em fim

I should really stop putting off updating for so long. Each time my picture file gets huge and intimidating and I find myself way too lazy to do so much work.

Let's kick off this entry with some more food. I went to a real Brazilian churrascaria on Saturday. It's called Prazeres da Carne, which translates to Pleasures of the Flesh/Meat. Carne is both in Portuguese. Ha ha ha.
Here's a van outside the restaurant:

Here's Paulo's plate from the salad bar, which isn't so much a salad bar as it is an everything-except-meat bar. Check out the freakishly huge asparagus!

Here's my plate! I think if you put a raw salmon in front of me, I would probably try to eat it. Maybe I'd smoke it first. Maybe. I love salmon. The white and yellow thing is cured squid and those are tiny little eggs in the middle.

Here's Paulo's brother's sushi course from the salad bar.

And here are some frighteningly gigantic shrimp:


The table while everyone was off at the salad bar. They served like five appetizers before anyone even went for salad.

The restaurant, mysteriously free of men with giant skewers of meat. Generally there were lots.

Me eating bizarro Brazilian pork. They do something to piglets (I think?) that's really complex and includes something about throwing fat at them. It's delicious. I am enjoying myself a lot more than I look here:

Skewers of meat! This is picanha, I think. It's a Brazilian cut of beef. Also delicious!

Pedro, Paulo's brother, and Isa, his wife of like three weeks. Awww.

My plate generally looks pretty empty, but we were there for at least two hours, steadily eating. I never need to eat again. I tried to try a little of everything. I even ate chicken hearts and blood sausage.

Classes are going well. The semester is starting to wrap up. Last week was the Semana de Multimeios, which was a week for the Multimedia department to put on lectures and shows. I didn't have class all week, which was nice, and I got to see some student week from over the last week, which was nicer. The Semana de Artes do Corpo is at the end of June, and the kids in my performance art class have been begging Brandon and I to do something. We've been kind of talking about the difference between performance and installation art, and he wants to do some more projects with sound to build up a better portfolio for the grad programs he's looking at, so hopefully we'll come up with something neat. My photography class is putting together a show of our photography in Higienopolis. We're going to have a class trip to the Mercado Municipal and use those photos. It's sort of a final test, and I'm nervous. I feel like I've really learned a lot in the course though, and it's easily the most rewarding one I've taken here. I am so glad I decided to do it.

I have about a zillion favorite things about Brazil and a million more about São Paulo, but one of my favoritest favorites about São Paulo is that it is a real live City with a lot of Cultural Events happening all the time. On May 5-6th there was an event called the Virada Cultural, where several neighborhoods in the center of the city were basically shut down for a 24 hour party sponsored by the Secretary of Culture of the city of São Paulo. There were huge stages set up for all kinds of live music, dance, and theatre. It was pretty cool.
I met up with Paulo, Claus, Luis and Ricardo on the afternoon of the 5th to watch Spiderman 3 before the festivities really began. We met at Luis and Ricardo's place. Here is a picture of their dog, Iashna. I think that's how you spell her name. She is fat like a giant sausage. She is adorable.


We walked to the bus stop to catch a bus to Avenida Paulista, which has about twenty movie theatres. We went past the Pão de Açucar café on the way. This is where we spend a lot of our time.

Here's a building with graffiti that I thought was cool. There's a lot of this going around.

Here's us! Claus, Ricardo, Luis, me.

This is Paulo and Claus being Paulo and Claus.

At some point I decided to obsessively take pictures of everything. This is Paulo and me on the bus.

The theatre we usually go to is in the Shopping Center 3, right on Paulista. The mall has a big food court. Here is a really dark picture of it:

Here's Paulo eating Brazilian food court food, which was made to order and looks suspiciously more like food than I am accustomed to.

This is us in line at the cinema:

Then we watched the movie and I stopped obsessively photographing. I liked it, except the part where Peter started revenge-dancing and also the part where he was in costume and paused dramatically in front of an American flag. Everyone looked over at me and I could only shrug. Anyway, I liked it. If you aren't prepared for some heavy cheese I don't know what you're doing going to a comic book movie.
After the movie we had a beer with some of Claus's friends from work, but I don't have pictures of that. Once it got late enough, we headed down toward the central district of the city. We stopped and listened to a couple bands, but there was really too much going on to concentrate on any one thing. There were obscene amounts of people (smoking obscene amounts of pot while the military police boredly looked on...what the hell is going on here?). Here's a shot of the crowd behind us at our first concert. We were really far back from the stage, too.

