This week I went with my host mom Edileusa to her gym, which is on the top floor of the Real Hospital Portugues, or “The Royal Portuguese Hospital” which was founded 154 years ago. She woke me up at 6:00 to go there, and I met the trainer Isabette who made a work-out regime for me. The gym has an amazing view of the whole entire city.
Then we went back to the house, had breakfast and I went with my host mom to see where she works. It is an office where she meets with clients. Later that day my host brother Nicholas dropped me off at a LAN house so I could use the computer while he was in class. That night we found out that we can use the neighbor’s internet service if we bring the laptops to the dining room table. In the bedroom there is no connection.
Tuesday was a holiday so my host Mom didn’t work. We went to her sister’s house, my host Aunt, in a poorer neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. We went there because they have a high-power hose that we used to wash our carpets. The neighborhood is poor, but their house is really big and really nice. I tasted a berry called Jabuticaba growing on a tree there. We went to the market, and it was really busy, like the kind of market you would picture in India or China, or some planet in Star Wars. My host uncle and cousin work there, in a home depot kind of store called Casa do Coelho, which means House of the Rabbit. My host cousin’s name is Michelle and he speaks English. He explained to me about how they have owned the store for 70 years and their market is the lower-class, so they provide lower-cost, cheaper items. He invited me to ride horses on their farm one weekend, and we exchanged phone numbers.
On Wednesday there was a Christmas celebration in the gym. A few weeks ago everybody had randomly selected another gym member’s name. That day they exchanged the presents that they had bought for each other, and they all brought food or drinks so I ate breakfast there. I met two college students who work at the gym from time to time for experience because their course is Physical Education.
I went back home, took a shower, dressed, and Nicholas dropped me off at a road called Conde Boa Vista, which is the main road of the neighborhood Boa Vista, which is the center of the city. This road is full of buses and people and lined with shops.
I found the Teatro do Parque, went in and there was a Symphony Orchestra playing. I met an old man named Gabrielle who was sitting in the back. He said he was there to meet his friend a trombonist who plays in the band. When the band finished playing we both went up, met the conductor, he found his friend, and I met the saxophonists. One of them, a black man called Gilmar Black is especially good at jazz, and he is the President of an organization called Aspesax, which is the Pernambuco Association of Saxophonists. It has about 80 members and Gilmar gives weekly classes. The only problem is that they don’t have anywhere to study anymore, because the rent from the last place was way too high, so the classes have stopped for now.
I watched the band run through some songs of Frevo and Forro, which is music from Pernambuco and the Northeast, respectively. Then I met a saxophonist my age named Marcos. He plays Tenor and is also learning Jazz. I went with him to a music school nearby where he studied. I met the director of the school who said that he could make an exception in my case and get a practice room for me to use at certain times, and that I can join theory and composition classes that will start in February.
Then Marcos and I went shopping. He looked for a part for his computer but didn’t find it. We went to the Casa de Cultura, or House of Culture, which used to be a prison, but is now filled with shops selling Tourist and cultural items. It would have been a great place to take pictures, but I didn’t bring my camera. If I go there again I will bring it.
I bought a shirt for me that says Recife, and I bought a shirt as a present for another exchange student. In Portuguese it says, “Someone who loves me brought this shirt from Recife.”
Then Marcos showed me his school, which is a public school. He lives in another city, that is an hour away by bus. We parted ways but planned to meet tomorrow.
I took the bus “Torres” home but almost got on the bus “Torroes” which would not have got me to where I wanted to go. Hehehe. I went to a present shop in my neighborhood and bought a “The Incredibles” walkie talkie set for 20 reais but it came without batteries. It was for the kid that I would give the present to in Natal.
My host Mom was going to the airport to meet my host dad in Sao Paulo, and the airport is near the gym where I do Parkour on Wednesday, so I went with her. The Taxi driver dropped me off at the gym. I arrived late, and it was the first time I had been to Parkour in over a month, so everyone was glad to see me, and I was glad to see everybody. We did some Parkour and then put all the equipment back and walked toward the metro. I had never taken the metro before, and I had heard it was dangerous, so I was kind of nervous. When I was living in my first neighborhood Piedade I could take a bus from the gym right home, but there is no bus that goes right from the gym to my new neighborhood. So I would take the metro with my friends, get off at a certain stop, and take a bus the rest of the way to my house.
