words, words, words

I have been noticing something in my Brazilian jiu-jitsu training lately.  If I look up a technique I want to try before class, I tend to over-focus on trying to find an opportunity to do that particular move.  Lets take, for example, the Otto-Plata.  I will spend a few rolls with my partners trying to find the opportunity to sink the Otto-Plata and get distracted from what is really going on.  This will happen until I am stuck under cem kilos still searching for it and realize that I need to get the hell out of there.

Or, in other words, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

I start to lose focus on the gestalt of what is going on and keep looking for something to hammer nail.

So I am trying to back off the techniques and stick to basic movements, that way, I’ll be able to get into positions to find the nail.
I’m going to just go to class with goals like: “today I will Elvis-ize my hips”.  They are a bit too stuck to the mat.

All that said, training is going well.  I’ve basically recovered from all my injuries and the new cracks and creaks in my formerly injured joints are just the soundtrack to me rolling around trying to hammer things.

We just returned from another competition. This one was the Arena Búzios 2008. It was in Búzios, which is the beautiful are a few hours from Rio.

I got second in my weight division and second in the absolute. The bling collection just keeps growing…

Bit of a rainy day in Rio, but it is still warm. It was good to get out of Rio for a couple of days and see some more of Rio de Janeiro state. Also, the contest was almost entirely devoid of grigoes, so everyone got to compete against Brazilians this time.

The International Masters and Seniors Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competition ended a few days ago. I wound up getting third in my weight division, and had a really bad draw for the absolute. I fought the biggest dude I´ve ever seen at a competition. He was 125 kilos of muscle. However, I did actually fight him, instead of backing out. Apparently a couple of other people looked at him and said ´no thanks´. So now, I won´t be scared to fight big dudes. They have feelings too!

Other than myself, the guys from my academy did really well and my instructor Flavio Ferreira, won his division in black belt.

I´ve been going to the beach, have seen the Big Jesus at Corcovado and went up Sugarloaf. Rio is such a beatuiful city. The people are really nice, too. Hopefully the surf will pick back up and I will get a board.   I´ve been eating heaps of Acaí!!!

The International Master & Senior Jiu-Jitsu Championship 2008 starts in Rio on Thursday.

I”m going to be competing in the Pesado / Heavy category for Master’s.  It is the Mundials for the … mature… eh hem.

Of course, I”ve got both of my knees injured and am still two kilos over my weight, so my goals are to make weigh-in and not get any further injuries… oh… and to win my division.  But I’m being realistic about it.  I haven’t had a chance to really prepare for this competition.  So I have reasonable expections.  In fact, this is the least prepared I’ve ever been for any competition.

I procrastinated long enough about writing about the Pantanal.

It was really a great experience.  We flew into Cuiaba and were met with by our guide, Vincente.  A super-nice, and a little bit goofy guide, who then took us on long drive to the lodge where we were staying.  Along the way we saw giant river otters, crab eating foxes, millions of caymans and all sorts of birds — everything from Hyacinth macaws to kingfishers to jaibaru storks.  The giant otters were very cool, being very giant and very rare.

We arrived at Pousada Onca, and then got up at 3:30 in the morning for a night saffari. But we didn’t see anything more than a fox, probably the animals were sleeping.

Then after finishing sleeping we went to Porto Jofre where we took a couple of long boat rides looking for jaguars. We saw a lot of birds and had a really good fish lunch, but no-dice on the jaguars.   After that we had dinner and another night safari where we saw a deer.  From that point on we did a bunch  of hikes, and Vincente said he saw an onca, but nobody else did.  I did have a really serious allergy problem when he said he saw it, so perhaps I’m allergic to jaguars.  We were almost attacked by a deer, which was very strange.  It was being chased by something and almost ran into us on a dirt road.  It must have thought that were less dangerous than the animal chasing it, but it was almost close enough to touch.

One of the big highlights of the trip for me was a visit to an abandoned research station, where they had all sorts of animals in jars that they had left behind.  Very creepy and very cool!

Pantanal is a mecca for bird watchers, who are an interesting, if eclectic bunch.  They travel with spreadsheets and lots of equipment hoping to see all manner of birds. 

From the Pantanal we went to Chapada de Guimaraes, which is a city in the mountains outside of Cuiaba (Cuiaba being the world’s most boring city).  It was really nice and we did a couple of really cool hikes and went swimming in a waterfall.

Some pictures are below.

Pantanal

Current temperature in Porto Alegre, Brazil: 8°C
Current temperature in Juneau, Alaska: 8°C

I just returned from a weekend with my friend, who we’ll call, Bubba Tribunales (hereinafter:BT), to Buenos Aires, Argentina.

I thought I would put up some notes and thoughts about the trip.

