World Cup, summer and other goodies

Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, the World Cup started and all our attention is driven to the television. I like to see the games, but some of them are sooooooooooooo boring. Like England x Paraguay. Tsc tsc tsc, what a waste of time. Besides Brazil, I am supporting other countries. Ecuador being the only one I was sure about, from the games so far. I have to confess that I was really divided between Argentina and Ivory Coast, because I naturally sympathize with African teams, but being in London, I tend to support South/Latin American teams. I know it is against Brazilian policies to support Argentina, but the game was quite good and 'nuestros hermanos' played very very well. And I am a fair person; it was the best game I've seen so far.

Sunday was an outdoor day, no football for me. I went to Kew Gardens and then for a walk by the riverside in Richmond. I must say that Richmond is the prettiest place I've been to in London so far. A lot of trees, green, beautiful mansions, nice houses, pubs, happy and healthy people everywhere. When I get rich, I wanna live there! :-D It seems quite far off, but it is only 20 minutes by train from Waterloo station and guess what?! the trains have air conditioning. For the Brazilians: the summer in London can be worse than in Rio, my dears. If you are by the shadow, it is fine, otherwise you can barely breathe. And there are those cotton-like things flying all over that make you allergic! But I'm not complaining. I prefer it like this (well, let's see July). One thing is for sure: I will avoid the tube as much as I can!

On Saturday we went for a typical summer program in London: sun bathing on Hyde Park! Quite good. Hot sun, nice shadows. We so need a beach – or a swimming pool – here! Maybe the bathtub…

Plans for next weekend: Saturday we might go to Brighton (beach!!!!) and Sunday we will eat ‘feijoada’ while supporting Brazil (vs. Australia – what a hard task to divide my heart between the two most beautiful countries in the world).

Insomniac

Today I fell off of the bed at 7.30 am. I'm taking vitamins so I don't get sick. I'm trying to live a better life, starting this week. I'm also trying to focus on my final project, but my mind is in Greece. I haven't decided between French, Italian, Spanish or singing classes yet. New MAX/MSP course in July, intermediate level, but not for me this time. My video camera arrived; it is so petit, the size of my hand. I'm doing the laudry and thinking about organizing my mess. I think too much, all the time, I'm thinking right now, and now, and now. About Greece, school, room, courses, life, next weekend and the film tonight. United 93. My friend Ines will give birth quite soon. Baby Isaac was supposed to arrive in May, I was told, but I think he is too comfortable inside mom's belly or he is waiting for Brazil's first game. Smart boy. I'm feeling like Nicholas Cage's character in Adaptation. Goodbye!

Plans for the next incarnation

In my next incarnation, I wanna be a cat. I don't like cats, but I would like to be one, especially one that belongs to a nice family. Usually, even if the family is not so nice, they treat the cat nicely. The members of the family may hate each other, but the cat is always the cute common sense that keep everybody together.

No big news. I bought a video camera. It is for my project, but of course I will use it for other purposes.

It is hot now! :-D Hot... the British standard of hot weather, please.

It's sunny!

Accoring to the weather forecast, this weekend will be sunny in London. Sunny and warm, with temp. max. of 25°C (11°C at night). Bad time for a good weather, as I want to sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

Friday

When you are just a student, it makes no difference which day of the week is today. At least I will meet the guy from my class this afternoon and we will spend some hours in a pub-meeting to set some details for our show in July. Things are moving too slow these days, and, as an anxious person, this is driving me crazy. Who knows me well knows that "there's not much you can do, just sit and wait" is the same as saying "kill yourself". I'm moved by Geraldo Vandre's song "Vem, vamos embora, que esperar não é saber. Quem sabe faz a hora, não espera acontecer". I don't think I would be able to translate it without killing the poetry of the lyrics, but it means something like "waiting is not for the wise; they make their time, and don't wait things to happen". Honestly, I think that when your goal is plan A, you have to pursue it with your life, but you also need to work on plans B, C and D, in case things don't go according to the master plan. Waiting for me is waste of time.

Having this in mind, I made a decision: today I'm going to College to get more information on the language courses and also the "Singing for Beginners" course. I will apply for two of them and my life will be planned around them; that simple. Now I know, for example, that I will renew my contract with my room (I won't find anything better and cheaper than this one) for the next year, as I live in a walk distance from College. Now, the next step is to find a job nearby that fits my time so I won't miss my classes. And this is how it works for me: the world has to fit in my plans, not the opposite.

