Drinking and Brazil

why do i drink? why did i move to brazil to be on a beach for 7 months?

i drink because i'm bored. i drink to bring out a more creative side of me. i do it because i like the way it makes me feel. i don't drink when i'm sad. i like who i am and i like to drink. is there anything confusing or complicated about that?

i didn't intend to go to brazil to sit on a beach. i never knew what i was getting myself into. i went to brazil because i'm impulsive. i require change because i find the most growth in change. changing anything! moving furniture around. changing jobs. changing friends. changing locations. anything different is a fertile ground for growth. i don't need to be "stable" but i need to be balanced. they're not the same thing. when i bought my ticket to brazil, it was an impulsive decision. i was dating this guy (a good friend, now) and we were planning to move to spain together. i was looking for programming jobs for him. well, one night, we got into a fight. at 5am, i impulsively bought a ticket to rio. i was like, fuck it. i'm leaving. and that's how it happened. i left myself two months to plan, to make some more cash so i could live there. i had bought a return flight so i wouldn't be trapped in brazil with no money, no way to make money. then i told all my hair clients i was leaving and scoured the internet for places to live.

i eventually found a house in a little surf town called "praia do rosa" on the south coast. the little place looked like a tree house. it was so hemmingway-esque. a breeding ground for creativity. i needed it. it became what i obsessed about. it was going to be my life. when i arrived, i landed in rio. from there, i had to take a 13 hr bus ride south, due to a flight being canceled. from there, i had to take a small bus to another town. from that small town, i took an even more rickety bus to praia do rosa. i thought, jesus christ. what am i doing here? i was in the middle of nowhere. never in my wildest dreams had i imagined being in that place. mountains and beauty, beach, cows, horse-drawn carts, little cars, poor people walking on the side of the highway, concrete storefronts with brightly painted signs, old men in shoddy bars in the middle of the day. it was all so foreign, for lack of a better word.

i tried to find work. i did. but working at a salon was fruitless. haircuts cost $5 in that town. i decided to budget and save my time for leisure instead of work. so that's what i did. i sat on the beach and did absolutely nothing for 7 months. i mean i did stuff. i started to learn to surf when the water was warm enough. i learned about brazilian culture through language, food, dance, music, television. i learned about the people, how to survive, how things work there. how to negotiate. i learned more in those 7 months than one can learn in any classroom.

and that's why i moved to brazil. yeah. i'm just now coming up with a reason.