Sunny times = Happy times

I know that I start so many posts with the by now familiar phrase ``This last weekend was great´´ but there is really no other way to go about it. I started playing pick up games of american football with some freinds from the other highschool here in Viseu. Every friday we meet up in an abandoned parking lot in the outskirts of the town to play. The scene is somthing like one would expect to find in the days of Sandlot. (great movie) There is a supermarket, a stretch of big road, a big field and us; running, grabbing, catching, laughing, all those great things that come with friends and a ball. We use the lines of the parking lot as yard markers and set up TD zones with our backpacks and bicycles. We get a diverse mixture of kids at our games, girls, boys, rugby stars and math wizes. Now, football is not the easiest of sports to master and therefore I do a lot of explaining and sometimes things meltdown into utter havok, but we have our fun just the same. After this fridays game I went to a jazz concert at the Teatro Viriato. It was an interesting show to say the least. The band was made up of a bassist, pianist, and drummer. They played the craziest experimental jazz I have ever heard in time signatures that I thought impossible to exist and ended every song in perfect harmony and coordination. It was something to experience. They are called Mikado Lab. I think they have myspace and I´m sure are worth a quick google search or other internet magic to hear their unique sound. After the show I went out with some friends. The next day Luis and I went to visit Luis´ parents in Sever do Vouga. The drive to my grandparents house is about 1 hour from viseu, most of it (45min.) spent on a big fast highway with the rest passing by going on small loopy roads in the mountains overlooking river valleys and the likes. Very pretty. We arrived just in time for lunch. Ah, before lunch Luis and I also took a little tour of some industrial area in between Viseu and Sever Do Vouga to see the plant of one of the biggest green energy producers in the world. This company, Martifel, makes everything from windmills to generate electricity, solar panels, to sports stadiums. It was cool just seeing the outside of the process to create one of these monolithic metalic structures. Well, After lunch Luis and I got back in the car to go on another tour, this time it was of the picturesque sorrounding mountains and river valleys. We looped high up to the tops of peaks over looking the river far, far below, and then back down through villages and past farms to the bottom of this river basin to dip our hands in the cool water. We also went to this really cool waterfall that seemed to pop up out of nowhere. Such beautiful country! And so much history too, I think 4 generations of Luis´ family have lived there and still many people from his family still do. We met up with Luis´ dad and went back to the house for a snack. Then we headed to some property that belongs to the family. The property is really cool, its big too, stretching all the way from one roadway about halfway up a mountain until the valley floor where it meets the river. We decided to take a hike and explore the area down until the river. There is an old house on the property and I was told that it was a great place to hold some parties with friends and to bring some people out there to camp. We walked down through the property passing all kinds of cool things, swings hanging off big trees over steep inclines, hammocks, orange trees where you could simply grab an orange of the limb and eat it all juicy and perfect. I was also told that this property was home to many wild boars, although I didn´t see any, there tracks through the mud were plentiful. We heard the rushing of the water long before we saw the river, I started mentally drooling over some imaginary kayaking and started wondering if there were some good rapids on this section of river, maybe even a playwave. We passed a small waterfall and followed it´s flow down to meet the river. As soon as the water popped into sight from behind the dense brush and big trees I saw it, a perfect play wave staring me in the face. I nearly yelled, ``Luis! DO YOU SEE THAT!´´ I said, ``A wave, just perfect for me to go kayaking on!´´ Luis had already seen the video I have here of me playing around on a playwave on the Upper Klamath river so he knew what I was talking about and agreed that it would be good. I sat there for probably ten minutes just looking at the perfection of this wave, long-ish glassy face capped with a nice white boiling top perfect for keeping the boat from washing downriver, and if this were the case, a big long pool afterwards with perfect eddy access and a sandy beach on the side for relaxing, some rocks for sitting, filming, jumpin and everything, just perfect. We walked up river a little more to another spot where the river formed a confluence and the water gained speed and presented another rapid. I would say iniccially class two, maybe three, but I dunno, looked like fun! After our hike, many oranges and some small yard type work we headed back to the house for snack time and then we left.
After arriving back in Viseu I re-dressed and set out for a birthday party in the big mall we have here. I met up with some freinds and we ate dinner, watched a soccer match and saw a film. Sunday was a work day for me as I had to turn in a bunch of drawings for the Design final. We also went out to Vila Nova for lunch and I spent my time drawing out there in the rustic old office of the farm house. Very nice. All in all a goooood weekend. And don´t worry my dear blog reader, I have sooo much more to write about. Much, Much more to come, I garuntee it.

Music

Hey, I´m just gonna skip around a little bit here, the stream of posts will still come as promised but I just want to write these little things before I forget. I went to a couple concerts in the past few weeks at our local theater here in Viseu. The first show was Rodrigo Leão and Cinema Ensemble. I really liked it a lot. The group was headed by Rodrigo Leão, like you can see from the name, on piano and consisted of a singer, an accoridan/marimba player, violinist, viola, cello, electric bassist and drummer. The style of music was like a mix between tango and modern rock, with shorter songs sigur ros like singing and build ups seemingly leading into infinity broken by sudden silence. It´s really interesting and if you get the chance you should definitely do a google search and try and hear some of their music.
The second artist I saw is called Noiserv. It is the project of only one man, but he manages to create complete and deep songs with the use of a looping machine. This is; he starts out playing one instrument, loops it, and steadily adds more and more things on top and sings and everything. It is very impressing. He also uses such diverse instuments as toy cars, cameras and loudspeakers.
The weather here has been really hot lately, just like summer.

First part

Friday morning: I woke up and went to school. I had english class. After english my class was instructed to meet my philosophy teacher at our local theater in and hour. We were to get there on our own, and as most of my coleagues can not yet drive, we set off on foot. The local theater, teatro viriato, is not that far from my school, about a mile, mile and a half tops. The walk there however is very interesting, we passed through the city park, downtown square, the narrow shop lined streets that sorround the cathedral that dominates our city and out the other side to our destination. We arrived about five minutes before our teacher and once everyone was ready we were shown in. With just enough trouble that you would expect from a giant crowd of teenagers we found our seats. The only thing I knew about the peice we were going to see was the title, and from that I could gather very little information. The something of the adolescente something, was what is was called. The lights went down and two men appeared on stage, after that the (for lack of a better word) art that flowed out in front of me on that stage was unlike anything I had ever experienced before. These two men, acrobats, poets, philosophers, musicians, did most a bit of everything and a little more. The ``Play´´ wove in and out of sense, changed languages (spanish, portuguese and english, all of which I could understand)flowed flawlessly from debates about Don Juan to akward reproductions of hit 80´s tunes. It was a sight, an experience, not to be described in words, but more, expressed, they were not putting on a play by reading us a script, these men were creating something that involved you as an audience member, that pulled you in, yet kept you out, in the reality that you were still an audience member, it was wicked cool.
After the play ended we were instructed to stay in the theater with my art teacher to make some sketches of the theater. The building is really cool, kind of like different sized cylinders inside one another. I finished this task with haste and was off to collect my things and begin my journey to lisbon.