More about Doblin

Checking my photos, I realized that I didn't take many pictures of hot spots of Dublin. They are more... intimist, I guess. I have to confess that having a photographer in the group made me a bit lazy to take my own photos; and add to that the fact that we've walked like camels in the desert and I was too tired to even think about getting the camera out of the bag. Needless to say that all my pictures are either lying down on a park grass or sitting on a banch somewhere.

Watching you watching me.

I've written in the previous post about the sense of humor of the Irish, right? A very good example was a fake Bono Vox pub crawling - well, it was only one 'pob' - while a curious crowd took pictures of the guy. Yes, he looked like Bono indeed. A little bit too much caricatural for me, but the audience was really enjoying it. In a first moment, I thought it was the famous "happy slapping", which I first heard about during one of my classes. Happy slapping, for those who never heard about it, is a bunch of kids - British kids - that slap others just to take pictures with their mobiles and publish them somewhere in the internet. Impossible to deny from whom American culture influences came from, huh? Back to Bono. Yeap, everybody excited with the possibility of being close to the Irish 'myth', including my beloved pair, who manage to take some pictures of the guy, just in case he was the real Bono. Who knows how much a picture of the real McCoy would cost on the black market? The best part was those weird boys coming to us asking "what's happening here?", we "some Bono copycat", the guy "Bono?", with that face "what the heck is Bono?". Bono in Brazil is a chocolate cookie.

Enough of Bono and still talking about food. Eating in Dublin can be more expensive than in London. Firstly, it is not so easy to convert euros to pounds all the time, but overall we were quite surprised with the prices. No Irish food for us. But we've tasted the delicious O'Briens' fresh juices. I got the traditional orange juice, not because of the price, but because it was the only one I was sure about the calories. It was a walking trip; I felt like a pilgrim trying to get somewhere anywhere. As I told Lilian, Dublin has this different atmosphere, a medieval and mysterious aura that I don't feel in London. I'm not saying that one is better than the other. They are just very different. I wouldn't live in Dublin, but I would like to go there more often. I wonder how I would feel in Santiago de Compostela. I'm having some problems in focusing here, have you noticed? Let's go back to food. No proper food for us. I should be ashamed to tell this in public, but I am not: we ate at Burgers King and at Eddie's whatever - a typical american burger place from the 50's/60's. It wasn't bizarre, but we weren't supposed to commit these sins in such a mystic place. :-P We had a calzone and a Subway-like sandwich too. The only proper meal we had was in Howth; I even ate broccoli! So, as you can see, nothing spectacular about the food in Ireland.

Let's not make this post too long. I'll tell more about Dublin tomorrow.

Ah, I went to the movies yesterday to see X-Men - The Last Stand and The Brick. Me great fan of X-Men, so yeah I loved it! I always leave the screen willing to see the next one. For those who didn't see it: stay until the end of the credits (we didn't)!!!!! About the other film... Have you seen a Russian film, in Russian with no subtitles about philosophycal aspects of human beings? This is The Brick. I couldn't understand the film at all - it's American, a thriller - except on the last 5 minutes where the guy says to a girl (representing all the expectators, I guess): "Ok, idiot, I'm going to explain you the whole story. Do you want me to draw?". And so he does. And still I didn't understand some parts. Just to conclude: if you have to pay, don't see this one. If you do and understand, please explain me what the Kara girl is doing in the plot!

Doblin was quite nice, I must say

Lots to talk about 'Doblin'. Starting with the 'fonny' accent, a little bit American, a little bit British, a lot Irish. The Irish people are odd too. Not because of the 'fonny' way of speaking, not because they pack the 'pobs', not because they have red hair and very red chicks, but because they are 'normal' people, in a Brazilian concept of normal. I saw a couple of Irish drivers that simply didn't stop at the red light. But they did blushed and were very shy about that. I think it's cool! :-P

Another 'cool' thing in Doblin is the special audio effect of the pedestrian green lights. It is something like this: "piiiiiiiiiiiuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu! Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta". I got addicted to it and EVERY time we were waiting for the green light I would do the noise too. Me and the machine singing together piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu, ra-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. I thought I was the only crazy person, but later on I saw others doing the same.

