01/11/10

(Will add photographs when I get the wifi sorted out properly on my laptop)
A pure palindromic date, replete with 1's and 11's, also marks the exact halfway point of my scheduled stay in Rio. Not that I plan to leave, though. The Day of the Dead over, it's now time to Live.

From an admittedly beautiful Autumn...

... to Spring.

I actually arrived in Rio via the hospital where I was born.

I was having lots of syncs to do with death and rebirth. My favourite piece of literature to this day is Frank Miller's Born Again.

Born again from the rhythm screaming down from heaven
Ageless, ageless and i'm there in your arms

Also via some violet lights in terminal 3.

(3's, like 11's, are everywhere) Violet was my colour of the time, the crown chakra.

Took a cab to Ipanema. Knew I was being fleeced for the fare but was too tired to find another way. Dropped off, headed to the bar, met a couple of English guys from Windsor (just down the road from where I grew up), then walked around looking for a hostel. Was directed to a pink place called Bonita - feminine beauty. Apposite.

Met a Canadian who owns a bar in the Canary Islands, but had taken a year out because of Visa issues. A German girl who sold earrings for a living and giggled incessantly, her laughter echoing round the hostel. A Columbian guy who was quite diffident but at times seemed like he had taken some Class A's. A bunch of Chilean students who didn't seem to want to talk to anyone outside their group, apart from the Columbian guy. A couple of Dutch guys who fitted the "shmoke and pancake" stereotype well. Another Canadian who skis for a living and climbs in his spare time. He climbed the Corcovado (Jesus Christ statue hill) while I was there. A Tunisian who now works in tourism in Sao Paolo, and was very funny whilst drunk. A Brazilian kid who had been to Chelsea and spoke English like a cross between Lord Fauntleroy and Dick Van Dyke. And a Brazilian woman, an actual local, a Carioca, a doctor (GP), who kindly allowed me to stay in her apartment for a while (number 704=11). The night we met we stayed out all night and then slept on Ipanema beach, and watched the sun rise together, pink and red and orange. I was cold in shorts and t-shirt, but it was the best kind of cold.

Saw the Black-Eyed Peas play a concert where the carnival is held.

They had Jorge Ben Jor come on stage, who then sang a song which perplexed many of the present Cariocas, because it was very sad: "Rain, rain, forever." True Cariocas, especially women, are wonderful people, chatty, sun-worshipping, generous, without artifice, unselfconscious, confident, uncritical, unpretensious, uniformly beautiful and avoid negativity at all times, instinctively.

That said, Paris Hilton is popular here and pops up as the face of a beer here (Devassa, meaning "hot girl") and various clothing ranges. I do hope the degeneration of the Brazilian woman does not go to the lengths found in the West.

People here are just so diverse. I've been assumed to be Brazilian, and I've got blond hair and fair skin. There's tall, short, pale, dark - the whole range. The Amazonian women (generally from the South) are often very tall, blond and dizzyingly attractive, but the more olive-hued skins which get darker as you go north are just as beautiful.

By the way, the rumours I heard beforehand that Brazilians don't get drunk is not true! Much evidence to the contrary.

Experienced the Blood Moon while in Lapa, a remarkable place of arches, aquaducts, a masonic lodge, bohemians, old decaying colonial buildings and an amazing festival-like atmosphere on Fridays and Saturdays. They close off the streets and everyone wanders around, eating, dancing and drinking ice cold beers. And they are indeed religious about the beer being ice cold.

That said, in bars they have an odd proclivity to something called a chopp, which is watery lager. Tastes as good as it sounds, and expensive at that. Prounounced "choppy", as they like to avoid ending nouns with a consonant. So you get "hippy hoppy" for instance. Kind of cute.

Been doing some retail selling online to boost my savings, and may sell some of my gold. Had an interview to teach English, and as I write this, she's just found me my first student!

As for the beach, you have me down as being utterly undisappointed. The finest beach culture anywhere I've ever been. Wow.

Must have fallen in love about 5 times while walking the length of Ipanema beach. The girls here are not only stunning, but they play football. Well. Really well. It seems all the hot women here are schooled in beach football volleyball.

It's funny the way Cariocas mope slightly when it's a cloudy day. They really, truly, love the sun.

Only here would the slums look so colourful and be so salubriously situated on hillsides overlooking gorgeous vistas.

Having said that, it's strange how almost all cars here are either black or silver. I had a laugh with G about that. Her name roughly translates as "feminine gratitude", to match my own. My Brazilian angel manifest.

Also, not sure where the stars are. Are they hidden behind smog? I thought this was the Southern hemisphere, so looking into the Milky Way?

I love their music as it is unashamedly happy.

Something you just don't seem to find in the Western tradition, where melancholy is so revered. They purport to like the concept of "saudade", which is a kind of sad longing which is almost untranslatable. But the happiness is what gets me, and its contagious. It's the vibration of the place.

G has been teaching me salsa and Portugese, very patiently I might add. And I've been teaching her to cook, and speak English, although hers is quite good already. And I made my first caiprinha with her! I added mint, as with mojitos, which they don't do here, but I found it to be a welcome addition, and it was pretty damn good.

Cachaca is very cheap over here, and seriously expensive in the UK, so it makes a nice change from vodka. In fact I often have one for breakfast.

Had some pasteis

and caldo de cana (sugar cane juice).

They actually press the sugar cane right there in front of you. And the result is a green liquid that is pure sugar, though doubtless with more nutrients than your average processed sucrose. It is sweet, but perhaps not as sweet as you might imagine, and has a frothy, fermented quality to it.

