Monday, July 28
GO AWAY!
Just kidding. I only want you to go somewhere else. I've started beta testing another blogging program called Type Pad developed by the people behind Moveable Type.
You can find Homage to Brasilia at: http://www.jedsundwall.com/
Please update your links accordingly.
See if you can find my shadow in the picture. It's pretty cool.
Sunday, July 27
Driving on the 3rd Bridge at Night.
Homage to Driving
I have had access to a car for the past week or so, but my reign behind the wheel has now come to an end and I want to catalogue the joy that I experienced commanding those four cylinders. I am not a big fan of the car. Car's are expensive, loud, dangerous, and dirty. They're convenient, but I'd prefer a well-oiled public transportation system to a car any day. Well, we don't have good public transportation in Brasilia, and the city was designed for the car. The roads here are markedly devoid of sharp turns, stop signs or traffic lights and driving here is easier than it is at home in DC. So, here's the homage to driving.
So the roads here are nice, the car is average, the air is perfect, and I had music. My brother sent me Radiohead's Hail to the Thief and Ivan just bought The Pixies' Surfer Rosa & Come on Pilgrim. Add Ivan's copies of In Utero and Paul's Boutique to that, and I had some of the best music of the past 15 years to crank as I cruised around town. The commute to the embassy is designed so that I never need stop, but there are two moments where I'd have to merge with traffic and stopping is sometimes necessary. Other than that, I flowed to work in the morning and the afternoon air is perfect for open windows and loud music. Despite chilly air, the nighttime was even better as I'd listen to Black Francis or Thom Yorke croon and fly over the perpetually curved thoroughfares. Breathe deep under the passing orange glows, speed is intoxicating; as Albert Morcerf said to the Count of Monte Cristo as the count's custom horses transported them to Normandy, "I never knew till now the delight of speed!"
Note to concerned parents or others: I'm a prudent driver.
On red dirt at dusk.
Homage to Having the Bike Back
Driving was great, but the bike is heaven. I hopped back on my seat, said a silent prayer to Lance Armstrong and rode to the embassy on Saturday afternoon. Music has a lot to do with my bike rides too, but there's nothing like pedaling yourself to where you have to go. The route, besides the 3rd bridge, is boring. I stay on the shoulder and spin my way with the traffic. There is, however, a new little path that I've started to take. You can't tell from the picture, but it's a red dirt road worn through a field by horse drawn carts. It's a bit of a short cut for me and it keeps me off of the most dangerous road on my commute. I shot onto the path on Saturday afternoon as I was listening to "Hopeless" from The Wrens' Meadowlands. The song got me moving and I flew up the dirt road, bobbing my head, cranking the pedals, in low gear, flying uphill; there's nothing like that. Bliss. Take the car. I love that bike. I took the picture on the way home.
DJ George Costanza.
Don't be fooled by the awesome picture. That DJ, like the Dr. Huxtable look-alike that DJ'd the first party that I went to down here, was strikingly uncool in appearance. For proof, look at this picture. For another cool picture of him looking at an Eminem record look here. He is renowned as something like the best hip hop DJ in the city and I'm not in a postition to dispute it. He worked the wheels of steel with dexterity and style that more than betrayed his Mr. Belvedere-esque figure. Before I tell you how I got to the club, let me inform you that the actor who played Mr. Belvedere, Christopher Hewett, died at age 80 in 2001. I just found that out. May he rest in peace.
So, Friday. A day at work like any other, except for the fact that I skipped water aerobics and went to Dominoes with Jeff and Tish. Dominoes here is like Dominoes in the states except it's a bit classier and it's a sit-down restaurant. We ate outside and ended up giving a lot of cheese bread to a woman who came and begged at our table. Keep in mind that it was Dominoes cheese bread and not the pao de queijo that I paid homage to a while back. There was a happy hour at the embassy and I stayed to chat for a while, engaging one of my fellow politicos in a discussion of Japanese animation, as I told him to go see Spirited Away. He explained how the visuals that The Matrix brought into the mainstream have their history in Japanese animation. It'd take too long to explain and the topic is far too nerdy for me to get into. I'll just point everyone to this excellent/hilarious deconstruction of Japanese animation that a friend showed me regarding my fascination with Spirited Away.
I took Jeff home, I put in about 20 minutes on the jump rope and I took Ivan to his girly girl's house. I cozied up with The Count of Monte Cristo, but David (the Japanese animation conversation co-worker) had told me about hip hop night. I was planning on heading out at 10 or so. I had gotten in touch with a guy named Gutavo who had become friends with my friend Jonas while they studied Spanish in Spain a few months ago, and we decided to meet up. He came and got me and we headed to the club. It turns out that David's wife wasn't feeling well so it was just Gustavo and I. Fortunately, he's a cool kid. A mild-funk (for lack of a better term) band was playing when we arrived. Our conversation quickly devolved from the standard getting to know each other banter to the standard "women of the world" banter. Spanish girls v. Brazilian girls v. American girls v. Italian girls ad nauseum. It's fun and there's little else to discuss at the club on a Friday night. Not having the necessary critical mass to hit the dance floor once the DJ got going, Gustavo and I stayed on the sidelines. He was getting tipsy and just bobbed his head and gazed. I'd get nervous and make brief forays onto the floor, dance, scope, and bail. It makes me laugh to think about it. I'm really bad at the human mating dance. I get so nervous and I can't pull off the alpha-male aggressive hunter thing. One girl caught my attention and I decided to excersize my ego and try to talk to her. It went a little bit like this:
"Hey, what's your name?"
