By Popular Demand

I am at the begin­ning of a two month trip to Rio de Janeiro, and many peo­ple asked if I was keep­ing a blog. When I said no, the responses ranged from sur­prise to dis­ap­point­ment. Thanks to your encour­age­ment and inter­est, I’ve decided to give it a go. Thanks! I appre­ci­ate it.

I am here to study in a three week course on Human Rights and Media offered through my Uni­ver­sity, The New School, in New York City. I had an amaz­ing course on Pho­tog­ra­phy and Human Rights with the pro­fes­sor of this pro­gram, Peter Lucas. Now, I am here two weeks early in the hopes to get to know the city and pick up some Por­tuguese. We’ll see how far I get.

I arrived on Tues­day and have had a mel­low week catch­ing up with con­tacts, find­ing an apart­ment, and look­ing for a Por­tuguese tutor. I am real­iz­ing that my ambi­tions with Por­tuguese are a lit­tle unre­al­is­tic. I am flu­ent in Span­ish, and I am pick­ing up the pro­nun­ci­a­tion dif­fer­ences quickly enough, but two weeks will only get me so far. I guess the only option is to have fun with it and not worry!

Look how cute my apart­ment is!

The day after I arrived, I looked at five apart­ments from four peo­ple. The one that Dieine of Copa Apart­ments showed me was by far the nicest and I decided it was worth the extra pocket change. Many places had bug prob­lems, no light, or were jack­ing up their prices for the Pan Amer­i­can games in July. This place had tons of light, just a few ants, and the same price for both months, so here I am.

The next day, Thurs­day, I met up with Wayne, and acquain­tance from New York who hap­pens to be in Rio. I found out he was in Rio to by chance through a photographer’s net­work­ing web­page. Check out his blog. He is also a pho­tog­ra­pher and has some fun stuff to say about his month here so far.

We went to a Quilom­binho con­cert put on by Crescer e Vivir, an orga­ni­za­tion that works with street kids in the sur­round­ing favela com­mu­ni­ties to teach fam­ily val­ues and pro­mote local cul­tural prac­tices. The shows are held every Thurs­day evening under the tent used to teach the kids cir­cus arts.

See more of my pho­tos of the show.