I miss Trinidad so much

http://wstr.org/nynex/Kevin%20Lyttle%20-%20ROTI%20(Soca%202007).mp3

In case that link is broken, go here and download the Kevin song: http://wstr.org/nynex

That lonely point in the trip where I desperately google for local karaoke

http://yamaga.com.br/images/sapporokaraoke1.jpg

I hope I get here someday soon.  It is far though.

Phone with FM radio

I have a phone with an FM radio and it is the raddest shit. I listen
to funny brazil radio all the time when walking around. The only
downside is I will be sadder if it's stolen.

Brazilian word games

1) The word "comer" in Brazilian Portuguese means both "to eat" and
"to fuck". So there's a joke, "As duas coisas melhor na vida sao
comer" which translates (literally, radio-editly) as "The two best
things in life are eating".

2) The word "pasta" means "crack" (as in cocaine).

3) There was a Brazilian folk hero who, when under attack by an
invading army, yelled "O Mata o Moro!" to his followers, which
translates roughly as "kill or be killed!". However, it also
translates as "Either the forest or the hills!" and some say that as
he waved his sword in the air he indicated each respective exit.

4) There is a Brazilian verb that means "to lick all over and cover
with saliva", and not in an eew way. I just forget what it is.

Brazilian tough kids fly kites

And they look so badass doing it. This needs to be in a hip hop video.

Videos

http://wstr.org/Videos

Some miscellaneous videos up there, including one of the time we saw
dolphins!

Belem

Got to take a nice aimless walk around Belem today. I like it here.
Nice old-city ultra-modern-city vibe.

Some of the people I've met say that it's a bit slow in terms of
social life though. I've definitely been hanging around the house a
lot, which is nice because I'm out of the sun. The plan is to stay
here until next week when the street party scene kicks up again after
this week, which is a holiday week where tons of people go to the beach.

Ton of new photos

I'm staying with some cool cats in Belem, and they have internet. I
just uploaded a *ton* of photos of the past few weeks.

There should be some videos of Trinidad and Dolphins at sea here in a
couple hours too:
http://nynex

Also, if you use flickr on a Mac and want to kill the uploading tool,
try fotofox, it is wicked better:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3945

Brazilian ice cream is extraordinary

Brazilian has a totally separate universe of ice cream flavors. Tons
of crazy tropical fruits. A couple days ago I got an ice cream
called "Romeo and Juliet" that was like peppermint-stick-like gooey
guava paste with a cheesecake flavor base.

Other highlights: something that tastes like macadamia nut, chocolate
with coconut, white chocolate, and Acai, a strange all-purpose jungle
food that gets into thick energy drinks, milkshakes, and savory
cooking as well (like, as a soupy mix alongside fried fish or
chicken). Bonkers.

If you travel with a laptop...

Travel with one of these:
http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/

So worth it. You can just plug it in to people's internet
connections and get Wifi everywhere in the house.

The only thing wrong with it is that it doesn't have 2 ethernet ports
(one to go to the computer you just unplugged).

Latest jam

I've been in the jungle for a while. Has anybody done this yet?

http://wstr.org/nynex/Nobody%20wanna%20remix%20to%20ignition%20the%
20stripper%20song%20(nynex%20remix).mp3

If not why not?

Brazilian Margarine

Apart from having trans fat in it, has an artificial butter flavor
that tastes and smells unbearably bad. Yuck!

Wheels spinning

I've been here for almost four weeks and my Portuguese is in a
"shitty Spanish" holding pattern. My interest in cool linuxy
projects here has been luring me away from language learning (primary
goal) and internet projects (secondary). Met a few cool people, but
my wheels are spinning even harder than in Trinidad.

Need a better Portuguese dictionary

I bought this Portuguese dictionary for Mac (Ultralingua) and the
dictionary they include kinda blows. The word results are ordered
alphabetically instead of by best-fit (so you get marginal
translations starting with the letter "a" before you get the most
useful ones), it isn't very comprehensive, and it gives minimal
explanation for the different possible translations so you're left
guessing.