The metro was actually really clean and modern. Everybody paid and got on the metro. But I hesitated for a second. I didn’t think that the Metro was going the way I needed to go. And then the doors shut. All my friends yelled for me, but it was too late. The metro was left and I was alone in the Metro at 9:00 on a Wednesday night. So what did I do? I waited for the next metro, I got on, I got off at the right stop, I took the right bus, got off at the right stop, and got home. On the bus there was a poor kid who stood at the front and made a speech about how he got sick one day and couldn’t work and how he needed money to buy packs of popcorn so he could get back to work selling on the street and he brought religion and God in to it and was very successful, the majority of the bus riders gave him some change, including me.
Thursday I went to the gym, but I walked there and back because my host Mom was in Sao Paulo. Then I went back to the Teatro do Parque to listen to the music and meet more musicians. I went with my sax this time. My friends assured me that it is safe to carry your instrument with you during the day, just not at night. So I got on the bus with my sax, and walked to the Theatre. This time I met another saxophonist my age named Denys. I got out my sax and played a little bit for Gilmar, Denys showed me some music, a song of Forro, and we played together. While the Frevo band was practicing we sat in the courtyard, played sax and talked. Then we went to the music school and waited for Marcos. When Marcos came I met his professor and a bunch of other saxophonists all crowded in to a tiny, air conditioned practice room.
Then we watched Marcos and a bunch of other saxophonists practice some Christmas songs. I met a guitarist named Carlos who says he has a blues band, and they don’t have a saxophonist, so I got his number and I hope I will be able to play with them some time.
The music school has a band, but it is a symphony orchestra and the last time they would play for the year is Monday, and this weekend I would be traveling to Natal.
I returned home, showered, had dinner. At 8:30 my friend Rafael called me and invited me to a party in Boa Viagem, so I asked my host brother if he could drive me there. I got dressed, put on my new shoes, and we went. My friends Rafael and Victor met me and we went into the building. It was a girl’s 15 year old birthday party and there was a chef making crepes, so I ordered a ham tomato and cheese crepe, a shrimp crepe and a banana, cinnamon and sugar crepe. : )
We stayed at the party until the end, then we called our friends Karina and Maysa. They live in the same building and we took the taxi there and hung out by the pool until like 2:00 in the morning I think and then Rafael and I took a taxi back to his house and we went to sleep. I woke up at 7:30 and took the bus back to my house. I showered, had breakfast and packed for the weekend in Natal. Nicholas and I picked up Tanguy and Gavin from Gavin’s house and went to the Theatre of the University to get on the bus. The exchange students from Caruaru and Recife were all there. It was about 2 hours to the next Capital, Joao Pessoa, where me picked more exchange students and two more hours to Natal, our destination. We all got off at a hotel on the beach and went off with our separate host families. I stayed with the host family of an exchange student who lives in Natal, Hannah from Germany. Her host brother Igor is 16 and will be going to Germany in January.
The family drove me to the most famous beach in Natal, with a view of a big hill called Morro de Careca, which means Bald Hill. Natal is a vacation city and a lot of the houses are empty most of the time but extremely full during the holidays. Natal means Christmas in Portuguese and this is because it was founded on Christmas Day. It consequently celebrates Christmas with a lot of gusto and puts up a huge electric Christmas Tree that we past on the way. I went to see the biggest Cajueiro tree in the world. There is one trunk but the branches go into the ground and then come back out, so the whole tree covers a huge area. Scientists have examined it and it is an anomaly due to a mutation in the DNA.
We went to the house, and I met their two dogs, boxers who jumped all over me. We hung out at the house until the host parents came back and took us all out to a nice restaurant. By chance the Rotary chairmen and a couple other host families and exchange students were there having dinner too! We talked with them and then ordered 2 pizzas with four flavors.
On Saturday all the exchange students met at the beach. A Surf instructor and his students gave us a lecture on how to surf and we did some stretching exercises. Then we all walked along the beach picking up trash. I met two exchange students who had arrived late, Eloiza from Oregon and Elias from Mexico. Eloiza’s parents in the US are Mexican, so she has Mexican ancestry and speaks Spanish, but is having difficulty speaking Portuguese because it seems to her like she is just making fun of Spanish.
