This is my third and final e-mail since I leave Saturday night for NYC to return on Sunday morning. Airlines have been a bit crazy lately, so it's probably pretty tentative when I actually get home :-)
Friday night we went to this club with live music and three floors of rooms to enjoy, and it was a really cool place. Each section of every room highlighted some sort of object such as telephones, cash registers, tools, trays, etc. They were placed on the walls or in display cases as decoration. Outside was the main party strip in Rio where several bars, clubs and restaurants are filled with people and music. There was a main stage on the ground floor with a great band, but the dance area was a bit limited. Another floor had another live band playing and there was a much larger dance floor so a group of us danced there for most of the time since it was hopping. We got there pretty early, and stayed until nearly 1 AM soaking it all in. That was enough club for me though...I had to hand wash the cigarette smoke off of my clothes later that night. The club was very open though, much different than any club I've ever been to in America. There were open windows and open ceilings everywhere.
Saturday night was probably the coolest night here in Rio. We went to the Live Earth concert. There were 8 cities around the world hosting a concert on all 7 continents including Antarctica (the scientists there put together a band to play their own little concert) in order to raise awareness for global warming. It was so packed with close to a million people, so we snuck around the beach side of the concert and watched from the side. There Pharrell, Macy Gray, and Lenny Kravitz performed along with several other Brazilian performers inclidung O Rappa, who the crowd cheered for the most. Pharrell was awful! He's a recording artist and not a live performer I guess, and the fact that he called the audience mother f@%&ers about 15 times really made the whole experience not such a delight. Macy Gray was cool, sexy and smooth. I enjoyed her the most. Lenny was Lenny and rocked the house. People enjoyed him, but they were dancing and throwing hands in the air mostly for O Rappa.
One of the girls in my group is getting married shortly after her return from Brazil, so all the girls decided they wanted to throw her a Bachelorette party at a nice restaurant near the hotel. Since I was the only guy available that night, they wanted to invite me as well, and you know me, I can't resist a party. An hour or so before the event, I received a phone call from one of the party planners asking me to make her a man...for some reason I assumed that she wanted to dress as a man or have male clothes, so I said I'd see what I could do and to drop on by. She knocks on my door with a big poster board and asks me to draw a man so she could play pin the speedo on the hot stud. My artisitc ability leaves much to be desired, but I decided to accept the challenge. (check out the picture). There were 19 girls and me, and we had delicious food and played Pictionary with wedding related terms and another game with clay that you'll have to ask me in person or on the phone to describe so as to avoid a scandalous e-mail ;-). The best part of the whole event was the waiters who stripped for the girls after dinner was over, and even made out with one of the girls (not the bride to be).
I have spent much more time at the beach of course and my tan is slowly developing. It's been way too long since I've actually gotten sun, that my skin is working very slowly. I'm still the whitest guy on the beach most of the time. One increasingly annoying feature of Brazilian beaches is the presence of hundreds of vendors that walk up and down the beach selling sarongs, beer, sodas, ices, hats, shirts, etc. I'm not familiar with all beaches in the world, but I do remember last year in Italy this was not the case, so my suntanning is frequently interrupted by people in my face or blocking my sun while pushing their product. I did get my spidey tattoo this way, but now with the Pan-American games here, they've increased by hundreds more. In fact, at our final dinner inside a restaurant and several blocks away from the beach, this vendor came by the large window trying to sell us these zip-up purses. He was relentless.
This morning, as I was walking, I noticed this American walking with two other guys with a soccer ball in his hand. He was tossing it up a little bit and accidentally dropped it in front of this street cleaner who immediately caught it with his foot, dribbled it like a pro and knee-bumped it right back to the American's hands. The look of shock on the American's face was priceless. EVERY guy in Brazil can play soccer. Several of my classmates went to a game the other day and when they got back, we laughed about how much testosterone they had to bear while they were there. However, they were fortunate to learn every profane expletive that exists in Portuguese.
Last night my friend Jane and I performed our YouTube-worthy Karaoke song for the entire study abroad group to tears and laughter. The funniest part was that the restaurant had 3 South Africans, and a crazy Brazilian who spoke English only in idiomatic expressions. So, we started the song, (we brought speakers and an iPod), and after the first line, he yells out, "Oh, I want to DIE!" with an expression of, "What torture are they putting us through?" It almost threw me off my
game. Fortunately, we got it all on video, and as soon as I upload it, it will be available on YouTube.
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