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.