year revolves around Carnaval down here, so the end of the year is actually around January/early February, right before Carnaval.
Other than that everything worth mentioning (or not) happened after work. I got a hot dog from a street vendor last night. Brazilian hot dogs are topped with shoestring potatoes, peas and carrots. Bizarre, and not too great. I bought a Brasilia-an flag. I don't know how to say that, but it's the federal district's flag:
I got my hair cut by a woman so obsessed with detial that I'm sure she has obsessive compulsive disorder. Geoff, Alessandra and I watched Old School at my place, as I had received the DVD in the mail yesterday afternoon. I'm flying to Belo Horizonte today to go to a seminar and I won't be back until Saturday night.
Music listened to while writing: M83's Dead Cities, Red Seas, and Lost Ghosts
Monday, June 30
Bolivian hot dog vendor, photo courtesy of Tim Valentiner
Before I get started, I thought I'd share a few interesting things about Brazilian Portuguese:
#1. It is common for the pronoun 'we' (nos) to be replaced with the phrase 'the people' (a gente). Therefore, if you want to say "we are going to the movies," you could be understood just as easily by saying "the people are going to the movies." Pretty awesome, huh?
#2. The word for the number six is seis, however it is commonly replaced with the word meia, which means half or middle. The reasoning behind this is that six is half a dozen. Why they would confuse our lovely base-10 numerological system with a dozen-based system is a mystery to me, but it's interesting.
#3. There was another thing that I wanted to write, but I forget what it is. I'll try to remember and write it down so I don't forget.
Today was great. My commute in was a bit longer, as I'm living further away. That's actually a good thing, as I want to get more of a workout, but it was cold this morning. I kid you not; I think I could even see my breath. I spent a lot of time perusing about three days worth of newspapers, and I found a great deal of articles about human rights violations. It was good to find them, because it makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something. However, it is sad work. I suppose it's good, however, that the media is addressing such an important issue. The highlight of the day was when Rosa walked into my office with two packages. One was from my brother and contained my very own copy of Radiohead's Hail to the Thief. Hot dang! That sure was nice of him. The other contained a DVD of Waiting for Guffman that I ordered from Deep Discount DVD. What a great store...they have the cheapest prices around and the shipping is free. So, that was great. Thank goodness for an APO address. Yes! Anyway, I think that Waiting for Guffman is one of the funniest movies of the 90's. It'll be good to have down here.
Water aerobics was a bit cold, but the workout was intense and I got a good workout. I only had one other classmate: a Brazilian woman named Angelina who claims to have a son my age who looks exactly like me. I spent the entire class practicing my Portuguese with her and the teacher. I feel like the language is really coming along well. I was fascinated to learn that my teacher's father used to be a bread-man: basically a guy who walked around selling bread to people in the streets. He worked selling bread, studied, worked some more and ended up becoming a successful economist. His daughter, my instructor, has traveled the world, speaks English and seems to do fairly well for herself as a water aerobics instructor/physical therapist. Look at that! She's been privileged, but her father worked hard for it, so good for them!
I'll avoid getting too personal, but my friends know who they are. I have some of the greatest friends in the world. Man, I wish I could articulate this well enough, but thank you...my friends, thank you so much. I'd like to add that my family is included among my friends. I'm lucky to have such dear friends at home. Dang! It's overwhelming sometimes, but it's easy to take for granted...I'm surrounded by wonderful people. I don't really think I deserve it sometimes, but I'm certainly grateful.
Music listened to while writing: Radiohead's Hail to the Thief
The vibe
OH MAN! Where do I begin!? This past weekend was nothing more than a comedy of errors starring none other than Jed Sundwall himself. I'll start with Friday.
First of all, things were looking up around lunchtime on Friday when everybody from political went out to an Italian restaurant to lunch with some Brazilian human rights activists. One of my awesome superiors dropped the maddest diplomatic bomb I could ever imagine. He asked them why so many liberals in Latin America love Castro. His point was that if they were so busy fighting for human rights in their own country, why is it that they give a get out of jail free card to Castro? It doesn't make sense. One of the guys tried to explain how Castro and Che were fighting for the people back when staged their revolution, blah blah blah. It all amounts to Castro being lauded as something of a mythical figure and little else. I agreed with them, the revolution was amazing and it was even inspiring in a way, but what is Castro doing now? I mean, honestly, they might have had good intentions, but look what's come of them. The woman sitting next to me simply asked me a question in return: "why did the United States go into Iraq and kill all of those people?" Please. If you want to talk about Iraq, we can talk about Iraq, but the war in Iraq has nothing to do with Castro. It has nothing to do with my question. I can't help but be insulted by someone who thinks that they can derail a debate like that. Nonetheless, it was awesome.
So, here's where the sucking begins. CENSORED, will be re-posted at the end of the summer.