Outhouses. We saw more people peeing in the street than we saw using the outhouses. Woohooooo.

I think this is the opera house but I don't remember? It's a big important building with lots of sculptures and things. It looks really nice all light up.

Street performers! These guys were all over the place. They were really neat.


The whole night was really surreal. We just kept wandering from one attraction to another until about 5am. The whole district was covered in people and art and food. It was really neat. I got quoted in the newspaper saying the US has nothing like it. Nothing I've seen, anyway.

Paulo really wanted to see a couple of the acts that were scheduled to happen early on the morning of the 6th, but I guess a huge fight broke out at the venue, and the shows were postponed until the next Sunday afternoon. The really big one was Karnak, an utterly bizarre Brazilian band that sings half in made-up Russian. They were so good, though. I went early with Paulo and we saw a really cool youth orchestra playing classical music against some drummers from the samba school Vai Vai.
First, we stopped at a McCafe (ew). It was in a super fancy shopping mall and was very super fancy. They didn't even serve burgers, just Italian sodas, deli sandwiches, and fresh pastries. Whaaaat.


Weird fans waiting for a later concert by Teatro Magico, a circus themed band. That explains the clown noses. Kind of.

The orchestra and Vai Vai:


A short video of the orchestra!

Karnak:


Aaaand there was a woman in the crowd who shoved her baby at me and then made me take a picture of it. She was asking for money, but neither of us had much of anything. It was terrifying. Here's the baby!

Here's a shot of the plaza.


On the Thursday between Virada parts one and two, the Pope came to visit. I went to see him on his way to the Pacaembu stadium.
The crowd waiting:

Guys selling Pope flags:


The mascot of a popular real estate company (I think). We were standing right in front of it.

And the man himself:

He's fast.

We went to the opening of a show of one of Paulo's teachers that night. It was really, really cool. The art was interesting and the venue, a book store in Vila Madalena I think, was really neat. Also, free wine, durr hurr. This is a picture!

I've been to a lot of openings and book release parties and all sorts of things here. I really like it and I think I'll try to pay more attention to that stuff in Milwaukee.

Last weekend we went to a street fair in Paulo's neighborhood. It had lots of art and crafts and fair food. There were also sushi booths. I love São Paulo's preoccupation with sushi. There was also more dance and music presentations, which São Paulo is also in love with. Here are some people doing an indigenous drum and dance presentation. The tribe is from I don't remember where! Somewhere in the North, I think.


And a movie!


Other recent events:

Messing around at Blu Cafe!
Paulo and Ricardo being goofy. They have mustaches drawn on their fingers, which is so superfluous for Paulo it's kind of surreal.



And the cafe itself:


Messing around at Parque Agua Branca, which is a big park right outside Paulo's house. Brazilian wildlife time!
PEACOCKS. They're absolutely everywhere and so beautiful.


A Lasar Segall painting, haha! No one understands my art jokes!


At night:


Messing around at Paulo's house! His elevator is green.

Here's more wildlife, and by that I mean Paulo's birds.





Messing around at the Museu da Lingua Portuguesa! I would say visiting the Museu, but I showed up way too late and instead just took pictures.
It's the yellowish building on the left, the square on the right is the Pinacoteca I think:

Now it's on the left, highlighting that lovely São Paulo contradictory visual I like so much:

Directly behind me:

Much closer:


Inside Estação Luz, an old train station. It's still being used. The trains here run to a smaller town outside São Paulo.


Messing around at Play Center with my Artes do Corpo class! Play Center is a amusement park. The class wanted to research carnival monsters and makeup. We rode rides and took pictures at the top of the Ferris Wheel, which here is the “roda gigante.” Giant wheel. Ok.


Messing around on Paulista! This is my favorite building in the whole world.



Not shown: Watching Pirates of the Caribbean 1 and 2 two nights in a row and not staying awake through an entire movie either time, the scarf that Paulo's mom gave me, a film festival at the Cinemateca called Resfest in which we almost saw Drawing Restraint 9 but the theatre was full so we watched Korean music videos and ate a pastel the size of my head instead, a party for a book that a friend of Paulo's dad wrote which included live storytelling, falling asleep in the middle of an RPG Paulo wrote (sorry Paulo! Are we noticing a pattern?), going to a bar called Bourbon Street and seeing a jazz band from New Orleans play and surprising them with my Wisconsin accent after the show. I have been a lot busier than I thought!