The daily routine

Here is the daily routine.
4:30am - go to sleep.
7am - get wakened briefly by dogs barking. Dimly notice, oh, the sun is up. Zzzz.
8am - rouse briefly to notice that the sun is definitely up, and hot, and bright, and I'm getting very hot.
9am - get wakened by guys hammering on pipes. I'm VERY hot. Peek outside at the scalding sky, a perfect blue bowl. Stagger to the shower and take an all-cold shower, get my hair completely drenched. Return to bed and lie in front of the fan, soaking wet, till I cool off enough to drift into a fuzzy doze.
10am - finally haul out of bed. Hm, I'm hot again. 2nd cold shower. Make coffee. Trot downstairs and across the street to buy two fresh little French-bread rolls (25 centavos apiece) and 100 grams of salty Minas cheese. Come back upstairs - the coffee's done! Breakfast of fresh Brazilian coffee and fresh bread and cheese. With a mango, plum or pineapple, depending what's ripest in the fruit basket.
11am - Pilates class in Tijuca with my friend Andrezza This finally wakes me up. Practice my Portuguese a bit.
12 noon - Pilates class over, browse through the dozens of very tempting used-book stands in the Saens Pena plaza. Get (say) a chicken-carrot-raisin pastry and a foamy coconut-kiwi-mango smoothie while I'm looking all those tempting Portuguese books.
1pm - back home. For some reason I'm all hot and sweaty now. Strip down, 3rd cold shower of the day. Check my açaí supplies in the freezer (and please note, Americans, açaí is pronounced ah-sah-EE! Thank you!), and, if necessary, venture outside to buy 3 large acais to go, bring them back, then decant them into 6 little bowls and freeze all 6 of them for later use. Putter around at home checking email, uploading pix, and trying to focus on my two afternoon goals: practicing music and practicing Portuguese. Music - I'm trying to memorize the entire Cubango samba so I can sing it while I play, including the Cubango breaks. Plus working on Suzano's pandeiro patterns, running through my Monobloco and Banga recordings trying to keep all the hand signs straight (let's see... crossed arms means "STOP" in the Lions, but means "CAIXAS KEEP GOING, EVERYBODY ELSE STOP" in Banga, and means "FANCY BREAK COMING UP NEXT!" in Cubango, and means "THE NEXT COMMAND APPLIES ONLY TO CAIXAS" in Monobloco. Great) For my Portuguese: Talk a bit with my online Portuguese language partners, watch a Portuguese movie and do some Portuguese crosswords.

Ants have found a tiny drop of mango juice on 1 spoon in the kitchen! Bazillions of ants! Pause the music practice for an ant battle. (this happens, oh, six times a day. There is nothing to train you to keep a spotlessly clean kitchen like these tiny Brazilian sugar ants. They'll find the most microscopic speck of food within 15 minutes, and 5 minutes later have recruited several thousand of their best friends to the site)

4pm - I'm hot again! 4th cold shower. Outside, the worst heat of the day is almost over, though, so it's time for me to venture outside. Depending on my mood and the weather, I might go to a street market, or the beach, or a movie. Say it's a beach day.... Put on the bikini and out I go - hop on the subway to Ipanema, get out at Posto 9, trot over to the beach and lie in bliss on the sand till hot (i.e. 2 minutes). Jump in water. (Thankfully, Ipanema's water has cleaned up considerably since I last described it.) Charge through the breaker zone to the wave-hopping area. Wave-hop with crowds of screaming Brazilian teenagers. Race back through the breaker zone - whew - made it - lie in bliss in the sun. Retreat to the shade of an umbrella after ten minutes. Read my favorite Portuguese comic book, "Astronauta". Hm, getting hot. Jump in water, wave hop, etc. Lie in bliss. Retreat to shade. Read some of Jorge Amado's "O Pais do Carnaval." The phone rings - it's JP, or Ben, or Brian, or Sami, or Chris, or Andrezza, or somebody, about a plan for what to do tonight before or after rehearsal. Long discussion about how to get to Beija-Flor or about how to buy tickets to a soccer game or about whether Mr. Big Name's show is really worth 90 reais. Hang up. Immediately forget all the plans. Forget what time it is. Jump in water. Lie in bliss. Repeat.

Getting hungry. Time for a waffle! Head over to Cafeina, get a waffle-with-honey, a fresh squeezed lime juice and a cafe-com-leite. Feeling very happy and blissful.

Whoops, it's almost 6pm. We're approaching REHEARSAL TIME! Let's see, where am I headed today:
Monday - Banga rehearsal in Lapa, 6-10pm. I'm playing repique.
Tuesday - Cubango technical rehearsal in Niteroi. Catch the 8pm ferry, then the 2am bus back.
Wednesday - Monobloco rehearsal at the Fundicao, 6-9pm. Then Salgueiro street rehearsal... then Canarios de Laranjeiras... it's 2am before I'm done.
Thursday is my free day. Unidos da Tijuca, Beija-Flor, or maybe some pagode or choro... or whatever....
Friday - Play caixa at either the Monobloco show (midnight-3am) or the Cubango quadra rehearsal (1am-3am). Catch some choro or pagode before.
Saturday - Escola rehearsals at the Sambodromo, and then over to Lapa to play with Banga at their midnight show.
Sunday - Catch the 5pm ferry to Niteroi for the back-to-back street rehearsals of Cubango and Viradouro, one of my very favorite events. Catch the 11pm ferry back. On the walk home through Lapa, get sidetracked by four marvelous pagode bands, one after the other, at the bars that I have to walk past on my way home. It takes a VERY long time to get home!

.... stagger back home at about 4am. I've been playing with bands and/or chasing escolas around and/or dancing for betwen 4 and 10 hours now, and I'm hot and sticky and sweaty and exhausted. Time for another shower! And tumble to bed.

Drift off to sleep thinking that I am the luckiest person in the world.