I had my first classes on Monday. Beginning Portuguese is really the beginning—”What is your name? My name is…”—but you gotta start somewhere. I had a fair share of nodding-off during the day because I simply didn’t get enough sleep. In the early morning, before we had any classes, we were instructed to take a placement test. Just in case you needed more proof that you were a bum beginner… Really, though, it’s more for the people who can speak some Spanish already, since that augments your reading abilities while doing very little for your conversational skills.

Classes were all right, but afterwards we headed to a nearby capoeira school, Academia Mandinga, for a lecture and demonstration of capoeira. Again, I fell asleep during the lecture, which was droningly translated from Portuguese by the man who is going to be our TA for the culture class. But then we were invited to participate in some warm-ups and drills, and then in the capoeira roda (circle). Throwing kicks was pretty tiring; I haven’t done any of these exercises for a long time. In the roda, I seemed to forget all of the skills I’d ever learned, but it was still fun to play with the locals, as well as people from the program who’d had training before. It was definitely interesting to see capoeira of a different bent; the songs, the moves, the rhythm—all were entirely different from what I’d gotten used to in the Capoeira Brasil satellite class at UCLA.

I definitely want to join an academy as soon as possible. I mean, I’m in Brazil—I have to. But I did talk to one or two people from the program who didn’t see the merits of capoeira at all and intended to have nothing to do with it, preferring Afro-Brazilian dance. Well, different strokes for different folks! I just know that last night’s roda awakened something inside me that had been dormant for too long a while.