The only shining light amidst all of that gloom was my Kombi. I had rented a van for a Saturday trip to a place called Pozo Azul (Blue Well). The Kombi is one of the most popular cars in Brazil, as it is the most basic people moving vehicle on the market. There are seatbelts for nine people, headlights, wheels, a four gear engine in the back and a fire extinguisher. No expense is wasted on safety features, a radio, or anything else. The car is nothing more than a metal shell on wheels. I think I'm going to write a book about it entitled Unsafe at Any Speed II: The Kombi. Needless to say, I was pretty stoked to have one at my disposal. I went over to Jeff's to pick him up to go to a party with some of our co-workers. Now, this was a party with people closer to our age or older, and it was quite refreshing. We were surrounded by diplomats from Finland, Spain, Venezuela, Japan and the rest of the world as we danced and mingled the night away. The DJ played the standard latin hits and everyone had a good time. Highlights of the evening were a FREAKY woman who looked like Chucky, and a FREAKY dude who looked like Falco. In all honesty, the guy didn't look like Falco, but he looked like he had walked right off the set of Interview With a Vampire and he made me think of Falco. All in all, a fun party. We met some really cool people.
Saturday morning, I wake up ready to hit the road and drive my friends out to Pozo Azul. Well, I pick most of them up at about 9:00 am. Two of them are still drunk from the night before. I think to myself, "oh well, no big deal." As the morning progresses however, our departure seems like it's never going to come. We meet some other friends at a gas station. Some of the guys decide to buy some more beer. "OK," I'm thinking, "this is kind of sad. Why on earth are these kids buying more beer at 10am? Whatever." I go to pick up Jeff and we finally get going. Jeff, however, gets more nervous than I had been and decides that it's time to say something to the guys in back. Essentially, he pointed out that while they might think that they're responsible, nobody else does. Jeff and I are by far the oldest ones around and if anything went wrong on the trip, we'd be the ones to blame. It'd obviously look bad if one of them got hurt and we had to explain that we were the ones escorting them out to go cliff jumping and swimming in the desert while they got drunk at 10 in the morning. So yeah, we told them to chill out, out of respect for us. So they did, but they felt bad about the whole thing and decided that they'd rather have us drop them off somewhere downtown because they didn't want to go anymore. Fine with me! They took off, bad blood having been stirred. Jeff and I felt a bit of remorse, as it's hard to lecture one's friends, but it had to be done and we felt a lot safer. The thing is that I have a friend who's brother is a quadriplegic and will be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life because he got drunk and dove off of a house boat onto a sandbar. I don't want anything to do with anything like that. On top of that, the Kombi is a death machine. A group of my closest friends rolled an Explorer when a tire blew out on them while driving across Nevada on I-80. It is a miracle that they survived, but if anything like that happened in a Kombi, nothing would save us, especially on Brazil's poorly maintained roads. It was better that they left.
Jeff and I had a great time swimming and cliff jumping. I'd write more about the place, but I'm too lazy. Basically, you've got a really deep blue pool that's fed by a 10 foot waterfall and is surrounded by cliffs perfect for jumping. The pool also stretches back into a shallow cave inhabited by huge bats, but we kept out of there. Anyway, I dazzled the Brazilians with some sweet gainers from about 30 feet up. It's a perfect swimmin' hole, and I'm stoked to go back sometime soon. We spent a few hours swimming and exploring the area, but when we got back to the parking lot to leave, someone had parked behind us and blocked us in. It turns out that it was the guys that had kicked themselves off of our trip. They found a way to get out there and thought it'd be funny to block us in. I thought it was pretty funny, but I was determined to find my way out of there. I took a picture of the scene and rounded up some Brazilians in the parking lot to help me move the car that was blocking us. Even with 8 people, we couldn't get it to budge. Fortunately, the car next to us didn't have a car parked next to it, so we all bounced its trunk and moved the back of it, opening up a space for us to back out. As soon as we moved that car, its owners showed up. In my panic, I jumped into the Kombi and tried to get out of there as soon as we could. Of course, it wasn't too easy to maneuver the thing out of there, but we did it. Luckily, he owners of the car that we had moved didn't even seem to mind that their car had been moved anyway. So in unneccesary haste, I tore out of there, the four manual gears of fury in motion.
However, I didn't get far before I realized that I didn't have my camera. I had set it on top of the Kombi, but I'm positive that one of the kids that I had rounded up to help me get out of there had stolen it. To be sure, I stopped the car, jumped out and ran down the dirt road as fast as I could back to the parking lot. My flip flops flew off and I bruised my heel pretty badly on the rocks, but I had some great pictures on that thing, and...I love my camera. I got down there, expecting to find it laying in the dust somewhere, but it was nowhere to be found. One of the kids had swiped it. The tragedy is that the kid doesn't have the battery recharger, he doesn't have the USB cable to connect it to a computer, and he probably doesn't have a computer. It's worthless to him. What a waste. Anyway, that's why I posted today's picture. I have no more pictures to post until I get my hands on a new camera. I've started a fund to get one, if you'd like to contribute, email me and I'll tell you how.
Anyway, Jeff and I drove out of there, back through the desert and on home. We ate at an all you can eat churrascaria (Brazilian BBQ) to celebrate our exciting day, took the rental deathvan back, and went back to my place to watch Gosford Park. I didn't make it half way through the movie before I fell asleep.
Yesterday, I went to church, played the guitar in the afternoon and hung out a Rosa's in the evening. It was a very relaxed day, I went home, read myself to sleep, and that was it.
Music listened to while writing: Black Dice's Beaches and Canyons