Well we’re a month into shooting our test episodic following the lovely Amy and Marisol through South and Central America and our first, and hopefully last, production snafu has occured. While dancing at a Capoeira spot in a small town in Southern Brazil, Amy left her bag at the table and it was stolen. Now there wasn’t much in it EXCEPT the mini HD video camera she was carrying to document her trip. We knew giving her the camera there was a high probability of this happening but we forgot to mention that she should switch out the tapes after every new adventure. We’re fairly sure their entire trip up until now was on THAT tape. You live and you learn. That was the point of this test shoot.

In other news our dates to rendevous with the girls in Central America have been solidified. Our crew will be flying into Nicaragua on April 28th and will follow the girls as they make their way North through Nicaragua and Honduras to Guatemala. Should be quite an adventure! The underwater housings for our equipment arrive next week. Intrigued?

there´s a little bird at my feet trying to nip at my dry heel skin. it used to be a cute little bird, about 10 minutes ago, but now it´s freaking me outa little bit because it´s following me everywhere i go. that´s the present-time update. now let´s jump back in time like michael j fox.marisol and i realized earlier this week that we didn´t have to stay in rio for the full month that we had the apartment. marisol had a phone conversation with her mom, who helped us see the big picture. hellooo! just leave earlier and spend more time in places you like. duh amy. so last night we hopped on a plane and headed for Vitoria. We´re staying with a girl our age (Paula) and her grandmother. We met Paula about a month ago when we were on Ilha Grande. It feels soooo good to be here, in a smaller city (still super huge though) and in a family environment, with someone our age. One thing that´s really cool and makes me a tiny bit proud of myself is that when we met Paula, she and I couldn´t understand each other at all. We shared a bunch of cookies over hand gestures to try and communicate. Now we can talk with each other!! She´s so patient and talks really slow and is probably using the vocab of a 4 year old, but I understand it. High Five!

Rio de Janeiro had it´s ups and downs. I didn´t hate it there. I wasn´t miserable. But to be honest, it was mostly downs. Here are the few Ups of Rio:

Language school - Figuring out how to ask for a napkin, talk to people about our trip, finding our way around the city, all that and more would have been impossible for me without language school.

Meeting and hanging out with our language teacher, Terry - We went out with her 3 times in 4 weeks, and every time was great. She even taught us all the portuguese curse words and bad slang (during class time!). A couple of days ago was definitely our best day in Rio. We started the day by meeting up with Terry and her husband in Copacabana. They took us to meet some friends of the family, and we all walked to the beach. We met up with even more people they knew at the beach. Once we were all set up, there was about a dozen of us, with just as many chairs and umbrellas, all set up in a big circle so everyone could see each other and no one was in the scorching sun. They joked that our umbrella-sarong fort was a favela, because we kept adding to it hap-hazardly to make sure everyone was in the shade. Marisol and I instantly felt as though we were good friends with all of these people, even though most of the time I couldn´t understand what they were saying. At one point, a vendor came around. He was selling “quejo cualho,” which is a stick of white cheese that is grilled and sprinkled with oregano. Thank the lord for that one. Everyone in our big group got one, and the vendor sat with us for about 10 minutes grilling 12 sticks of cheese. We were at the beach past sundown. Afterward, we showered at their nearby apartment and all went out to dinner. By this time it was past midnight and the metro had stopped running, and the family invited us to sleep over at their house. There were two girls in the family, 19 and 16, and it was fun talking with them. It was so good to finally not feel so isolated in that big city, and again we saw more of the Brazilian kindness and generosity that we´ve been fortunate enough to encounter since we first arrived.

CARNAVAL!!! - oooooh boy. Brazil not only knows how to open their hearts to complete strangers, they also know how to party. I think Marisol and I ended up with little colds as a result, but that consequence was a tiny price to pay for the amount of fun that was had in the 5 days of carnaval. Last Friday got it all started. We went out with her aunt to the neighborhood Lapa, where a bloco was scheduled to play. Blocos are giant parade-type events that picture percussion bands (anywhere from 10-100s of players) and everyone else who wants to join in. It´s a very exciting, very public event. They happen everywhere, day and night, during Carnaval. I read that 300 blocos take place in Rio. The one we went to in Lapa was huuuuge. Thousands of people were in the streets, and you´re back-to-back trying to get somewhere. After winding our way through the packed streets and turning down several offers of kisses (”come on, it´s carnaval”) we ended up in a big warehouse where the bloco band was playing. Marisol´s aunt and several of her friends joined in, so we were right there next to the action. We danced like crazy and lost a few pounds from sweating, then in the early hours of the morning we chowed down on some pizza. We went to bed at 3, which ended up being the earliest of the 5 days.