Green is now my colour. It's my heart that is now being cleansed.

The Marvellous City. The City of God. I'd concur. Thank you for reading.

Harvest Moon

It's the Autumn Equinox, and a full moon. The first time in nearly 20 years they've coincided.

To mark the occasion and respect the feminine principle, I've just booked my flight to visit the water nymphs of Ipanema.
Hi...

I hear the train a comin'

For exactly 10 years now I have been meaning to travel. I came back from a year's travelling in 1999, did a course in London, and meant to go away again. I arrived at Heathrow the day after the solar eclipse, and looking at the newspapers in the newsstands, I could no longer relate to what was going on. I had felt the flow of travel, it had given me strength, and a wit, an optimism and a flexibility which removed me from the herd. At the time I did not know about the Control System, and was a long way from knowing about conspiracies and the deep historical corruptions which powerfully manipulate the minds and souls of all under its umbrella. But I knew something was not right. I also felt it - that there's something out there that is right.

I felt it first whilst deep-sea fishing in South Australia - cracking open a "stubby" whilst heading home at sunset, freshly-caught red snappers in the hold and dolphins following us, sillhouetted against the orange sun.

 Then again whilst cruising in my orange 1976 Holden Kingswood...

... I had been to see the New Year's celebrations in Adelaide. I had met a group of students that night, gone back to their place, sat in their gazebo smoking what can only be called "good shit". On my way back the next day, I was cruising down the Sturt Highway...

... with the windows down, a wide open road, warm winds blowing my hair. I suddenly felt a rush of... emotion. A big feeling, shivers running down my spine, an electricity and what I guess was freedom as an actual emotion. In motion, like an arrow, cruising forwards with the sun blessing everything around me.
Ever since I was never the same, and the experience of travel galvanised me in everything I did for the next decade.
Bear in mind I had come off the back of twenty years of indoctrination. Schooling, universities... that's all I knew. And now I was free.
So it wasn't books, it wasn't thought per se. It wasn't even the beautiful sights I saw - the scuba diving on the Great Barrier reef, the working on vineyards, the vibes of Melbourne. It was the people I met along the way, it was the motion, the constant improvisation, the knowing I could go anywhere, do anything.
In New Zealand I met an amazing, crazy Austrian girl who loved the Pogues and Irish pubs, and we bought a car together and drove around visiting just about every pub we passed in the misty wilderness.

 The Dutch girls in Surfer's Paradise, Dave in Sydney, parachuting onto a beach in Broome, surfing in Bondi,  winning 500 dollars in the Alice Springs casino, and seeing that incredible vortex at the centre of the continent.
Travelling alone, you are forced to confront the bounds of your experience, of your existence. Loneliness bites, so you got to get out there and talk to someone. You've got to have the resources, so you get resourceful. The idea of thought manifestation becomes important. And you always get what you ask for.

So I came back, and always intended to go away again. As soon as... and here's the rub... I had earned enough money.
Yes, I began to worship that false god. But I lived in London. An expensive city at any time. I was living it up and found it almost impossible to save money, espeically since I was still paying off debts.
And I got caught up. Long hours at investment banks, followed by long hours of drinking and whoring. I started to forget that elemental joy, once more.
But that's over. I've been out of work for a while now, as I can't join the slave-force, not now that my third eye has been polished.

Ever since that day of touching down in London, I knew where I really wanted to go next. A mystical land where they play football with magic, with joy.

 A land of beaches and rainforest. The land of samba and the girl from Ipanema.

 A place where "to party" actually means something...

 ... where women are feminine and free...

What's not to love? I've needed some time first to work on myself, change my outlook, do a little deprogramming, a little reprogramming. But that's where I'm headed, and I'm so excited and nervous about the prospect that I can hardly stay still. InMotion is EMotion.

It may be that the place will change in the future. The fact that both the Olympics and the next World Cup are to be hosted there, suggests that it is set to be the next place to be fed upon by the psychic vampires. Indeed it may be that it has been left alone, like a farmer leaves fields fallow in order for them to become fertile once more. Given how barren my homeland has become, how utterly desolate, surely the soul-suckers are going to have to move on. Mission accomplished, nothing left to eat here.

This is conjecture - after all, I haven't been to South America before. I haven't seen it yet. To me it still has that quality of dreams, of exotic smells and hot sun, of smiling beautiful women and dancing and music that comes from the soul. But my intuition has been pulling me there for a long time, and I was held back by... programming.

No one deserves the life that people around here have. It's not even a life - these people are, unfortuately, already dead. They're gonna be going back round the ferris wheel in the next life. Reminds me a bit of a snatched bit of programming from one of the major soap operas in this country, which I overheard as I was passing. Even when you avoid the idiot box its tentacles still reach out to you. One character wanted to go live somewhere else, and the reply was, "what, you think you're too good for us?"
What a statement. Guilt-tripping, implying callousness and delusions of grandeur, ridden with disdain for advancement, for movement, for travel. How about this, mate - we're all too good for this shit. Every one of us. And you can either stay here and wallow in it, or move on. Inside and outside - just move on. Grow. Let the light in, let the light out. Should I stay here and fight the World Order? Loyalty and attachment to a certain nation is some kind of psychic disease. If there was any semblance of community around here, there would be a reason to stay. If my family weren't the dysfunctional set of friendly strangers that the Control System modelled, I may have a heavier heart leaving them. Sure, I could work on myself, get better and better. Broadcast my message far and wide. But I can do that in a beautiful place, too, one that feeds my soul and speeds up my spiritual metabolism.