Posts from — January 2008

My weekend went a little different than planned. Things I do always go a little different than planned, I am used to it First, let me tell you what was planned.

On Saturday, I was going to go to this metal festival in Ervália, about 300Km from Belo Horizonte. During last week I found some people on Orkut (the number 1 Brasilian social network) that were going to Ervália also and I arranged to go with them in a van. I was gonna come back during the night and then go trekking (in Holland we call it hiking ) in the hills outside Belo Horizonte on Sunday. I could have known that this was not the way it was going to be

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Today I want to talk to you about another very interesting and socially important thing I have found here in Brasil: Maids.

First, you should know (if I haven’t ranted about this already;) ) that here in Brasil one of the small problems with couchsurfing is that most of the hosts are young, middle/upper-middle class people. That has probably tainted my view of Brasil a little and that’s something I wish I could change, but for now I can’t. So keep that in mind when reading this article please

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There was quite a nice article about Belo Horizonte in the NY times recently. I can recommend you all to read it so you can hear from a third party how nice BH is

• I have had the apartment for myself for the last 8 or so days, so I have been working in the peace and quiet of my own place. I haven’t gone anywhere or done anything exciting during the week. Basically waking up anywhere between 5 and 7 and walking straight from my bed to my laptop to work. Programming feels good, although I am amazed at how much I have forgotten in 4 months of doing nothing. Of course there is also the simmering thoughts in the background that have been keeping me busy and will probably do so for the next few months.

Click through for more random thoughts

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So I have been watching a lot of movies lately. I have found a list of movies recommended by brasilian couchsurfers and I have watched a bunch of the movies on that list just to see what brasilian movies are like and to learn a bit more about the culture. Here’s a list of the ones that I can recommend to any of you. They can all easily be found as torrents (use www.torrentscan.com, very easy torrent search engine searcher ) and english subtitles are also available from subtitle websites.

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When looking for a specific picture from Slovakia I noticed that I never uploaded the pictures from Czech Republic, Slovakia and theway back to Rotterdam through Hungary, Austria and Germany. I uploaded them now so go take a look!

I also uploaded some pictures from meetings and random views here in BH and some pictures from the christ’s statue in Rio.