The best dictionary I've ever touched (in terms of content... the
software was windows only, not great, and DRM'ed) was the Garzanti
Italian dictionary. Using that thing was a dream, there's something
so rad about never having to guess the meaning of a word or expression.

I want a Portuguese one of those.

Traveling? Don't get a camera, get a phone.

If you're thinking of traveling around the world, don't bring a camera, bring a good camera phone.  I bought a camera before I left and I totally regret it. Here's why:

Having a camera that takes big high resolution photos is a total waste.  High res pictures are a pain in the ass on the road.  You run out of memory in a second and then you're fucking around with buying more memory or burning CDs in internet cafes, which is not how you want to spent an evening.  I'm even traveling with my laptop, which should mitigate the problem since I have a hard drive to dump them onto, but laptop hard drives aren't big, and pretty soon you're stuck in the same position.  

Most of the space on my disk is already taken up by music.  And when it comes down to it I'd much rather be using the space for music.  What would you rather have when you're thousands of miles from home: one of your favorite albums from highschool, or 10 photos you took yesterday?  

Saving space by being choosy about what photos you snap or keep defeats the whole purpose of digital photography for travelers, that being the way a series of photos can tell or anchor a story.  And buying extra memory cards like you would rolls of film defeats the other purpose of digital photography: not blowing a ton of money.

The other reason not to take big photos is that these photos will only be seen on a computer screen.  It's not like you're going to make 5x7 prints.  And it probably isn't even worth keeping most of them on your computer; everybody else will see them on Picasa or Flickr.  And bigger pictures don't just use extra storage space, they also take much more time to transfer on your computer, and more time to crunch down to a size suitable for uploading.

So you're going to end up taking pictures at a resolution that most recent cellphones are capable of.

Traveling outside the US without a cellphone will INDISPUTABLY have a SIGNIFICANT negative impact on your trip.  Not traveling with a GSM* cellphone is my #1 biggest regret.  Here's why:

If you have a phone you will get more peoples' numbers.  When I have my cellphone on me I am way more likely to just pull it out and get somebody's number than I am if I have to interrupt the conversation to go searching for a pen and a bar napkin.  Plus when you're traveling you can get numbers in situations where at home you'd have to earn it.  This is so important, because meeting people who live in a place instantly opens up all kinds of scenes and experiences that would otherwise be closed to you as a traveller.  It also gives you a real insight into the culture of the place.   Meeting people is how you get away from skimming the surface Lonely Planet-style and start sinking your teeth into a place.  The best thing is, it works even if you're only there for a few days. 

If you have a phone you will lose less peoples' numbers before you wake up sober the next morning.  Sometimes you will wake up in the morning with names and numbers in your phone and be like, "oh yeah, I should call them".  No phone and those numbers are gone, dude.

If you have a phone you're more likely to follow up with these people in meaningful ways before your time runs out.  You know how it is; plans get made that night, and kids might call you up if they have your number but they won't track you down at your hostel.  In countries where everybody has a phone, making plans to meet without them is really difficult.  You're late.  She's late.  One of you decides to bounce and now no gorgeous girl with a cool accent for you, buddy.  You're working with very small amounts of time and lots of other barriers (you don't know the language, the city, the scene) so you can't afford missing connections. 

Email is not a substitute.  Even if you check email every day, the people you meet probably won't, and even a day or two of latency is too much if you're just there for a week.  Plus with foreign handwriting on bar napkins and emails from people speaking in other languages or with weird syntax looking like spam to either you, them, or spam filters there are many possibilities for email attempts to simply fail.  Some of the people you meet will be very, very beautiful women.  Why take that chance?

If you have a phone you will have more independence from hosts or larger groups.  Staying with friends is awesome, but communication problems can make it hard to go off on your own for a bit, because you don't want to worry or inconvenience them.  Having a cellphone solves this problem.  A similar thing happens when you're traveling with a group.  You might stick with the group even if you'd rather do your own thing just because of how difficult it will be to reconnect.  Being tied to a group sucks, and no matter how cool and gracious your hosts are, being forever tied to them is a drag.  

