June 15, 2003
Geoff throwing a dart at the Parrot's Perch, The UK Embassy's pub / tennis court / all 'round party place. To see what a real man looks like throwing a dart check this.
Where do I begin? Duh! Where I left off! So here goes...
I slept in on Saturday. The real day began at lunch when 'the new guy' came over for lunch. His name is Jeff and hails from Seattle, where he is getting a master's degree in policy. Interestingly enough (or boringly enough), he is interested in studying energy policy, just like me! So, what a coincidence: a guy shows up, one year older than I am and he seems to be exactly where I want to be in about a year's time. He arrived yesterday and almost immediately came over for lunch.
After we ate our leftovers from Friday night's Mexican food extravaganza, we all took off to check out the 'hippie fair.' It's something of a crafts fair that is comes together at the base of Brasília's TV tower every weekend. The sad thing was that I didn't see too many crafts. It was hard to tell if anything was authentic or if most of the wares had been mass-produced somewhere. Either way, it was worth checking out.
My host brother Ivan and I wandered the booths in search of anything that would catch my eye, but I didn't find anything. Ivan nonchalantly told me that "once, there was a dead guy here." What? Yeah, apparently he had gone to the hippie fair a while back and noticed that the man who looked like a sleeping laid-out bum was really a dead laid-out bum. Ivan could tell that his chest wasn't moving so he nudged the corpse with his foot. Sure enough, the guy didn't respond at all. Dead! And the craziest thing is that no one seemed to care. This brings me to a point: Brasília is surreal.
I'm not going to get into all of the surreality just yet, because I want to save my visual description of the city for a later date when I've had time to crystallize and refine my opinions and observations about the space that I'm living in. Nonetheless, I'll just start off with this. Take a late 60's vision of the future, cast it in concrete, lay it down in the middle of a plain, and let it sit for 35 years. Yeah, that's Brasília. It looks like a run down Stanley Kubrick set (think: A Clockwork Orange). The flat horizons and harsh sunlight make sure that the odd shapes and silhouettes of the cityscape are impossible to ignore. On the surface, painted metal and concrete don't age well. They corrode. It's an odd place. Really odd, and the bright late afternoon sun scraping over the concrete and cutting through the hippie fair stands made me marvel at how otherworldly this city really is.
I went out with Geoff again last night, this time over to the British Embassy for a fundraiser for their cricket team. The night was spent placing bets on little wooden horses that raced down a track on the tennis court. Huh? Well, here's how it goes: they have six different colored wooden horses kind of like foot and a half tall Monopoly pieces lined up at the end of a track. Someone rolls a giant wooden die with each of the six colors represented on its sides, the horse that moves forward is chosen by how this die falls. Then two equally giant numbered dice are thrown to determine how far the selected horse moves.
I think the track had something like 20 spaces on it and blah blah blah: I spent the evening listening to a drunk Englishman call the race over a tremendous PA system while I ate Brazilian BBQ (blew! free! siven! BOLLOCKS!). Once the racing was over and the announcer had finally been stripped of the mic, Queen's greatest hits was put on and Geoff, the Ecuadorian Ana Maria, Jeff's sister and I took to playing darts in the pub. Before we could even finish a game, we were teaching a group of diplomats from Ghana how to play. How awesome is that!? It's pretty awesome.
We took Ana Maria home and met some kids at T.G.I. Friday's for drinks. Interesting note: they still wear pieces of flair (those assinine pins and buttons that the waiters used to wear up and down their suspenders) down here. Of the many policies that govern my life, one of them is to avoid T.G.I. Friday's like the plague, but I'm not going to be a stickler about it. Anyway, I had been told that flair was no longer required in America, as we have become far too cool for such jackassery. Well, the Brazilians are not only lame enough for flair, but several waiters were wearing awful Cat in the Hat / Blossom (daaah!) / Redd Fox hats. I can imagine no more compelling argument to aggressively develop Brazil's economy. It is imperative that we foster a market in which Brazil's youth will not be subjected to such degradation in the workplace.
After Friday's, Geoff and I got our flirt on with some girls hangin' at the mall (the place to hang out in Brasília) and then we took off.
Church this morning. A great place to practice my Portuguese. I really love my community. Obviously, I was warmly welcomed and everybody was very patient with me as I tried to speak Portuguese with them. The nice thing about church is that I generally know what people are trying to say as they teach their lessons. I can focus on learning vocab and grammar instead of trying to figure out what's being said.
By the way, I'm beginning to reconsider comparing Brazilian women to John Basedow and the Crypt Keeper; the beauties that Geoff and I met at the mall last night and the lovely girls at church have convinced me that Brazil boasts a certain beauty that is nothing short of stunning (it's just not as ubiquitous as they'd have you believe).
The family that I went to church with is good friends with Rosa and Ivan so we all came back home for lunch afterwards. Once again, we chowed down on leftovers from Friday night's fiesta. I can't complain. Mexican food=good; even three days in a row.
Rosa and I went to the Paraguayan Market after lunch in search of a lock for my bike. The market is an expansive little city of booths and stands that sell just about everything, given that it was procured semi-illegally. Well, that's not fair. I'm sure there's plenty of good business that goes on there, but most of it's kind of shady knocked-off Rolex, Oakley, Versace type stuff. I found a nice lock and happened to stumble across a sexy little all-black classical guitar for about $50. Not bad my friends! Not bad at all! Besides being all black, the best thing about the guitar is that it sounds like it cost $50. It has that charmingly crappy K-Records vibe going on. Yes!
Anyway, that was my weekend. It all ends here at the keyboard again, after a three hour nap and an enormous burrito (more leftovers), I've got to find something else to do until I fall asleep again.
music listened to while writing: Boards of Canada's masterful Music Has the Right to Children and Steven Malkmus' mediocre Pig Lib