This week I am going to begin recording the workouts that I do myself. Here we go.

Workout 7

Warm Up
10 squats
10 pushups

Activity
5 x (12 burpees, 12 squat jumps, 12 pushups, 12 plank-flexers), as fast as possible

2.5 mile run

Cool Down
10 pushups
100 situps

Stretch

     When I sit down to write this week´s update, the first thing that I think of is the fact that in Brazil everything takes a  long time to do... I have come to this conclusion after a long month now, lost in translation, trying to sort out the necessities of my existence. It has really been quite an experience. As for the timetable of things, I have learned to not try and rush so much. Many times already, I have been told that a situation is urgent and action must be taken immediately so I hurry to prepare myself, only to find that as soon as I am ready, the urgency is negated by things like lunch or afternoon coffee. It will take some time, because I am not used to doing things slowly. When I have an objective, I like to rapidly achieve it, no matter how much difficulty or hardship I must endure to just get it done.
     On the way into Brazil this time, I had estimated that I would find, rent, and pay for an apartment within the first two weeks. That has turned out to be a very incorrect estimation. Back home I know that I could view, rent, and pay for an apartment within the same day, but here, almost 3 weeks went bye between the day I requested my apartment and the day I finally moved in. To this day, I have never understood what that 3 weeks of sitting around was for, but apparently it was some kind of administrative work to go along with the 15 pages of paperwork that were initially required.
     However, my apartment is now mine and I have the rent paid through March. A shame that the rental company took so long to process my request, since now if I do not return, I will be sitting back in the USA with an apartment in Brazil paid through March, but I will not be in it. A waste that I hope to avoid.
     In Brazil, (As far as what I have seen.. I´m sure if you are operating in a situation with more money involved, it is different), when you move into your new apartment, you will not have a toilet seat, any appliances whatsoever, or a showerhead. These things must be acquired by your own means. Also, there is a good chance that your new apartment (even nice places) will have several electrical sockets and light fixtures with an amount of wiring exposure that I am certain is illegal in America. Not much effort is made by the landlord or rental company to improve these displays of tangled electrical wire and the perspective is that if you have a problem with it, it´s your problem. 
     In my apartment, my two favorite dangerous features are both ones that I have observed in many places thus far and both reside in my bathroom. Traditional electric composition here dictates that in the bathroom, the switches for the lights go directly above an electrical socket. So, keeping your hands dry when you are fooling with the bathroom lights is definitely a good idea. I have already envisioned walking out of my bathroom from a shower, flicking the lights off, then recieving a huge electrical shock that send me careening towards the floor, splitting my head open on the ceramic toilet bowl (if only a seat had been there to save my skull). My second favorite dangerous element here is the design of the showerheads...
     When I moved into my apartment, the condition of my shower was like many others I saw during the touring and viewing phase of renting; there is a threaded hole in the wall where the head should be, with two electrical wires dangling below it, metal tips dancing about in their uncovered liveliness. The reason for the electrical wires is the fact that in most places here, there is no in-home water heating system. Unlike the U.S., where we have the big cylindrical monstrosity hiding in closets and under staircases, ensuring that hot is hot and cold is cold, here the water is heated IN the shower head shortly before it falls on your face. When you buy a shower head, the head is attached to the hole by a pipe of your choosing and then the two electrical wires are plugged into the heating system of the head. Showerheads are quite expensive here, as with all other things electronic or slightly advanced in any way, but I got my on loan from Kenia´s grandfather... Very appreciated. I took my first shower with it this morning and the temperature was very good. An interesting feature of my apartment.
      Exposed electrical sockets are actually not a probelm in my little apartment... I have some light fixtures that are like a scene from Star Wars, with red a blue wires pakced behind the bulbs like celtic patterns, but none of them are making trouble for me.
     The security of my apartment is incredible and I think it may actually be the safest place I have ever lived... A good thing, since society is a bit more dangerous here. My apartment used to be a store so aside from the huge front gate and steel front door, there is also a huge roll-down door that I can pull down.
     Safety here is essential. I have yet to experience anything bad, but I think I am fortunate so far. I know that the reality of it is looming over my head constantly, a mental sensation I derive from my own observance of sincere paranoia amongst everyone I meet here. I told Kenia, ¨ Oh my apartment is so cute! I want to get a little table and chair to put outside so I can sit... Maybe some plants!¨, I said. Very worried she replied, ¨All the time?! You cannot have these things outside! Someone will steal them!¨. I laughed, but was a bit alarmed by the level of criminal desparation it would take to climb over a 7 foot gate to steal an old table, chair, and some plants, and then climb back out with all of those items. However, that is the scene out here. If you have something that is worth anything, someone will take it from you if you do not watch out... Your table... Your plants... Your life.
