jungle survival

Another Amazon activity we signed up for: Survivor Day.

On Survivor Day some guides take you on a long hike through the jungle and show you how to do stuff like build a palm shelter and a make rotisserie out of sticks and rig an animal trap using just vines and branches and discern which trees will ooze vick's vap-o-rub and milk of magnensium and which twigs you can smoke like stoges. All you need is a machete.

The Ariau Treetop Hotel is very proud of having hosted a season of Survivor. And now i'm uber proud to have a certificate from Ariau that brags about how I, Cill, survived some serious shit too. The Surviver Day.

Our guide was this incredible dude named Gerson, a Manaus native who'd done a whole nightmarish military training in the jungle, in which he had to live off the land for weeks, distinguishing what stuff could be eaten and stepped on without getting the shits or getting killed or getting killed-by-way-of-the-shits.

And a big part of the training is to do all this while your military superiors yell at you. Like right into your face.

I don't like snakes or getting yelled at, so I had tremendous respect for Gerson. Plus I ate jungle stuff he approved of and I didn't get the shits.

But I felt kind of sad wondering what kind of warfare his rigorous training has prepared young Gerson for. I mean, he is without a doubt the most badass and resourceful rainforest magician ever, plus he's jacked and he has a machete. But what if like, a tank suddenly rolled in here? What then?

But then another part of me was just like duh, Gerson would build a foot trap out of some vines that would fucking flip tanks over and catapult them back to explode wherever they came from. He's pretty awesome.

Anyway, there's no story here. Tickby just thinks it's funny that I puked and I got a certificate anyway. The only thing ARGUABLY funny about how I puked is that I thought nobody knew I was puking because I snuck off into some bushes to puke. Tickby told me later that in fact everyone knew I was puking, and one of our co-survivors - an articulate and hilarious surgeon from Idaho - asked Tickby if I needed medical help.

But i didn't. Because I'm a survivor.

os dentes

As usual I don't know if this is a Brazil thing or a São Paulo thing or just a thing of the crowds we run with, but people here fucking LOVE brushing their teeth.

Public bathrooms are often equipped with mouthwash pumps and teeny-cups and sometimes baskets of dental floss. And people actually use them!

People also carry toothbrushes and little tubes of toothpaste in their purses and briefcases. It's unreal.

And i love it.

It creates a wonderful slumber party atmosphere in the public restrooms of Brazil. You walk into a restaurant or an office shizzad and find a gaggle of women chatting and laughing and brushing their dentes and spitting minty foam into the sinks.

It all feels so wholesome and warm. I wish I could stay I've started carrying around a tooth-cleaning kit myself, but it'll be too damn much fun to tell my dentist in the states about all this and watch his hopes soar and then tell him I'm still not into it because I don't like how mouthwash ruins the taste of Diet Coke.

pilates

Here in Brazil it is pronounced 'pee-LOTS', which is apt because I always drink a lot of water before class and pee out lots afterwards.

And it's awesome. My fondest memories of Brazil will be of the ceilings and roof beams at the Kaizen studio, where I've learned more Portuguese than Rosetta Stone and Muito Prazer combined.

Thanks to Pilates I can count to twelve, or at least know when someone else is doing it. I also know all kinds of key vocab like glutes, abs, knees, breathe in, breath out, and 'Let's go!'

It's not just the weird machines with pulleys and springs and rolly-carts that rule. It's also the bouncy balls and bean balls and foam noodles and plastic arc-y things. And also that I love exercise that you do while lying down.

The teachers are also pretty fantastic, not just in their knowledge of anatomy and rolly-carts, but also in their ability to put up with how weak i am. (Machines and rolly-carts often have to be adjusted and sometimes disassembled and reassembled to accommodate my 'arms-of-a-six-year-old.')

I like my Pilates teachers so much that I do odd little things to be considerate of them.

The first time Mark saw me spritzing perfume onto the crotch of my pants he asked - with his eyebrows -  'But why?'

And i explained that often while adjusting springs on the rolly carts a Pilates teacher's head can come awful close to one's chach and that I want mine to like me.

It's not that I think I smell. Or even that they'd care if I did. Or notice.

But like, what if I did, and they did, and then I was kicked out and put in jail and told to never come back to the best Pilates studio in São Paulo? Where then would I learn Portuguese?