One more cool thing I saw in Doblin. The Irish are happy people and have a great sense of humour. The city is very musical; you can find musicians in every corner, singing and playing for money, as you find at the tube stations of London. In Doblin it is more easy going, more relaxed, more amateur and consequently - in my opinion - more authentic. We saw these group of teenagers rehearseling something close to 'street dance' - a bunch of very very white kids trying to do those complex dance steps that only black people are capable of. Not being racist here, but people have to assume that they have certain limitations. Some people do. Like this redded hair chubby guy on the 'audience' that decided to show his skills on street dance. I would have given him some coins, if I was the type of person that gives money to public presentations, just because he made me laugh so much.

Last cool thing about Doblin: the weather was so welcoming! Today my classmates said "you have a tan"! Do I need to say something else? Photos to be posted! :-D

The DaVinci Code and other boring subjects

When you have no expectation on a film - even better: when you are expecting something really bad - the film can become an ok - or even good - surprise. DaVinci Code was one of these cases. It is a kind of audio-visual pocket book version of Dan Brown's novel. The first half was nice, entertaining, easy to handle. The second half started to get a bit too much blah, blah, blah for me. Maybe it was because I read the book? Maybe. Good to see Ian McKellen-Magneto-Galdalf again. Paul Bettany as the albino monk was really good. It wasn't Tom Hanks' best role, but I like him always. The same for Jean Reno; I like his voice, I like to see him acting, even in a shitty film. Poor Audrey Tautou, let's forget her as Sophie Neveu and remember always sweet Amélie Poulain. All in all the film was ok-good. If it wasn't better it was also because the book is not that good. Entertaining though. Can't wait to see X-Men III, Wolverine and all those cool super-mutant-heroes. X-Men is my favourite hero-film ever, followed by Spider Man.

By the way, new Superman coming soon. The trailler sucks.

And the last thing is just to say how I get annoyed by 1) stupid idiot weird people, those that don't hide at all that they are useless, nasty, unfriendly, disgusting, worthless, and I keep on going here and 2) other people that agree with that but keep in touch with these type of people just to be political and because they have "friends" in common. And what I don't understand at all is when everybody thinks that a person is weird, boring, stupid, but they keep talking to the person with no apparent reason. Why waste time with useless things, when time is short and you have so many other things to do? For me, it is like eating the cake's glace: the taste is awful, it is not healthy, it is not fun at all, you have many other better options, but you're just too lazy to take that thing out and eat just the cake.

Yes, I am annoyed and angry and I wish some people could simply disappear from Earth, forever.

Booing astral hell

In spite of people in this country trying to annoy you and to deeply irritate you, which can be easier in your pre-period time, there are times that they won't make it, even trying as hard as they can. Especially when you have just booked a trip to Greece. In summer! With your boyfriend! Staying at the house of a friend! Shoudl I keep going? Astral hell my ass (sorry for that); unless I die before (knock, knock, knock on wood), this trip will be perfect!

Nothing to do with the topic, but the American Government is giving away Green Cards. For those who aim a life in Europe, it makes no difference. Brazilian passport is well accepted in most of the countries here, as tourists, in the same way as the american passport, but if you plan to go to the US, or if you are living there, it could be a good oportunity.

Next week we are going out for dinner with a 'friend' (he is a very nice person, but not my friend, so that's why the quotes), but he are struggling to find out a restaurant. I don't want to repeat options, so I would go happily to a Greek, Swiss, African, Caribbean or German places, Even veggies, as I've never been to one (because I don't eat vegetables at all); but it is so hard to achieve an agreement when you are four people. Well, it shouldn't be in London.

I don't care, I'm going to Dublin this weekend! :-P

Oh, I've seen The King, with Gael Garcia Bernal. It is his first incursion into Hollywood. So far, so good. I left the film with that question mark face, but now I think I've like it. If someone sees it, please pay attention on the last sentence of the film and sent it to me. It will be my next motto.

Today we're going to see Da Vinci Code.

I have to study.

Astral hell?

* If there is an astral hell - and if the name in English is this - mine is starting today.

* Tomorrow I will have a very important meeting: I will discuss dates and itinerary of the trip to Greece. One week in July. Don't envy me, please, your day will come! :-P

* I might see Da Vinci Code this week. Many many new films screening and I have just seen two this month.

* This Saturday I'm going to Ireland. First stop: Dublin. New pictures soon! :-)

* Now it's official: I have absolutely no food in the fridge!