Best Holiday Wishes 2009

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

I've come home to discover my parents decided to decorate the tree with a "Nature Captured in its Natural State" theme.

Best New York City is Full of Helpers

East Broadway Station, I had just paid Andy a visit. The curving of the platform caught my eye, this joker jumped into the frame. What a cheeseball! But her certainly brought some flair to the shot.

Best There Was a Small Problem This Morning

This morning (and I was leaving a little later than usual and yes, I had heard a lot of noise in the hall) I had a real hard time getting my apartment door open to get out.

Because it was all taped up.


And my hall looked like this.


It was sealed off from the rest of my floor. I had to tear my way through that plastic, more or less. I ran into workers on my way out, they laughed, they'd been told no one was in our apartment.


This place could use a lot more signs or visits from the management.

Best Sixth Day in Rio: We Get Off the Island

We woke up in Ilha Grande Friday morning with a responsibility: the responsibility of waking those lazy girls. Chateau did it with song.


I want to show you the shark poster that was up at the Inn,

This is the bathroom for gentlemen in Brazil, this is the bathroom that I use.

We had a ferry to catch back to civilization at 5:30, that gave us a lot of time for one more key adventure: hiring a boat and rappelling down a waterfall.

Boat hired. He was not the Captain.

The hike to the waterfall was not as easy as hoped. Oh my poor hams! But here's the waterfall!

From the ground I caught the action. And if you are asking why I didn't participate, then you don't know enough about my knees and elbows for me to explain it here. And another reason: my burnt up feet.

One by one, my buddies all descended. A few times a trip the rapel master would have the rapeller give a turn to get blasted by the waterfall, so keep an eye out for that.





Others, locals and tourists, enjoying the waterfall.

Back to my buddies making there way down:












Hiking back to the boat, so hot and dirty and terrible on that hill. My hams got their second roasting of the day. But getting back to the beach was nice.




Next stop? Lunch on a beach somewhere else on the island, somewhere where they had a zipline. (Click that video and you'll see Bryndee zipping)



Another thing they had: friendly kids, kids without fear.




And also, they fried fish for me. (Not the kids, the people of the beach. At their restaurant)

A little more playing around, and then we boarded our boat and headed back to homebase.


Everything seemed to be going as planned until we discovered we were cutting it very, very close on the ferry. We were the very last to board, if it weren't for the diligence and persuasiveness of someone we were paying to get us back to Rio, we would have surely spent another night on our island paradise.







We disembarked in the charming town of Angra, here we took a waiting van back to Rio.


BEACH DOGS. A whole wonderful pack of rebels and scamps!

Banned from Angra: Crocodiles, I suppose.

Returned home to our dear Girl from Ipanema Hostel we enjoyed a private room to ourselves this time. And by "private room to ourselves" I mean a hallway with bunkbeds in it that other people passed through at all hours.

That night? Taxi'd over to the Lapa neighborhood to enjoy the nightlife. The nightlife had me on edge, but here's a market-ish place full of food stands beside the arcos.


And here's from the inside of a bar/restaurant/whatever it might have been where we enjoyed some samba--at times melodic and lovely, at times cacophonous and grating.


Doesn't this wrap up of our night out seem a touch brief? Danger Supplement #6, my friends. Danger Supplement #6.

Best Wait, I Thought of a Question

A Poll, really:

Are You...

"Going back to Cali, Cali, Cali"

or

"Going (going) back (back) to Cali (Cali)"?

Best Sorry Guys

I have been busy and redistributed my priorities. But I have content in the pipeline, it's just a matter of uploading photos. I should get an intern.

One Avatar thought...

OUT: Comparing Avatar to Dances With Wolves
IN: Comparing Avatar to Dune

Danger Supplement #5

There was no danger on Thanksgiving, only good things. But there was definitely something deserving of its own post.

In our Inn room, Chateau and I turned on the Brazilian news and saw this, which we answered immediately with hearty laughter that continued into the night:


The news was that 4 Brazilian guys (shown standing against the wall) had taken this car, loaded it onto their cart, and took it to sell as scrap. They hauled it for a kilometer before the cops stopped them. I hope they didn't go to jail, they deserved to be rewarded for their ingenuity.

Also deserving of a reward for ingenuity: Chateau, for finding this image. That's what happens when you can google in Portuguese.

Best Fifth Day in Rio: Thanks.

Thursday. Thanksgiving. It was a Thanksgiving to be thankful for. We signed on with a speedboat and spent the day snorkeling various coves, beaches, and middle-of-the water sites. It was all so magnificent and nearly unphotographable. We went to the Blue Lagoon, then a place where a sunken helicopter was--I swam down so deep to touch it, and then so deep to retrieve a giant star fish from one of its skids, and then so much deeper when I dropped the star fish by accident, but then I finally dropped it for good on purpose and it landed on its back. From above we watched transfixed as it slowly flipped itself over. A star fish has one job in life, and that's to flip himself over if he ever needs to. Then we went to a kelp farm full of sea turtles, how wonderful to spend Thanksgiving snorkeling with the sea turtles...and also, in the murky distance, I discerned a great and speckled ray. We went to what I think was the green lagoon and sat between shallow opposing tides, pulling us out to sea in one direction and then out to to sea in the other while a nearby party boat blasted 90's dance hit after 90's dance hit. We lunched on great platters of chicken, rice, fries and beans at a beachside eatery and visited even more beaches and played games of underwater handstand, underwater handwalking, and underwater teaparty. What a day! Perhaps the best was just being in the speedboat, applying innumerable coats of suntan lotion and bounding over waves between beaches, shooting through the air and then bottoming out with mighty thuds between waves. What a day!

Where we signed up for our boat and rented our flippers

To the ocean! To the waves!



Blue lagoon.

This is where the sunken helicopter was.

That's a kelp farm or an algae farm, here I met sea turtles.

The green lagoon, the water breathed through that passageway.

Thanksgiving feast one:

The proper way to enjoy a guarana is with a slice of oranged pinned beneath ice cubes.

Shining with the sheen of so much suntanlotioning.

I used my whole bottle that day. It featured 50 frames per second protection and provided 95% of my daily grape requirements.

Day has ended.

Thanksgiving feast two:

A very funky shrimp and cream cheese crepe.

Desserts.

You and me both, pal. What a day.

Danger Supplement #4

This Danger Supplement might be too intense for some readers, so you'll have to click on the links to see how bad things were.

Since we were hiking to Lopez Mendez I wore sneakers and socks. I lotioned up good for the day. But when I got to the beach I took off those sneakers and socks and spent the frolicking in the bright sun without a lick of protection upon my feet.

The result? A pair of fully baked hams. (click for grossness)

I nearly couldn't walk on them, the swelling and pain was astounding--they were so swollen I couldn't feel my bones. Good thing we spent the whole next day in water. Good thing that maybe I decided to bring certain mighty painkillers along for the trip.

And now they're all better. But the peeling was incredible. (click for more grossness)

Also, after we went swimming in the nice cool pool in the rain forest, Chateau's hands got real wrinkly. Really wrinkly. The hands of a dead man. (click for zombie hands)