     Also, the other day, A friend of Calebe (Kenia´s brother) came bye to change the locks on my front door and give me a new set of keys (done for about $20 in 10 minutes). This change was recommended to me by Kenia and her mom who explained that because my apartment was one that the rental company allowed people to view without an escort, it is possible that some of the people could have had the keys copied with the intention of coming back to the apartment later to rob the new tenant. I sleep with my CRKT M16 Knife under my pillow in case I get unexpected visitors.
      Shitting without a toilet seat, I don´t really mind. It´s like doing a horse stance exercise. The only thing I have a probelm with so far is with the piping for my sink. Some genious plumber decided that to hinge the water supply from the wall to the sink, it would be smart to use a ¨T¨internsection elbow to connect the angles. So the pipe from the wall goes into one tube and then, at a right angle, another tube goes up into the sink. Therefore, the third opening, without any pipe attached, was left to spew out a jet of water any time the water was turned on. It would appear that this has been remedied by jamming a plastic shopping bag into the whole. After a few showers and toilet flushes, I have decided to leave my water off until it is fixed. Already, there is a reporduction center for mosquitoes forming on the stagnant water of my bathroom floor. During my first night, I was paid a visit by the firt wave of offspring from this little lake, who zoomed by my ears on the way to bight every single area of skin that I could not conceal.
     So, during my first night, I got maybe 30 minutes of sleep. To protect myself from the mosquitoes, I pulled my blanket over my head and held my pen in my hand, upright, by my face, to create a little tent pocket for air. At about 2 in the morning, as the heat and sleep deprivation started to mold my reality, I began to laugh hysterically. I thought to myself, ¨Lord in heaven. After everything I´ve done and everywhere I´ve been... The Ritz in London, suites in Vegas... Anyone who is thinking of me right now could not imagine that I am in the middle of Brazil, in an apartment that used to be a store, sleeping under a blanket to hide from mosuitoes.. What squalor.. What a time. HAHAHAH¨. The other funny thing I realized is that basically, for the next few months, or until my income improves (or appears rather) I will be an ¨urban camper¨. The tent I made with my blanket brought me to realize this fact... I cannot spend much nor do I need to yet. I have no refrigerator and no apparatus for cooking anything. All my tapwater is unsafe to drink and too-rich with minerals, and intestine spelunking critters. Hence, I must purchase items of food that are unparishable if I intend to keep them at my home and if I want something fresh, hot, or ice-cold, I have to go to the store to get it when I want it. There will be no waking up in the middle of the night or a cold sip of juice or microwaving a snack. The humidity is too substantial for bread and the bugs come to quickly for even fruit... Meat, milk, juice, things like that have already been deleted from my wonderful kitchen dream. So,  in my apartment it will only be the same kinds of things I take when camping. Dried meat.. Canned meat. Canned everything. Maybe some fruit if I will eat it soon enough. I will also have to buy large jugs of water in various gallon dimensions and I am thankful that at least I can have that around. 
     On my first morning at home, I decided to inaugurate my living-room area with a little workout. Exercising on tile and then tile covered in sweat is a bit danrouge at time, but I figure I had better adapt to the situation since I do not and, looking at the way things are going with money, WILL not have any way of paying for time at a gym. So far, that is the biggest tragedy for me. Not the food, the electricity... Only the fact that I am surrounded by some of the greatest places to train that I have ever seen, but I cannot afford them, and to make the money to attend, I will need a schedule that eliminates the time to train at them. I have already mentally comitted myself to training alone with my surrounding environment. Exceptionally challenging, because of weather and self-discipline, but free. Guys in prison do it. I can do it. From now on, I will post the workouts that I myself am doing here. I have space at home and when I get a bicycle or time, I plan to ride down to the lake, a good place for jogging, doing pullups on the football goals, and step-ups on the benches. I will find some way to do some work.
     Eating well (as in; avoiding starvation) is not a problem here. However, it is definitely a challenge to replicate the diet I used to adhere to back home that focused on smal portions every 2-3 hours, 7-8 times a day. Loads of water, fruit, vegetables, lean meats, and a lot of fiber. The culture out here is all about big breakfast, big lunch, big dinner, MSG, sugar, sugar, sugar, salt, more salt. Pork, pork, beef. Eggs, pork, beef. Chicken, pork, chicken. Oh, a vegtable. Fruit. Coffee, coffee, coffee. Have no doubt, it is heaven, but I hate it when my body is not running like clockwork. So, the challenges of stress and nutrition have definitely affected my performance, but I am determined to continue on in my way; instinctually.
     My blogging will inevitably be affected by the fact that I will have no internet in my home, but I will keep trying when I can. Until next time.

