New ink, new home, New Years, and news
The view out my bedroom window for one more night. In the midst of one of Sao Paulo's daily monsoons.
Internet! What is up! It's been awhile. Sorry about that.
There is a bunch of New Stuff in my life, which would be exciting even if it wasn't filtered it through a language barrier. As it is: SUPER EXCITING (and difficult to understand at times).
The least new of the new: Girlfriend and I went to Buenos Aires for New Years. The bus ride there and back holds a special place in my Traveling Is Its Own Circle Of Hell story hierarchy, to the extent that I can't do the trip justice without horrified facial expressions and lots of frantic gesturing. Some words that don't come close to conveying it: no air conditioning, no water, 15 hours longer than anticipated, robbed at the border, cockroaches hatching at 2AM, no bathrooms, and 17 shirtless Argentinian frat boys singing pop songs all. night. long.
Buenos Aires was pretty awesome, once I recovered from a fever, dehydration, and getting elbowed in the head on the metro. We stayed at a shmancy-ass hostel owned by a fabulously gay Brazilian who served us champagne, smokables, and tiny sandwiches while we lounged our hangovers away in the pool the day after New Years. New Years itself we spent dancing in the street with a mess of other Americans collected from various hostels, dodging cars and drinking things I don't remember now because there were a lot of them. Photographic evidence suggests things were hella cute.
This may be the most stupidly adorable picture ever taken of me and a partner.
We spent a day in Florianapolis on our way back to São Paulo, which is a tough place to describe without falling back on clichés like "tropical island paradise".
This almost made the bus trip worth it. Almost.
A few days after we got back to São Paulo, my housemate Atila was nice enough to inject a large amount of ink into my skin. I hadn't gotten any tattoo work done since my tiny ankle piece on my 18th birthday, and living with one of the highest rated tattoo artists in Brazil who's also a total fuckin' sweetheart seemed like a good opportunity to change that.
The original sketches, and the final design in the middle.
Two hours and a buncha pain later! The plan is to do a mirrored image on my other hip when he has time again. I could go on about the deep, meaningfully meaning behind it all, but really- I like art, I like GOOD art, I like my curvy-ass hips. I like fishies. That's about as deep as it gets.
Last piece of newness- the Girlfriend and I are leaving our lovely, cheap, gorgeous flat for a falling down, cheap-as-SHIT vegan punk collective/show space and illegal bar called Espaco Improprio on the edge of the red light district. I am massively enthused about it all (except for the vegan bit because I'm going to start training aerials soon and will have to get creative with my protein intake). The area we're moving to is on Rua Augusta, a stretch of brothels, dive bars, gay clubs, upscale bohemian restaurants, warehouse art spaces, ho-tiques, and sex shops where we spend most of our time anyways. Everything there is plastered in good street art, too.
I'm shooting as much of the street art here I can find, my albums are all up on the facitybooks for perusal.
Depending on when my other tattoo gets done, I'm finally (oh, sweet jesus, finally) getting back into training at a circus school. It took me three months now to find one that I both liked and was taking new students, but now that I have, I am FREAKING bound and determined to get my ass airborne as soon as possible. I've been keeping to a pretty strict push up and stretching routine at home, and I'm quietly massively gleeful about seeing what my body can do when I give it a trapeze now.
That's all the new in my life- my portuguese is getting a wee bit better every day and I'm trying to pick up a language book on occasion so my vocabulary doesn't get stuck revolving around queers, drinking, dancing, and circus for the next three months. My grasp of portuguese includes five separate words for "dyke" and no words for "apple", which is what happens when you learn a language immersively from your friends in bars.
Immersion language seekers, consider yourselves duly warned.
Updates on what it's like to live in a big, sprawling, vegan punk collective with its own bar, in Brazil to come.