Elementalidad

Well I´ve been in brasil one week and have pretty much been exposed to only one group of capoeira.  So based on my impressions thus far, I just want to get some of the thoughts out of my head that i´ve been running around with for the past few days.   My goal is not to offend here, but simply to critique a couple things from an outsider´s point of view. One of the bigest things GUETO has been preaching is that capoeira is these days exploited for tourism. They are trying to distinguish themselves as a more of a cultural association and teach students appreciation for the arts and apart from capoeira, incorporate other aspects of afro-brasilian cultural dance like puxada de rede, maculelé, and samba de roda. They also told me that they dont like the group of which i was a part of in the US called ABADA Capoeira based on their style of play, and according to them, their goal to own the world….. so,  my goal the past few days has been to attempt to let them see that critiquing is ok, but they could be much more useful to be happy of who they are and where they are going, and not put so much negative energy to badmouth other guy.  As far as i can tell, every group has an external appearance as well as their internal practices.  From the outside, and from what i´ve seen in their presentations, GUETO could easily be mistaken for just another extravogant capoeira show with their university and mall presentations attempting to sell their instruction to prospective students and families looking for alternatives to drugs etc. for their kids.  Of course they are not just show, they have structure and good intentions as does every group of capoeira I imagine.  

ABADA has their own style and their own method of teaching, perhaps different from the free-style vibe of Salvador Bahia. But to GUETO I say: calm down here, you cant negate their existence as one of the largest groups in the world…. even if they have emerged as the McDonalds of capoeira, their system of training, and instruction must be doing something right!  A few members have told me that my abada t-shirt is not well received in Bahia and that i shouldnt wear my corda crua (a beginners cord in the ABADA cord system) because this color in general is the color of mestres cords, which is true. I´m fine to forego the advertising and wear and wear all white with no cord, however the constant negativity against ABADA as a group and persistent badmouthing of other groups that to them have lost something of the “true essence” of capoeira, I find it to be redundant, petty and even offensive. I explained to them to take it easy and step back and look at what they are saying and to whom they are speaking…  Im not Brasilian and i dont care about petty bickering, machismo, and competition for new $tudent$ between schools.  Furthermore, i reasoned to them that without ABADA I would have never been introduced to capoeira and its highly likely i wouldnt be where i am today, and perhaps wouldn´t even exist as a capoeirista. Unlike Brasil, in the exterior much of the time there is no choice of schools / methods / mestres, in fact there is only ONE school in my city.   I understand that the dynamic between mestres and personalities here is a complex, living, changing situation, but i believe capoeira is a beautiful means for cultural exchange and its really tiring to see so much negativity intertwined with the art.

My friend Marek, after a recent visit to Ecuador, found and sent me a link to an article about climbing Ruca Pichincha near Quito.   I really liked the article and upon browsing the site, called Live Travel Guides (www.livetravelguides.com) for a few minutes found many other great articles filled with tons of great advice and travel tips of locations all around me here in Ecuador I realized how useful this gem could be.   With the help of the travel comunity this site could effectively overrule the need for hauling around a thick bible, (a.k.a, LP Guides, Shoestring, Footprint) of where to go and what to do in South America.   Along with the other list of webtools I’ve put together on my site,  its really becoming much easier to get to many interesting and unique places a bit further “off the gringo trail”.  Of course, the caveat being that as sites like this become more popular,  the places they elaborate about become more turistic and less off the gringo trail.   But I believe the goal is not to hide away all the cool places in the world,  rather, to keep the information about these places as up to date as possible. Much of the information in these softback ”bibles”  we travelers follow is VERY often outdated,  missinformed,  or misleading.   I will suggest this site to the CouchSurfing.com community’s South America group. 

As a traveler, a tech person, and occasional internet addict, I’ve been slowly scouring the web over the past few years for the most useful sites and computer tools I can find to help the independent globetrotter while on the road in distant countries. These tools range from travel forums, to wiki guides, to finding free worldwide accomodation, to getting there cheaply. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently received an email inquiry about how to go to the Galapagos Islands on a budget. I have an Ecuadorian friend that has worked on a cruise ship that frequented the islands, as well as a friend that purportedly made the trip on a budget. Perhaps the most relevant fact though is that I’m now (relatively) close to the islands and therefore have more immediate access to the kind of first person local information one needs to get informed about a place; not to mention that I myself was curious to find out if such a thing as “Galapagos on a Budget” even exists. Below is a copy of what I was able to find out and send in reply to the recent inquiry…