A new GSM phone with a pretty good camera costs between $200 and $400.  You could easily spend that on a camera, and if you have a nice digital camera already you could sell it for that much.  Be serious about your trip.  You're spending a significant amount of money just to be in these new and interesting places; it's stupid to scrimp on something relatively cheap that will hugely improve your stay.  And it's even dumber to bring along another piece of expensive electronic equipment that will be much less useful.

*Why GSM:

GSM phones (the kinds with the little swappable chips that link you to a number and a service) are perfect for traveling because you can keep the same phone and just buy new prepaid chips when you enter a new country.  A chip gives you a local number and sets you up with a local carrier.  In Brazil, a chip costs like $7.  If you have Cingular/AT&T or T-mobile you already have a GSM phone (though you may need to unlock it).

Good spam subject

Spam subject:

I'm disappointed that Band of Bugs didn't do more with its insect theme to make it stand out, but what it does, it does quite well.

Okay, I'll read you, you deserve it.  Even tempted to buy your stock.

New jam available in a few moments

http://wstr.org/nynex/Big Day for Promiscuous Girl.mp3

Uploading now. I'm pretty happy about this one. Started it late
last night and finished this morning.

Casetta e Planeta: Baile Funk parody on Brazilian TV

So there's some Brazilian sketch comedy show that parodies two Baile
Funk artists, Casetta e Planeta ("Casette" and "Planet"). One has a
scraggly afro (scraggle-fro?) and the other has parallel light and
dark stripes (skunk-hawk?). They talk in really Baile Funk -esque
cadences, and in this episode of the sketch Casette and Planet go to
Venezuela, where they are greeted by a parody of Hugo Chavez who
speaks in a robotic, military Spanish in the fashion of the square
not digging this crazy music.

They sing him a really silly Baile Funk song and get chased out of
the country. Then they go to Argentina. I'm not sure what happens
in Argentina, cause I got distracted.

(kevin and andy, thought I'd CC you on this, but this is basically a
blog post, if youtube has anything matching this, please link to it
in the comments).

Da un nike

There's a funny expression that is kind of like "talk to the hand"
that involves saying "da um nike" (give/do a nike) with a hand motion
in the shape of the nike logo. As in, "get the hell outta here".

Casetta e Planeta: Baile Funk parody on Brazilian TV

So there's some Brazilian sketch comedy show that parodies two Baile
Funk artists, Casetta e Planeta ("Casette" and "Planet"). One has a
scraggly afro (scraggle-fro?) and the other has parallel light and
dark stripes (skunk-hawk?). They talk in really Baile Funk -esque
cadences, and in this episode of the sketch Casette and Planet go to
Venezuela, where they are greeted by a parody of Hugo Chavez who
speaks in a robotic, military Spanish in the fashion of the square
not digging this crazy music.

They sing him a really silly Baile Funk song and get chased out of
the country. Then they go to Argentina. I'm not sure what happens
in Argentina, cause I got distracted.

(kevin and andy, thought I'd CC you on this, but this is basically a
blog post, if youtube has anything matching this, please link to it
in the comments).

Tons of new pictures up today

Check 'em out!

Parentins crazy Brazilian party Day 4

After waking up in my hammock to Parentins music and checking my
email, I had a boat to find. Turns out the fire station was a little
far, but the walk was great. It took me outside the mayhem a bit,
down a slightly shaded boulevard and a curved market street. I
bought a heavy tapioca pancake flavored with coconut and wrapped in
big leaves, which I picked at as I walked and ate more of than I
meant to.

The streets got quieter and it looked like I might be on a dead end
when I saw the fire station. Across the street I could see an
offshoot of the Amazon, some broken down looking boats tied up--some
grounded--and a few guys sitting in the shade near a propane
station. "Have you seen a boat with foreigners?" I asked. They
hadn't. I walked back to the road and continued down to its end
where more boats sat in the mud and a small bar was set up on the
street. No boat here either. And there wasn't really any good way
to follow the river, I had to just backtrack to the next cross
street, go up a block, and walk down to the next dead end. After a
couple iterations of this in the hot sun, I decided to check one more
street and then go home. At the end of this next street floated the
boat I was looking for.