The next night we went to the Sambódromo, which is the arena/road where the samba schools parade down. When you see pictures of Carnaval in the states, this is usually what you see. 300-piece percussion bands, thousands of dancers, giant elaborate floats. I tried to get some good photos –we’ll let you know when we get them up on the sight. It lasted from 8pm to 6am. The parade had 10 groups that each take about an hour to parade down the strip. Muito legal!!

On Sunday Mari´s aunt left, and the real parties began. We went back to Lapa and met a group of really nice people while eating linguiza on a stick. They took us to a nice place for some beers and appetizers, then we went to a huge public plaza where live music played on a huge stage until 5am. Nothing like getting home and going to sleep while the sun is rising.

Nothing like it except for doing that 3 nights in a row. We went back to Lapa the next night after a failed attempt in Copacabana, and danced at a samba club to a small band. I didn´t dance the whole time, as I don´t know samba very well and feel silly amongst all those beautiful Brazilians who dance perfectly, but it was just as enjoyable sitting back and watching it all. Every time waiters had to come up to where we were dancing, he would join the group for a while before returning to work. The band played until 4, and we finished the night by joining a conga train led by the waiters and a cook.

We had an entire month in Rio, but procrastinating´s my thing, so we squeezed in the tourist attractions at the last minute. Christ the Redeemer and Sugarloaf mountain were just as cool as they look in the postcards. We took some fun DMX pictures in front of Jesus. It´s funny, those things are the “must-do” things in Rio that every tourist ends up doing, but I’m pretty sure they won’t be the first things I remember when I look back on our time there. Instead I’ll remember our beach favela, and the all-night forró fair with Terry, and getting açai at our neighborhood juice bar every day. Now that it´s over, it’s easier to look back and realize why we decided to spend a month in a busy, crowded, dirty city.

with lots of love, Amy

You never know how a place will make you feel until you get there. Sitting in the plane, staring out the window at the dense Guatemalan landscape below I writhed with a growing sensation of excitement and nausea. The rugged mountainous green and brown jungles stretching out to the horizon almost reminded me of my childhood growing up in Tennessee, But there was something different. Something unfamiliar. I didn’t know anybody down there. I didn’t know the language, the customs, where to go or how to get by. Just that I needed to be doing this. This was right for me, right at that moment in my life.

Flying into Guatemala City

I crept closer and closer to the glass. The anticipation was killing me. When my friend Caitlin had proposed this trip to me six weeks earlier, I honestly never thought we’d actually make it that far. I’m a great starter but more often than not my grand ideas fizzle out in a stew of pragmatism and obligations. But not this time. In the span of six weeks we had quit our jobs, given up our apartment and most of our stuff, put the rest in a storage locker, gotten half a dozen shots, sold whatever we could to raise funds and hopped on a plane to the third world. Then, suddenly, we were there. (more…)

Hello to everyone from the ´cidade maravilhoso` of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I write after completing about 9 full days thus far in this city, and with 22 to go.

Even though our time here has so far been short, I feel as though I have gone through a dip as well as a rise in feeling happy and comfortable here. Before even arriving in Rio, and I mean months before, the most I heard about it were dangers and precautions: ´you´d better be really careful, that´s a dangerous place´, ´don´t take any public buses in brazil´, ´if/when anyone tries to rob you, just give it all up´. Most were accompanied with a `but you´re gonna have a great time´, which seemed to be a semi-cushion to the initial fear and worry that were instilled in me, however not in any way dissolving it. Therefore, upon arrival, i looked around with heightened awareness, for myself, as well as my protective instict for the safety of my travel companion.

I´m not going to lie and say that from the minute we got here we were floating on a rainbow of parties and new friends, because on the contrary, we were afraid to go out past dark, and very protective of our things and selfs. Our first few days had ups and downs. We found and got into our apartment with ease, and found it (as well as it´s surrounding neighborhood) to be comfortable and safe. Our first day of language school went well, and we respect and enjoy our teachers very much. However, we also got lost a few times, had to do the whole `walking withour maps in our faces`, and got frustrated with the midday heat, humidity, and our newfound normality of sweating the minute after we get out of the shower. However, with the week that has passed, we have somehow gotten used to the heat, don´t need a map of the city all the time, and feel more comfortable with each passing day.