Technorati Tags: budget, galapagos, ecuador, travel

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I´ve recently been given some web design projects to work on for the next few weeks while in Ecuador. So today as i am getting back into the swing of work I somehow became distracted (for better or worse, is still to be determined) by this new thing floating around the web being blogged, highly praised and supported mainly by the mac geek / programmer / web designer / blogger crowd. Its commonly tagged as GTD which stands for a productivity technique coined by David Allen’s book Getting Things Done. There’s lots of support and ideas (AJAX websites (like 43folders.com, downloadable software plugins to your favorite apps such as “Kinkless”) popping up around the idea, and incase you dont want to buy the book you can get an idea of what its all about from the MineZone site’s notes from the book. I have particularly picked up on the idea of the formalized idea about a hipster pda and found some useful cutout templates to printout and use on index cards, to get organized, motivated, and productive.

![77240488][small][alignright] yeah, haiti. i didnt make it inside because i left my passport with the motorcycle rental company. a mistake, because i really did want to cross the border and see what it was like there. there are plenty of hatians here in the DR and from what i can gather from other travelers and locals is that its not really as dangerous as everyone (eg, media in the US) makes it out to be. the exception being of course the capital city of port-au-prince, which was nowhere near where i would be crossing. the fact is the people there REALLY need tourism to bring in much needed dollars. the people are poor and have been abused by their tyranical and corrupt government and the evil upper class who dont do the slightest things to help their country or their poor. In fact, from a budget traveler’s perspective, there’s no reason not to go: everything is quite affordable (much more so than even here in the dominican republic), there is great carribean climate, the weather is typically dry, the kreyole language is cryptic but beautiful, the people are amiable and proud of their music and culture and have preserved their african roots better than any other american nation. I’m a bit dissappointed even now that i have returned the bike and now have my passport, becuase i’ve realised there is no time because carol will join me in 2 days to celebrate the new years.

Today was an exercise in life simplification. The routine equaled any other saturday spent grounded in the city; slept in late… struggled through a midday capoeira workout… enduring the dreary ride back home across the city… and so it continued, but with one subtle difference. Today I began what is probably considered one of the more difficult tasks of preparing for liftoff: reducing clutter.

Corporate downsizing, a buzzword popularized by the end of the american economic boom (coinciding with the end of a Gregorian millennium), is a commonly accepted method involving cutting costs, exporting work and resources to needy and cheap third world countries. Its generating lots of buzz these days with companies moving to offshore labor and resources, but somehow cutting down on personal dross tends to go against everything the commercial world preaches through cleverly placed adverts to their target markets.

Introducing Acme product line QRSTU. You need products Q, R, S, T, U! [repeated 2x daily]. Ok, so you bought and own my products S, T, and U. I know you love them but wait, have you heard of new and improved F? You REALLY need F… buy-one-get-one-free.

I’ve suddenly been sparked into action to start my consumer downsizing as an effort to loosen my roots from the red clay that binds me to my home in north carolina and to free me from the “work, produce, consume” state of mind. cleaning out corporate deadwood is a fundamental technique embraced by every businessman in all history but generally the individual does not possess the motivation to cut out their deadwood. But then, seemingly out of nowhere a swelling grows from within. Its some basic inexplicable instinct to experince new sights and sounds and cover new ground. To be an airbourne seed, lifted from the tree by the whisp of a windy day. This is exactly what has happened to me; since my return from a six month circuit through south america, ive been hit once again with a serious case of travelbug. I’ve known for a while now that I will inevitably be pulled back to the road and it’s just been a matter of time for an opportunity to present itself and for another burst of wanderlust to grab hold.

So I finally acted upon a process that I’ve been devising in my head over the past year or so of just exactly how to clean up my living space and cut out the deadwood in order to facilitate ease of globalmotion. The first step was that I took a veritable boatload of old well used clothes that I’ve aggregated and carried with me to the various dorm rooms and cheap college apartments over the past 8 years. I parted with white running shoes, brazen (a.k.a., gaudy) floral neck-ties, soccer cleats with 5 year old mud stains, holy white tee-shirts (from years of over-bleaching), multiple pair of corduroy pants, stretched out sweatshirts… I even left behind the luggage that I used to carry them to the drop-off point It was a truly liberating feeling to get this stuff thats been collecting dust in my closet out of my bedroom and into the hands of some people that perhaps can make good of the excess crap i own. Although I’ve done my share of thrift store bargain hunting this was my first experience supplying products to the cause. I was surprised to find out that you can give away your junk and get a receipt for the transaction. A momentary thought flashed through my head. Could you actually claim someone taking your leftovers as a deduction when you file taxes? I guess I’ll never know because I turned down the receipt with the justification that the additional paper would only add to the clutter that I’m trying to clear out.

Technorati Tags: awareness