There were about 12 folks on the boat; kids (three Germans a dutch
and a Swede) from the hostel in Manaus and family and friends of the
Brazlians who owned the boat. We ate grilled fish, jumped off the
boat into the water, and then drank caipirinhas (sugar+lime+cachassa)
and danced around on the deck for the next five or six hours,
surrounded by muddy water, river boats, trees, and houses on
stilts. At one point it started pouring rain even though 3/4 of the
sky was clear blue. That was wonderful.

One of the Germans was really good at flips and dramatic dives. The
other German was really good at doing this funny Brazilian dude dance
(half dance half stance, actually) in a speedo while water poured
down from an outdoor shower on the deck. The Germans were both about
20 and had spent the past 10 months in Rio fulfilling a civil service
requirement, so they'd developed Brazilian extensions to their
personalities, which was fun to see. There was a young Brazilian guy
Lucivan (sp?) who was just a total treasure, trying to talk to
everybody in whatever language they spoke, none of which he knew.
Everybody was just being silly.

We slept in hammocks through the evening, until about midnight, and
then hit the same techno party as the night before. That night the
music was a lot better, and I ended up staying out until 8. During
the day we'd made a plan to go swimming out by the river, so I was
psychologically prepared and surprisingly un-hungover when somebody
woke me up an hour later.

yo!

http://www.gmail.com/app/v1.1.1/L1/gmail-g.jar
http://www.gmail.com/app/v1.1.1/L1/gm-Generic-Advanced_MIDP2.jad

Place them in your phone using your computer and USB cable or

Parintins Day 3

When I woke up a band was playing onshore next to the boat. I'd seen
them setting up the day before. They were playing Parintins songs,
which I got to know real well, because there are about 8 of them.
Some background on the theoretical framework of the history and
practices of the festival is in order. If anything seems unclear,
don't ask me because I have no idea. Just relax your need for
explanation as much as possible and use your imagination to fill in
gaps.

So there are two bulls. Bulls correspond to colors (red and blue),
to vaguely stated personality traits ("garantido" and "caprichoso")
and to two tribes of people who affiliate as one or the other and
where the corresponding color t-shirt, armband, etc. The words
"garantido" and "caprichoso" translate directly to "guaranteed" and
"capricious" so if you thought a dictionary was going to help you
understand this better, you're out of luck. Some of this had been
explained to me the night before while I was drinking, other stuff I
was just intuiting or (maybe) hallucinating.

Each side has it's own songs, like "I'm blue, I'm blue, I'm blue, I'm
'caprichoso'" or "Garantido... garaaantido". And there are four of
them. Did I say eight? No, I think there were four.

For lunch the crazy guys from the boat were having a barbacue. Huge
chunks of salted meat and sausage, and some of these really mean
looking river fish with tough black scales that you have to rip apart
like a lobster. Later that night I realized how cheap beer was and
got really drunk and ran around dancing at the techno party. At some
point I ran into a swede from the hostel scene in Manaus; they'd come
down on a smaller boat that day, but all she knew was it was near the
fire station. So the next morning when I woke up (pretty early
considering) I checked my email and went to find this boat.

Orcootchie

I officially inaugurated my stay in Brazil by making an Orkut account.
Orkut is this weird social network site (like Myspace or Facebook)
that Google bought several years ago.

It blew up in Brazil, where it is pronounced "Orkootchie".

Parentins, visually.

http://images.google.com.br/images?gbv=2&svnum=10&hl=pt-BR&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=parintins&spell=1

Skip the pictures of costumes and look at the big stadium shots.

Pictures in a week or so

I have a bunch of awesome pictures of Brazil, but the internet in the
areas I've been is ridiculously slow, so I'm not even trying to post
them yet.

Dolphins

Last night while chilling next to the Amazon we saw dolphins. There
are fresh water river dolphins here, and some of them are pink (no
joke).

