The Culture of the Dirty Foot

Hello again. It's been a busy weekend again. Friday the gang went to Lapa with some of the kids from school and saw Nouvelle Vague at this cool venue called the CircoPoador. Very fun. During one of the songs some guy climbed onstage and started samba-ing with the girls. Nice. Saturday was back to Lapa again, this time we started out at one of the little street bars. Here is where the dirty foot comes into play. Apparently, so my Brazilian friend tells me, this kind of bar, where the beer is cheap and the tables and chairs are of the stackable kind so as to fill the streets at night, these kind of places are called pesujo bars, meaning little dive bars or whole-in-the-wall places. But pesujo literally translates as dirty foot, pe-sujo. Very fitting, judging by the blackened condition of my foot by the end of the night. Muaha.

Let's see, what else have I been up to. Krista and I bought a Brazilian cell phone. Woo hoo! Finally coerced after we had our social life explode in our faces. Very exciting, it's prepay but you can buy the cards at any magazine stand, which are literally every 15 feet on the sidewalk anywhere in the city.

Hmmm. My roommates and I are starting a Tuesday night family dinner. Krista and I are cooking. Ha. We considered just getting some Big Macs and Fries and setting them on plates just to make our haute couture cuisine-ily inclined euro roommates mad. Nah we'll spare them.

Krista and I are noticing a lot more prejudice towards the foreigners. We've encountered a few instances where store owners were unwilling to serve us or speak to us because we are from os estados unidos. While rare, it is something to think about, being on the other side of the divide. On the whole, everyone is really excited to speak to us and hear all about our exciting lives in this great exotic land of Oooohhioooo. Most people ask if it's like California. Ha. Sometimes I let them live the lie.

One other thing that is crazy here is the amount of impoverished kids running about. They range from about 5 years old to 16, and they roam in terrifying packs trying to wrangle change where they can, in exchange for some gum or mints. They are very aggressive, a lot of them look like they are high, and they seem to be the biggest threat on the beaches. They sleep on the streets, even near my apartment. I used to like watching the Genie the Wild Child specials on the Discovery Channel, it's kind of like that. Rio has its own breed of urban feral children. Like an LOTF adaptation in NYC on heroin with Portuguese subtitles. Something along those lines.