After a few false starts with my Spanish, I got into the groove of the language again.  At first, the swirl of Spanish/Portuguese was pretty bad.  It wasn’t that I  that I felt like I couldn’t speak, I was starting to feel like there was something wrong with my brain.  I wasn’t even sure I could speak English after a while.  But eventually I started shifting gears and was able to communicate, even if I had to hack a bit and had forgotten some words.  It’s funny how the effort of trying to communicate can make you sweat!    I could understand everyone, but flipping through the files in my brain for the right words when speaking was taxing.

Buenos Aires is geographically fairly near Porto Alegre, but it is not very similar.  Primarily, BA is a metropolis, and it seems to change character with every corner.  Sometimes it feels like Manhattan, sometimes like Madrid, sometimes France, and other times, like no place else in the world but BA.  So whatever it feels like, it is certainly not POA.  The shoes are one of the first things you notice.  Shoes seem to be all about elevation here in Porto Alegre. The higher the better.  However, in Buenos Aires Chuck Taylor All-Stars seem to rule the day.  Oh and in BA, people tend to look a bit like members of the Ramone’s.  (Possibly adding to the band’s huge popularity.  Perhaps the band is a bit more accessible, since the members look like your neighbors — but that is a PhD in itself, just waiting to be written.)

There is a lot of art in BA.  And there is really great music played on the streets there.

We met some fellow travelers in the La Recoleta cemetery joined them for coffee and then went to a milonga.  Now, I didn’t know much about this before we went, but from what I gather, a milonga is a place where people dance tango, and it is also a type of tango.  These people were incredibly talented.  A lot of the people dancing were actually instructors at some of the schools in town.  It was not a place to “give tango dancing a shot”, so BT and I were on the sidelines watching.  Like watching any masters of a craft it was awesome and inspiring.

BT and I met up with a longtime friend of mine, Gabi.  She is Argentinian, but I met in Madrid when I was living there, a long time ago.  She is a musician, amongst numerous other skills and her
band site is here.  It was great to catch up with her.

If I can be allowed a bit of navel gazing.  I seemed to notice a trend with Aregtines.  It seems like they have less fear of economic uncertainty, perhaps because the majority of them have already lived though the type of things that scare the crap out of USAians and Western Europeans.  As things decay more rapidly in the USA and UK we could do well to take a page out of their book and try to figure out how to weather our own economic storm.    This type of can-do-ish-ness, dedication to the arts and desire to do things that make them happy rather than sitting in an office was great to see.

An interesting development that is happening right there are some problems with “el campo”.  These have been caused by the government of Cristina Kirchner.  I believe the problems started with the introduction of a sliding scale of taxes on agricultural goods.  This has resulted in a number of “cacerolas“.  The cacerola is a Argentinian type of protest in which people go to the streets and bang on casserole pots with sticks.  While we were in BA there were roadblocks set up by farmers as well as “Cacerola”.   In short, this means trouble for the government and everyone agrees that something has to change: not only that the people are taking to the streets to bang pots and demand the change.  Again, I only wish that Americans would do the same thing. *sigh*

Here are some photos:

Buenos Aires

I am in the middle of writing a big old blog post about my trip to Buenos Aires. It was really interesting, and fun, so I’ll have an update soon.

Also, I am going to the Pantanal in a couple of weeks for a bit, before I go to Rio for the nternational Master & Senior Jiu-Jitsu Championship.  It is like the Munidals, for the — eh hem — mature.

I’m packing to go to Buenos Aires in a few moment, putting some last minute text files on my iPod.  But that reminds me, I have a problem with my iPod on airplanes.  As soon as the cabin pressurizes, my iPod freezes.  I did a cursory search on the Internet and can’t find anyone else with the same problem.  The whole device makes this terrible grinding sound and the display stops working.  There is a little flashing broken iPod.  Then as soon as the cabin pressurizes, when we land thank god, the things starts working again.  It is really weird.

I’m gong to Buenos Aires on Sunday with a friend from London.  I’m going to be there for a week, eating and site seeing and stuff, and hopefully catching up with some old amigos.

Curious how the Spanish is going to work out now that the Portuguese has eaten up the space in my brain.

I had an MRI on my knee today (another pinche injury, but I think this one is minor).  I had heard a lot of complaints from people about how it is noisy and scary to be put in the machine.  Truth be told, it was kind of relaxing.  I got to lie down and was inserted into a tube.  Then the sounds of the machine were kind of musical.  A sort of Philip Glass meets Basement Jaxx.  The beats were interesting becasue they were in off time, grinding sounds, whirring sounds, clicking sounds and a timer as well.  The sounds would overlap and stacking, creating dissonance, etc.

I am going to look for mp3s of MRI machines, and if there aren’t any, then I should create them.  It is an medical-industrial symphony. I think it could work on a let of levels.