But the really cool thing about river dolphins is that at night the
river was as calm as a puddle and the town was quiet so you could
hear them breathing. Snort. And you could hear the squeaks they
made as they echolocated in the muddy water.

Parentins or Crazy Brazilian Party - Day 2

The next day I woke up feeling like a million bucks. I lounged in my
hammock half asleep and half awake for ages, soaking up the morning
chatter and swaying hammocks around me, watching the jungle slide
by. When I finally got up to walk around, I was delighted to see my
vision of an armada partly realized. In front of us I counted 9
boats trailing off into the horizon, and another 8 or so behind. It
was like a convoy crossing the Atlantic in an old war movie, keeping
sharp lookout for u-boats. And knowing that our floating hammock
city of sleepy people was part of a larger confederation just
deepened the warm feeling that'd been diffusing through my body since
I woke up.

I took a shower in river water pumped up to a tank in the top of the
boat, and then walked to the front to dry off in the breeze and watch
the country slide by. Junior was holding court. Junior lives in Sao
Paolo, a huge city, and the way to picture him in relation to other
people we met is: he's the guy from the big city who loves traveling
around his country and seeing the sites. He was basically a big,
outspoken New Yorker (or Statin Islander) taking a boatride down the
Mississippi with a bunch of locals (and a miscellaneous foreigner).

I think when I was dry I just went back in my hammock, and spent a
little time copying music onto one of the other DJs' mp3 player.

We rolled into town in the early evening, and Junior and I went off
on our own to get something to eat. We walked into town, passed the
cemetary, and up to the stadium where a huge number of absolutely
ridiculous floats and large puppets were standing by. There were
trees three stories tall, giant skulls, miscellaneous vegetation,
enormous elf-like figures and giant lizards. I had no idea what any
of this was for, and figured a parade maybe but didn't give it much
thought. The streets were full of people but everyone was just
milling around in anticipation, and even though there were some
tremendous crowds watching something on a stage by the stadium it was
too chill to be much fun. After dinner we went home early and went
to sleep.

Know anybody in Brazil?

If you know anybody who lives in Brazil or who's recently lived in
Brazil, drop me a line: hwilson at the gee mail. I'm in Brazil now,
I'm planning to live here for 5 or 6 months, and I'm looking for a
good place to settle down. So I'd love to hear ideas about cool
cities, or get contacts of friends you might have living here or
elsewhere. Feel free to pass this on to others you know.

Parentins or Crazy Brazilian Party - Day 1: Boatride

Junior already had his ticket, so early Wednesday afternoon we went
down to the boat to buy mine. The boat was crammed with others of
varying shapes and sizes along the busy river front. It was among
the larger boats, three levels high, and was made of white painted
wood. It looked like a Mississippi riverboat but without the
paddlewheel. We walked down a shifty gangplank and aboard. There
were very few people on the boat at this point--mostly just the
boat's crew and their friends-- but hammocks of all different colors,
textures, and sizes already hung from the ceiling. A guy was selling
woven cloth hammocks and I bought his cheapest one for $6. It was an
ugly set of colors and slightly smaller than the others, but seemed
fine. He tied it up to the ceiling for me in a totally inefficient
way (a few days on a sailboat and now I'm a knot snob).

The operators of the boat asked if we wanted to have a look around,
so we took a walk up to the top level where somebody stood fussing
over a table crammed with DJ equipment: amplifier, CD decks, and a
computer. I remembered that these boats were known for playing loud
dance music all night; awesome. One of the guys in charge of the
boat caught me eying the equipment and asked me if I DJ'ed. I don't
DJ, so I said "yes". "Great, so you can DJ later then!" Awesome.

After buying my ticket I went back to the hotel to get my DJ set
together, but ended up just making a soca megamix of Akon "Nobody",
"Remix to Ignition" and the old Wyclef "Stripper Song". I got kind
of sucked in and did that until I had just barely enough time to
pack, check out of the hostel, and run down to the boat. I didn't
make it on time, but the boat didn't leave on time either, so I
checked in with Junior (who was already down there) and went to buy
DEET and--as it turned out--a hat as well.