What has best facilitated this transition has been my friendship with one of my profesors, a 28 year old woman named Teresa. Within the first day of class with her, she told us about a place she goes dancing in her home neighborhood in Rio, and invited us to go with her the first weekend we were in town. After having a week of socializing only with our teachers during our 3 hours of class-5 days a week, we spent almost the entire weekend with two locals, (called ´Cariocas`, meaning a person from the city of Rio), and learning more about local life than any amount of portugues classes or renting an apartment in the city can provide.

Saturday night began with a long metro ride to the north zone of rio, ´zona norte´, where more Cariocas actually live, and where most tourists don´t know exist in rio because books dont mention it or even map it out at all. (Note: the parts of rio that tourists mostly visit are only about a fifth the size of the actual city, or probably even less than that, but i guess that´s normal….). Our teacher and her husband met us at the metro stop, which was followed with a half hour bus ride to what I thought was going to be a normal sized dancing club. However, we got off the bus, and joined the spuratic groups of people of all ages gathering towards what looked to me like a huge baseball stadium.

We got in line, payed our 1 Real (about 50 cents), and were immediately engulfed in a huge outdoor (yet enclosed) market for everything, which was sprinkled with Kareoke bars (all in use!), informal brazilian restaurants, music shops with small tv screens playing (or rather blasting) brazilian music videos, small independant bar-b-q-ers selling meat and cheese skewers, and people dressed for satuday night filling the aisles between everything. It was all quite sensory filling, especially with the salty and yummy smell of all the meats being bar-b-q-ed and the sounds of people belting it in the kareoke bars. Along with all of this, there were also two main stages with live performers that went on from when we arrived at 11pm to when we left at 6am.

So we drank beer, we sang kareoke (billy jean to be exact), we ate tasty bar-b-q food, we danced forró (pronounced /foho/), amy and said no to guys asking for (or just going for kisses), and all the while we laughed and shared the night with our wonderful teacher and her husband. The night was completed with the sunrise on the scary running-across-huge-brazilian-highway-type-streets, eating fresh pasties and coca-cola in our teachers home after meeting her entire family who lived within 10 seconds of her, and passing out for 3 hours in her bed while her and her husband insisted that they share the single mattress on the floor beside it.

The following day (or the same day?) was spent walking along the less popular however more beautiful beach by her house, drinking beer under beachside kiosks, and taking a long busride home which happen to go through the biggest favela (slum) of all of south america, where the cuttest kid got on and played with me the entire ride home.

with lots of love, Marisol

Marisol and I misunderstood bus transfer information so right now we have a few hours to kill in a little town on the coast. being such efficient travelers, we are seizing the moment for internet time. we just got returned to the mainland from Ilha Grande. wow. i already want to go back.

there was an interesting mix of travelers/locals on the island. the first night, we hung out with a few British couples. it was fun talking in English with them but most times I prefer understanding a word or two of portuguese and feeling like i´m getting a more authentic experience. one day on the island, we went on a boat from 10am to 7pm and stopped at a few awesome snorkeling spots. snorkeling is amazing! there´s a cave on the island, close to the water, and you can climb down in it and see the water come up under the opening every time a swell comes in. the cave is probably about 60 feet long\deep, and it´s completely dark except for flashlights. then, when you get to the end where the water comes up, everything is glowing green from the little bits of sunlight that seep through. that was the first place we stopped to snorkel. it looked like a completely different world. sorry, it´s hard to put it into words. even cameras wouldn´t do justice.

the next day, we hiked 3 hours to a GORGEOUS beach. probably the prettiest one i´ve ever seen, if my definition of pretty includes white sand, turquoise water, shallow for 100 yards out, and lots of fun waves. they were the biggest waves i´ve seen since we´ve been here, and still wimpy compared to santa cruz. which was perfect because i wasn´t afraid to swim in them. we hiked back to the main village after a full day at the beach. 6 hours of hiking through rainforest, 4 hours at the beach = best day yet, plus lots of sunburn and mosquito bites.

today we bus to rio and find our apartment. it is going to feel so good to plop on a bed that i can call my own for a few weeks. AND, marisol´s birthday is this monday so i´m going to do my best to throw her a little party in an unfamiliar big city. i´m thinking balloons, confetti, cake, and maybe some new friends from the language school. i think about home a little bit each day. i hope everyone is doing wonderfully. to be honest, those cold january nights would feel reeeeeeally good on my sunburn right about now. i have no clue when the superbowl is, but make sure you play catch in the street during halftime for me.

muito amor,

amy