I have never surfed before in my life and I only had 10 min in the water, so of course I didn’t accomplish anything. Then we all gave our presents to the local kids. There was a TV crew there and a few of the kids and exchange students were interviewed. The kid I gave the present to was on camera for a few minutes.
All of the exchange students got on dune-buggies. There were 12 dune buggies and 4 exchange students in each. I was in the dune buggy with Johanna from Germany, Eloiza from Oregon and a Rotex from Aracaju.
This was so awesome. We went speeding through the streets, over a huge bridge and finally onto the dunes themselves. We went DOWN the dunes, stopped in the middle of the desert and got to hold an iguana and a little monkey.
Then we continued to a place called Lagoa de Jacuma and did a thing called Aero-Bunda. Look at the pictures on dropshots.com/matt484. It was a zipline over a lake and when you reach the water you going skiing on your butt for a couple feet, then get off and swim to shore, or caught a ride on a raft. Then there was a bench on a track with a pulley system that pulled us back up. It was awesome.
Then we went to a nice restaurant and ate churrascaria for lunch. As much soda as we wanted. I sat with the two guys from Denmark and David from Germany and we finished off about a dozen bottles of coke between us.
Then we rode back on the dune buggies to the hotel where our host families all picked us up. Hannah and I showered, got dressed for the party later that night and got our presents ready. While we were having a snack the host Dad called us from his room. We ran there and saw the footage from us at the beach earlier that day! My friend Eloiza was interviewed and it ended with a kid showing the present that I bought!!! That was really awesome. Then our host parents dropped us off at the mall, where we met David from Germany and Craig and Kelsey from the US. They got some food, we walked around the mall a bit, Craig and Kelsey went back home, and Hannah and I walked with David to his house. His family made some pizza, we ate and went to the party at the hotel. There was a DJ who played nothing but Forro, pretty much, which is music only popular in the Northeast of Brazil, and it has a dance that is basically simple, with a 1-2, 1-2 step but despite this I can’t seem to figure it out.
We did the gift trade. I was number 2. I won a ceramic tile of an Eskimo from Twyla from Canada and my shirt went to Lars from Denmark. But he traded it with Hannah for a toy monkey so Hannah ended up with the shirt I bought. We also all got presents from Rotary; A Citizen’s Manual and a Rotary Polo that we wore for the photos the next day.
Sunday all that happened was breakfast at the hotel, group photos, goodbyes and the bus ride. On the bus ride one of the funniest things ever happened. Remember how I said on the last Rotary trip the girl Mariah from Canada got sick and consequently everybody got sick a day later? Well, this same girl went into the bathroom and all of a sudden there was a horrible smell on the bus. She stuck her head out of the bathroom. “Guys sorry, can I have some help here?” I did not stop laughing until Gavin stuffed a pillow in my face. It was Mariah’s pillow.
When we arrived in Recife my host brother Nicholas and I waited for all the other exchange students to be picked up, then we drove Malu home, the chairlady.
Then we went to the Church and met the rest of the family. I ate the hostia, the communion bread dipped in wine, which is supposed to represent the body and blood of Jesus Christ. No, I am not turning Christian.
Then I showed my saxophone to Elias, the saxophonist in the church, and met another teen who is learning sax with him.
The exchange students from Aracaju stayed in Recife that night and so us exchange students from Recife were talking about going out with them, but I was too tired so I didn’t go, and I don’t know if anyone else did.
So, that was my week, and I must say it was one of my best I have had so far.
I am trying to find a band to play in. All of the musicians who I have met here have talked about how much harder it is to study music in Brazil and how much more opportunities there are in the US. If teens play music it is usually in their church, in a music school if they are in one, or in a band they organize themselves. In the US I had a great opportunity to play in a small band with two other teens and a professional musician, and he provided the music, guidance and venues for us. I don’t know if I will have that opportunity in Brazil, but I do want to play and learn more. I played my friend Marcos’s tenor sax with a metal mouthpiece. It was really different and I liked it. None of them have ever heard of my sax’s brand, “Martin” and that’s because it is vintage, made in Indiana in the 1950’s.
But here in Brazil to buy a sax and accessories is much more expensive, and there is really not that much Jazz in the northeast. There is a lot in Rio and Sao Paulo. But stay tuned to see how this develops.
And check out the new pics on dropshots.com. On Thursday I got a haircut and I don’t know if it turned out that well. I may just shave all of it this week. Tchau!