Groups of shirtless dudes in surf shorts were pushing big motorcycles
down the gangplank and lowering into the boat's hold. I boarded.
The sun was setting, the boats' engines were on, some were already
blasting dance music, and the smell of engine oil in the forest of
white painted wood made me feel like I was on an old wooden
rollercoaster at a cheap amusement park. Someone told me that there
were at least 200 boats. I had a vision of them all spanning the
river in formation, the dreaded armada of the Beer and Techno empire,
conquering the first the Amazon and then the Atlantic, the world. It
didn't happen *quite* like that.

The sunset was incredible. The sky was perfectly clear and rays of
light shot out from below the horizon through a fiery gradient of
yellow to orange to red. Then it got dark, and then we left. Music
came on and the dancing started. This was the first real Brazilian
dance party I'd seen, so first impressions were strong. First they
played Parentins music and some sugary pop songs. More on that
later. Then it was techno and people starting dancing for real. One
thing about Brazil is that dancing is more universal than music, so
the old ladies who were dancing to funny holiday songs continued
dancing when techno came on. Then forro (fo 'ho) which is Brazil's
merengue--fast dirty music for dancing close to--except the steps
looked way more complicated than merengue and there was more/faster
twirling.

Then it was baile funk (here just "funk" pronounced "funky") and
people went crazy. The dancing was less structured but still really
complicated; lots of big steps forward and little fast steps back,
like in breakdancing (uprock?).

More fojo. I tried dancing for a bit, letting the girl lead and,
well, more or less humor me. Nobody wanted to for more than half a
song or so, which was fine. I've already promised somebody I'm going
to learn how to dance bachata and merengue, which seem similar and
easier (merengue is simper, bachata is slower) so fojo seems like a
good target.

The music had shifted back to techno and almost all the girls had
stopped dancing, so it looked like a good time for me to DJ. When I
got my laptop they didn't have an 1/8th to RCA cable for connecting
it. I felt mostly relief with a touch of disappointment. But it
turned out I had one in my bag, so no escape. My laptop only has
only one audio output, and I probably could have eked out something
using the left for playing and the right for cueing, but I was drunk
so I said fuck it: I couldn't listen to a song before fading it in so
I was flying blind, so to speak. But it was fun. I'd decided the
theme was going to be hip hop remixes, since I like that and since
it's really American. I started with an Usher remix Will Schachterle
did (Let it Burn + Seven Deadly Strokes) and then had to follow with
the Akon soca megamix I'd made that afternoon since none of the other
songs were done importing into Ableton yet. That was a little
weird. Then I played another remix I made that was a little more
straightforward, and closed with two Kelis remixes back to back:
Bossy and Milkshake. And then I totally abdicated my DJ reign. I
had no idea how well it went, but the sense I got from Junior was
that I was a terrible DJ but people liked it because it was something
different. I can live with that, and now I want to be a DJ here.

Pretty soon after that I went to my hammock and went to sleep. When
I woke up in my hammock the next morning I was not at all hungover as
I'd expected-- on the contrary I felt amazing.

Parentins aka Crazy Brazilian Party - Preface

I came into Brazil by bus from Venezuela, which lands you in Boa
Vista and eventually Manaus. From there, if you want to go anywhere
else in Brazil other than back to Boa Vista, you need to get on a
plane or go by boat down the Amazon. Since so many legs of this trip
had been by boat so far, I felt compelled not to fly, even though it
was $20 cheaper and several days faster. This will eventually let me
say that I made it from the US to wherever I end up in Brazil without
flying--so long as Puerto Rico counts as the US, and it might as well).

Junior my Brazilian hostel (and in another life prison) bunkmate said
that a day's travel down-river there was a massive regional festival
called Parentins, in a town called Parentins. I'd vaguely heard
about this from somebody else too, and was beginning to realize that
nearly every billboard I saw in Manaus for beer or cola was Parentins-
themed, and I'd wanted to break up the trip by stopping somewhere, so
this sounded perfect. Junior was going to Parentins. I was going to
Parentins. But Junior had a much better idea of what the hell it was
going to be like, and I had none.