Update

Here goes.

Over the past month I've started to travel a lot more, hitting such notable destinations as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. I've actually been to São Paulo a bunch of times over the past two months or so for reasons that I will explain later.

Rio was really awesome. That city is much more Brazil to me than São Paulo is. From what I've seen, São Paulo is sort of like New York but with more of the bad stuff and less of the good stuff. While it is in many ways the cultural and financial epicenter of Brazil, it's got no style; sure you can go to museums and get a good job there, but it's big, ugly, dirty, polluted, and dangerous. (São Paulo is really big, enormous to the tune of 20 million people).

Rio, on the other hand, has charm and is a fantastic tourist city (minus the crime which is purportedly even worse than in São Paulo). Rio is warm and sunny and colorful. It has beautiful beaches and incredible sites to visit (Pão de Açúcar and Christ the Redeemer). It has samba and funk and parties in the streets. It's residents walk around in standard Rio attire: t-shirt, shorts, and flip flops. Like the country itself, Rio has beauty and glamour next door to wretched poverty and crime; its favelas literally stretch as far as the eye can see. Rio is Brazil.

My most important announcement isn't about travel and is the primary reason why I haven't been posting. Instead of my usual work-basketball-party routine, I've been in more of a spend-all-my-time-with-my-girlfriend routine. That's right, girlfriend. Her name is Ruth and she is awesome. We've been together for about 2 months now and pretty much all my time not spent working is spent with her. She's an anthropology student at UNICAMP (the big university I live near) in her second to last year. She's short, cute, funny, smart as a whip, and silly as a goose. Here's us together:

Here's us posing for the camera and laughing about some damn thing. Notice the tip toes -- so short!

I wish I had some sillier pictures but alas my mother f-ing camera was stolen. When I get some better ones I'll throw them up here. I think you get the idea though.

We're toeing the line on this being truly serious business. I've met the family a few times (they live in São Paulo and that's why I've been there so much) and she's coming to the U.S. in December and is going to spend Christmas at my house. My plan is to come back next summer after graduation and do a Master's degree at UNICAMP in linguistics. Our travel plans were already prearranged (or at least preconceived) before meeting each other, so this isn't just young love naïvité, but that is a good part of it.

That's enough for today. I'll see you around the next tube of the Internet. Bye bye.