Tuesday, April 24th, 2007
Hooray for being back in Blighty and back in Bristol!
Bit of a step up from the last post since I came back from Brazil. I am over the blues and full of energy and enthusiasm! woop and indeed yay. After a few days in Surrey and London and the care and loveliness of family and friends I felt revitalized and ready to get back to my favourite activity; Hippy whipping!!! Organising a bunch of slacker hippy types to do projects and create that wonderful entity known to some in this world as “fun” ooooooh!
Within 24 hours of being back in Bristol my diary looks like a warzone, I am full of ideas and projects and activities and I’m thoroughly buzzing with it! hooray!
Also, a short visit to see that entirely weird and wonderful genius that I like to call ‘bro’ resulted in the usual fits of laughter… this time upon learning how to manipulate a ‘Winword’ document so that every other word becomes “buttocks”. Time well spent I feel.
On a more serious note, the impetus behind such silliness was actually my current crusade to become more whizz-like (than my already intermediary-but-could-do-better
whizz-like status) with basic computer programs like word and excel. Joy and fun indeed! 
Call me a geek (you wouldn’t be the first, though these days I often hide it better), but I thoroughly enjoy learning how to manipulate documents and databases, and discovering a whole new world of syntax and grammar errors! fantastic! hahahaahahah
Tuesday, April 17th, 2007
right, this is out of the order, I wrote this post a week ago and forgot to publish it!
OK times up! Pack your bags and get outta the country!
Yes, *sniff sniff*, the time has come to leave this place and return to Engerland. I am sad to leave. Very sad to leave 
this doesn’t mean there aren’t thngs in the UK that I will be happy to return to, no! Friends and family are there! It’s just that I’ve been really happy here, I love this city, I love the culture and the people and the general vibe of this place!
sigh
well, I’ll just have to find a way to return back here as soon as possible…
In the meantime, let me post up a little update of some things I have been doing here and forgot to write about! Firstly, the maracanã stadium!!!!!!!!!! yeah baby yeah!!! A couple of weeks ago I went to see Vasco da Gama (wooooohoooooooo!!!) play against Flamengo
(boooooooooo!). I went with Igor, who is a Vasco fan, so obviously I had no choice but to support them too!
It had been another incredibly hot day in the high 30s all day, and we arrived at the staduim at 5:30 in the lingering heat of the afternoon.. but thank goodness the match wasn’t at 2! The atmosphere was electric. The noise of touts, beercokewaterpeanuts-sellers, heavy smelly traffic and of course thousands of fans - many with percussion and brass instruments beating out the teams’ fan music, which of course was full of vulgarities and swearing, but here to the beat of samba!
And the walk up to the stands, squashed and sweaty and full of antipication… as you approach the entrance the muffled boom of the frenzied crowd is almost frightening, and the entrance out into the arena is an attack on all the senses! The first thing that hits you is the powerful noise of thousands of people roaring and chanting and screaming (and that’s before the game has even started!)… then there’s the sight itself! The morphous animal that is thousands of sweaty, colourful, bouncing fans lining the stands of the oval stadium with the focus down onto the green pitch, which I never thought would feel so close! You could almost feel yourself running on it when the players are out there! Then there’s the strangley not unpleasant mix of smells that is peanuts and beer and coke and sweat… and somewhere mixed in is a sort of sweetness, but hey, that could have been my excitement mixing everything up (I put jam in everything!)…
anyway, the game was fantastic! Vasco beat the treacherous Flamengo 3-0 and each goal was a frenzy of euphoria where complete strangers become the best of friends just for a few moments and together pour forwards all of their strength to create a roar that could deafen the weaker-eared amoungst us!! ahahahaaha
The great Romario (of Vasco of course) scored his 999th goal, and nearly his thousanth! And I had a great time learning some rude chants 
“puta que pariu! so falta um pro Romario fazer mil!”
goooooooooooooooooooool!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Tuesday, April 17th, 2007
“saudades” is an untranslatable word, which means “longing, missing, aching for something/one/where”.
I’m back in England now and I’m all a mess. I wasn’t ready to leave Brasil and there’s a deep pain in me now of being ripped away from somewhere I was very happy… it really hurts. And then I feel guilty for not being so happy here, because this is my homeland and I’m surrounded by people I love (which is great…), but despite all the good things here I just want to go back.
And I know I cant just now. I’ve got a lot of work to do before I can crawl out of this financial hole I’ve got myself in. I feel quite trapped. I miss even just the air of Rio, the thickness and humidity and tropical smells, which sometimes ming so much that you gag!! but sometimes are filled with the scents of churrascos and garlic rice and lime and vibrantly green plants and fruit! I miss the fruit with a passion!!
And I miss the people I knew out there. Muitas saudades… ate eu acho que meu coracao nao esta mais dentro de mim, eu deixei ele la. Mas eu nao devo pensar assim, tenho que olhar pra diante e nao pra tras. Estou aqui na Inglaterra de novo, e vou ficar aqui muito tempo e essas lagrimas nao vao mudar esse fato.
Thursday, April 5th, 2007
My solo poi choreography lost it’s virginity last night to a crowd of rowdy hippy brazilian juggly-types.
The “cabaret na segunda, da segunda qualidade!” (slack monday caberet!) is held in the ‘Centro
Interactivo de Circo’ (see piccies). My solo was one of 5 performances and as a premiere I think it went pretty well! I dropped a couple of times, but it wasn’t drastic… plus having recieved my newly designed contact poi only 2 hours before the performance, I think I did pretty well considering I hadn`t quite got used to the new weight haha! bum!
No, no, of course I didn’t plan to leave that to the last minute! *slap round face with fish* I`ve been trying to get these poi made up since the beginning of February, but without a sewing machine I have to rely on someone else to do it for me - which entailed discussing designs, meeting up to buy materials, making up prototypes, testing them, and then finally sewing everything together… somehow it just ended up being the day of the performance that I recieved the finished product! and yes, the weighting and the material was very different to what I was used to, and yes, of course my choreography had lots of moves in it that depended on precise manipulation of the weighted poi… sigh.
I’m quite pleased with the way the choreo turned out in the end, although I wanted to include a lot more ideas that I’d had. The main problem was lack of physical ability!! *must train more must train more* So, to overcome this, I am going to be showing my dance teacher the choreo on monday for some advice on how to improve on what I already have, and hopefully how to nail the ideas I wanted to include and work those in too. As for my poi manipulation ability, I know what I need to improve, it’s just a matter of more practice and constant dedication!! no problem there then!
Well, I have my brand spanking new poi now to practice with and hopefully the next performance (in a week!) will go a bit better!
I’ll be performing at the British Juggling Convention in Nottingham! hoorah!