It is week 4 now. After a rough start, I have succeeded in renting and paying for a nice little kitinete (A small apartment) in the Centro area of Lagoa Santa. Getting the paperwork finished was an ugly ordeal, but now it is over. I put down the money for 6 months, giving me the kitinete until mid-March and that will be nice if I am able to come back, since I will have a place to stay until finding another. If I can come back, maybe I will just stay in the same place, I don´t know. Each day here is a blatantly obvious battle to secure the future, one step at a time. I have been trying not to overstress myself or overwork myself however, since most of the limitations on my success are things I can do nothing about. Citizenship is the biggest barrier. This factor makes it impossible for me to be hired anywhere in a formal manner and also dictates the amount of time I can stay in Brazil. It is a pain in the ass.

So, each day, I try to handle what I can, take advantage of opportunities whenever possible, and when nothing can be done, I kick back and enjoy the life of a tourist, observing and absrobing all I see. Lately, as I have been cruising along here, I have been thinking much about my family and my own life; how it will be in the future and what I will remember later.

Family life in Brazil is much different from anything I have ever seen in the US. I´m sure there are families back in America that operate in a similar fashion, but my family definitely does not and I have come to admire the way many families are here. First off, everyone in a family lives very close together here. Grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, all are usually in close proximity and visitation between all of them is very frequent, often on a daily basis. I constantly compare this family lifestyle with that of the one I have always experienced, with each branch striving to distance itself from its beginning, as if to do otherwise would be a sign of failure, and eventually carve out its own space in the universe. However, I simply compare the two styles objectively and in a circumstance of awarding points to one lifestyle or the other, I would not try to calculate a winner. It is simply a matter of culture. My family is an American family. Families here are Brazilian. At the same time that the family liftestyle here has elements that are universally reputable, I have come to realize that the American family lifestyle produces aspects of great quality as well.

It was not too long ago that the US evolved from a beginning of revolutionary warfare and exploration, mixed with an emerging mentaily of independence, self-reliance, and the notion that life can´t be spent giving a damn about what others say. The Wild West is an iconic era of the culmination of these thoughts. America possesses an inner loner culture, more or less. We carry the memory of the lone cowboy, the lone explorer, and we convert it into things like; riding Harley Davidson´s on the open road, hunting for Elk, going camping, and leaving home for college. It is hard for me to explain to people here in Brazil, why it is that in American movies, when the kid is leaving for college, the family cries. For most people here, they cannot understand why a child would leave home to go far away from there family, ever.

I explain it in comparison to two things. Baby birds getting thrown out of the nest, and the ancient Spartan practice of banishing young boys from home in childhood, so they would be forced to fend for themselves and return as men, or people with the culturally percieved traits of men. I think many of the same inner-principles from these two things have comingled much with the family lifestyle in America. I will only speak for myself now... For my entire life, I have aspired to be like the cowboys, the explorers, the great heroes and leaders who I read about while growing up. I attribute this desire to the culture of my home country, since it is American culture that dictates the viewing of cowboy movies, the availability of the Iliad and Odyssey, the grandeureqsue actions of Cyrano de Bergerac and other stories of these sorts. Furthermore, the US military has a great marketing campagin that constantly bombards the American populace with imagery of what it is to be a true American citizen; strong, fierce, independent. Now, I do not like riding horses and have no desire to fight the Cyclopse or fight in a war, but something from pieces of media like those I have mentioned, has forged me into a person that possesses that uniqely American desire to head off into the unkown to make something for myself.

I also think it has much to do with the history of my family, a history similar to so many other families in America. It is an immigrant story; a story of individuals who left all that they knew to make something fresh, in a distant place. The gold rush, the Great Depression, the Second World War, they all make up part of this big mental picture or portrait rather. 

The resulting product instilled in myself, and I think there are many other Americans like me, is that I have a gross abhorance to staying at home, not because I hate my parents or something like that (on the contrary, I always miss them and the rest of my family very much), but because I will not believe I have achieved anything in life until I stand in a home, where every part of it I have acquired by the work on my own body and mind. Furthermore, I aspire to perfect the abilities cherished in olden times before the support of modern comforts and law; The ability to travel anywhere, any distance. The ability to defend oneself. The ability to make a living anywhere, all alone. All with the hope that one day, when I feel I have mastered all of this and reached a point of true success and wisdom, that I can return home to my parents who will then see that their young boy is not a child anymore and is a man who is capable of achieving the same things they did before. All with the hope that one day, I will feel confident in any situation, whether the challenge is economic, physical, or spiritual. 

However, I hope that I can eventually mesh together the strengths of all that stems from my upbrining and the strengths of the family lifestyle here. I think, however, that it is something that will just happens as it happens and attempting to plan and execute it as a methodology would be... weird.

