Hello Brasil!

I'm here, I made it down in one piece!  That was one of the most uncomfortable nights of my life, but from the looks of things down here well worth it.  Between the two layovers and long plane rides I spent  just about a total of 15 hours on  trave l down here.  Brasil is what I expected it to be, as well as so much more.  The people and the bit of the city that I have seen so far are very different than back home. 

First Impressions

The first thing that really hit me was how nice and open the Brazilians are.  The longest flight that I had was from DC to Sao Paulo.  It was just over nine and a half hours of total flight time in the middle of the night.  I had an isle seat which was awesome and sitting next to me was a young Brazilian couple.  Those two have really set the tone for how Brazilians act and interact.  Right off the bat they were extremely friendly and were having fun talking to me in english.  Within the first thirty minutes they had invited me to come and stay in Sao Paulo with them at their house and they would take me out.  They admitted that Sao Paulo doesn't have the beaches that Rio has to offer, but that they knew many places to dance.  Like EVERYWHERE.  From what I gather about Sao Paulo after talking with them is that it's just basically one big club, everyone dancing all the time...like MTV's the grind or something.  As we landed and they prepared to leave they forced their telephone number onto me and insisted that I call them to go dancing.  

Dennis from Connection Rio set me up with a ride from the airport in Rio to where I am staying in Barra da Tijuca (pronounced Ba-ha da Ti-ju-ka).  It wound up being two of the guys from the academy in this little geo metro style car (i'll get to the cars and such in a bit).  They wouldn't let me carry my bags and worked diligently to pronounce my name for the duration of the ride.  The older one, nicknamed "peach" I think...I couldn't really understand him, is in his late forties and started training when Renzo was a purple belt.  Peach is like the second in command at Gordo's academy and I was really surprised that he would spend his time to come and get me.  He has trained with pretty much the who's who of JiuJitsu and has to be the most mellow person I have ever met.  The other one who came to get me was named Ebu, again there's a good possiblity that I am way off here, and he works at the academy cleaning and the such and in return he gets to train there.  JiuJitsu is a way out of the wrong kind of life down here and it's really humbling to see someone in that position so happy.  Ebu looks like a little monster, a few inches shorter than me, gnarly cauliflower ears and built like a bull.  He barely spoke any english but liked pointing out all the favelas and saying "like slums in english" the best he could.  I imagine if it wasn't for JiuJitsu that is were he would be.  

To fully understand the academy and house where I am staying you will need to see pictures so I will get on that.  It's funny though, as we were pulling up to the house the guys that are staying here were all walking down the street to the academy in there kimonos.  It was a really funny site to see but awesome that we just throw our stuff on and in less than a minute are at the academy training.  Im not sure the training schedule yet but it seems that there are classes all day starting early in the morning.  Tomorrow I plan on hitting up my first class...Ive already heard so much.

The Word

The word on training down here, so far as I will confirm this shortly, is that the purple belts are like brown belts back home.  Not that that matters to me as Ive never trained with either back home.  The guys were rattling of names of who they train with regularly, Pe De Pano, Rafeal Dos Santos, and Antonio Braga Neto to name a few.  AWESOME!  Those are all big boys.  Everyone keeps telling me not to get frustrated basically because I probably suck compared to everyone else...oh goodie