"Mariana," she responds with a frighteningly low voice (no, she wasn't a man).
"I'm Jed."
"..."
"Do you like hip hop?"
"Not really."
"Cool."
"..."
"Do you come here a lot?"
"First time."
"Me too!"
"..." I run away and tell Gustavo that I've got to get up early the next morning and that I'm ready to leave.
Ha! So she had a terrible voice. I suppose if I drank that sort of thing would be a lot easier, but I'm pretty sure that I don't really want to get good at picking up girls in clubs. Just a hunch. It was fun regardless and DJ Sancho played Snoop's "Beautiful" and that awesome Punjabi Knight Rider song back to back and I can't complain about that. Gustavo drove through the red-light district on the way home and we saw all of the "ladies of the night" that get picked last (it was 1:30 or so). It's depressing stuff, especially since one of them was a man wearing a thong.
Pale dusk spectrum.
I slept in until 10 or so and got up to read. Ivan went to pick Rosa up at the airport at around 1:45 and I stayed behind because I was going to The Hash. Let me explain what the hash is. No, don't. You can read a quick FAQ here, but I'll just sum it up like this: hashing is an excuse for bored expatriates to get together and jog and drink beer. That's it. Fortunately, they have coke and water too, so I didn't feel too left out, but we had a good ol' time. I rode my bike to the embassy where Jeff was studying and we took a cab to the club where the hashers were meeting. We paid 10 reais a person, got T-shirts, did a goofy song and dance to stretch and took off running. The running course is marked by handfuls of flour or rice thrown down on the road every few hundred meters. Occasionally, the trail will lead to a circle of flour, indicating that the runners have to discover what new direction to take and everybody needs to run off in different directions to find a flour marker that indicates the new trail. Unfortunately, there can be several new trails and only one of them is correct. That means that some runners might have to run far out of the way and follow up to three flour markers before they find a flour X indicating that it's a false trail. Boo! Then they have to run back to the circle and start the search for the new trail anew. At the halfway point, everybody stops for drinks and a break. At the end, everybody drinks some more. It's all good fun, and nobody actually drinks too much. I hear that some Hashes get out of control, but the Brasilia Hashers are a family friendly group.
One of my fellow first hashers is a woman from Minas Gerais named Tania (she's the ghostly looking figure that I'm talking to in the picture from my last post). She arrived at the hash with her tiny overgrown rat Chihuahua type dog and was subsequently baptized by the group with her new life-long Hasher nickname of Taco Bell. The beauty of the nickname is that Tania knows nothing about Taco Bell or their years-old Chihuahua advertising campaign. She just accepted the new monicker and laughed with everyone else. What camaraderie! The afternoon of running ended with a great picnic of sandwiches and chili. I met a woman from the Thai embassy and tried to get her to invite me over for Thai food, but I wasn't successful. Dang! Fernanda, one of the Foreign Service nationals from the embassy, invited Jeff and I to go out with her and some friends to a Japanese restaurant that night at around 10. We planned on it and Jeff and I got a ride back to the embassy.
I rode home, said hi to Rosa, showered and got back to The Count. 10:00 rolled around, but the plans to go out fell through. Everyone was too tired.
I went to church late, as I contacted my ride late, and they were running late as well. Nothing happened at church worth mentioning, other than that a kid had some awesome headgear (another nod to Mr. Belvedere). My ride had to leave a little early, so I made it back to Rosa's to find an empty home. She and Ivan were out shopping. I'm bad at keeping a stocked fridge and they made up for my negligence in a big way. They got back not long after I had returned from church and we all had sandwiches on warm bakery bread. Sun dried tomatoes, provolone, ham, turkey. It was great. We watched Will & Grace reruns together, Ivan installed a new game on the computer, and I got back to my book. It didn't take long for me to doze off into sleepy Sunday afternoon bliss. I laid there above the sheets, in my shorts, while Ivan clicked away at his game for a few hours. I woke up to a dimmer room and I returned to the book, periodically looking out the window at the ivy covered wall and the small strip of sky visible above it. And that's where I stayed all afternoon, until the view outside was dark. My calves are sore from jumping rope on Friday, but I feel good. It's been a nice weekend. It's nice to have Rosa back, and it's nice to be on the bike again. I was feeling kind of down earlier today, sometimes my thoughts get heavy, but Sunday afternoon melancholy turns that sadness into a warm haze. I don't know what it is, but it's that sadness that I enjoy. It's a miracle.
Music listened to while writing: Pinback's This is a Pinback CD and Auburn Lull's Alone I Admire (a perfect Sunday afternoon album)