On the other note; thinking about the future of my life and how I will remember what life I lived before, I realizend today that, for sure, I will always remember my time here as one of the greatest periods of my life. Young, healthy, in a far-off beautiful place, surrounded by fantanstic people. What an adventure, what a life. I thank heaven each day for what I am experiencing here, but I give my thanks cautiously and reverently, in the knowledge that in life there is a thin line of fate seperating fanstanstic from terrible. I know now, from becoming aware of what I have here, what it is that many old people are thinking about when they sit quietly, staring out the window; the days of youth. When I am 90 years old (I hope I make it so far), I will sit and sip my Scotch (don´t tell the doctor), and I will remember the days I spent here, amidst the smells and the sounds of South America, struggling to work and live, experiencing so many new things.

One thing I have constantly thought about lately is a day when I met a man while doing my laundry in Arcata. He was a skinny, pale, grey-bearded man, wearing a ratty old t-shirt and faded jogging shorts. His appearance was that of homeless person who had quite a bit of experience in that field. He initially approached me with questions about my Macbook. He explained that he had been in the market to buy a new notebook computer and together we discussed the pros and cons of a Mac. We got to talking and as he typed away on his old, 2 inch thick Toshiba notebook, he explained to me that he had once been a millionaire computer programmer. He told me that he had gone to the same high school as Steve Jobs and they had been good friends, but Jobs had turned his back on him, all because he had dated Jobs´s wife in high school. The jealousy was just too much. He told me that he had decided to forget about the computer game and used all his money to travel overland across Asia, India, the MIddle East, and eventually Europe, following some wandering revolution of LSD tripping yoga fanatics. We both laughed excitedly at the awesomeness of his adventure and after, he explained to me that all he had left to show for his money was his car... We sat for a while more as the washing machines turned. I was immediately skeptical of the whole story, but for some reason, it all made so much sense and the reasons for everything were so realistically simple. He was the right age to match his story and definitey had a high level of intelligence. His account of the places he travelled were intimate and outlined in the way that only experience can produce; this tree here and this great bar here.. Not many city names and distances. Only the memories of the eye. The jealousy of Steve Jobs was really the kicker for me. I could totally see it. As I folded my laundry, we parted ways and I watched as this homeless looking man, who had just told me the story of his life, of working on the first modern computers, of walking throught the Valley of Kush and the streets of Beirut, of taking acid the mountains of India, climbed into a gold S500 Mercedes Benz, and drove off.

I stood for a second thinking deeply. Not about whether all he said had been true or not, because for some reason I thought, and to this day I know, that his story was true, but because I realized that one day I might be just like him. I thought about all the places I have ever been, all the things I have ever seen, all the craziness, everything, and I realize that one day, I might be at the laundromate next to Blondie´s in Arcata, telling some suspicious college kid about the things I had done. Growing up in Berkeley, travelling the world, living in Hawaií, China, Brazil... The fights, the parties, the learning, the romance. In the end, I might not have anything to show for it, except for some crazy stories.

So week 4 is going along here. Brazilian independence day was on Teusday, the 7th. I spent the weekend working in the country side, cleaning and waiting tables. I got terrible blisters from playing soccer barefoot and had to get the rest of my exercise rowing a boat around a small lake. The language is starting to come along quite well for me and i am starting to feel the tentacles of permanence emerge from the soil and tug at my body. Concluding my long, cerebral ramble about the pscyhology of American open-road sydrome and crazy people I meet at the laundromat (As Irish once pointed out, they might just think I am also crazy... Maybe I am.. Oh Hell, after seeing "Inception", I really cannot tell if anything is real), I will now give some factual information. So, finding a job here is difficult, but not impossible. To rent an apartment, you will definitely need the borderline babysitting-like assistance of a Brazilian or the help of the company you are working for in Brazil. To rent an aparmtment, sufficient money or not, requires 3 sponsors. To drive here, you driver´s license must be translated and approved by the government, and henceforth, you must carry your ID and traslanted document while driving. I have already erased any idea of owning any type of vehicle requiring documentation. It is a matter of the money and the trouble. Bicycle, bus, and ride begging. That is it.

It is September now and the weather is starting to get both increasingly hot and increasingly wet. Forunately, from living on O´ahu, I have quite a bit of patience and practice when it comes to sweating incessantly while in the rain at the same time. Changing US bills is best when done at a private money changer... They can give you the best exchange rate as long as your willing to go through a process similar to the scene in Desperado where Quentin Tarantino goes through the secret door in the bathroom, led by the Machete guy. As far as getting more cash, trasnferring between banks and extracting from ATM´s will leave you feeling angry and abused, and, although I have not tried it yet, Western Union looks like the best way to go... Also, Western Union can get your money to you here in a few minutes for a nominal fee.

The food, music, and poeple continue to be exceptionally awesome. I have not met one unfriendly person yet, experienced food poisoning, or heard a song that was terrible. It is a wonderful place.