My lack of computer was my excuse to be super lazy with my blog for the six months I was in Brazil. Two weeks of traveling with Swhorm (Sao Paulo, Trindade, Paraty & Rio for Carnaval), a month and a half in Brasilia with Verenice, and then four months spent in Rio gave me 7+ homes while I was there. I enjoyed something about every place I stayed but the last one was definitely the most interesting.
With just under two months left for me in Rio, my friend Nico had started looking for a roommate to make his rent cheaper. He and I had become good friends--I met him in Cuzco through a mutual friend who had her own restaurant where we both ate all the time (Lila's in the Mercado San Blas if anyone ever goes to Cuzco...Lila's the best and her food is amazing!). Lila's son takes jiu jitsu classes with Nico and I'd been wanting to learn some sort of self defense for a while so I went to take a class with him.
He was always a big-time jokester in the restaurant so I was surprised that he owned his own gym and took his classes very seriously. We spent an hour and a half working on balance and basic self defense for the cost of about 3 USD and I loved it! I wanted to take more classes with him but it turned out that he was heading to Lima for two weeks and then I would be leaving the country.
Well, it turned out he was leaving to and we were both headed to Rio!
Thanks again, life! Before we even got there, we started talking on facebook and whatnot and I helped him translate some things into English so he could find more housing options once he got there. As a thank-you, he offered to give me free self-defense lessons and that's where the genius idea of an English/self-defense class exchange was born. Starting right when I got back to Rio, we spent almost every day of the first few weeks doing classes together and it turned out we both loved to salsa, too, so we became going-out buddies as well and ended up becoming great friends.
So, like I said, Nico was looking for a roommate and I needed a new place as well (more on that, later because that's a whole other story). I decided to move in but went to double-check everything with the owner, first. I'd been there a number of times before for Nico's English lessons so I knew there was a very sweet 82-woman who lived there and was always down for a chat. Her son was the owner and his wife, their son and their son's wife all lived there as well. Then I knew there were about three or four guys who trained at Nico's gym as well.
Well...I went to talk to the owner and, as we were standing outside talking, dude after dude that I'd never seen before started walking into the house, one by one. After about the 8th person I had to ask. "How many freaking people live here?!?" The answer was about 14 guys, all of whom are paid to train full-time for the MMA.
Things went well with the owner so I went home, loaded my backpack and headed over. When I walked into the house, I saw abs and biceps everywhere; the kitchen and living room were crawling with dudes. I went up to the room I'd be sharing with Nico and stayed in there the rest of the night. I admittedly didn't know how to handle all that we had going on downstairs.
Nico, preshnut that he is, gave me the only bed and put a mattress on the floor for himself. From the day I moved in, our friendship began to turn into one of the most beautiful ones I've ever had. He became a real brother of mine; he's someone I can be honest with, act silly around, have sing-alongs with, have deep, important conversations with and be completely comfortable around.
We spent the next two months living together, with MMA fighters constantly moving in and out of the other rooms of this enormous house. The background there is that we lived really close to a famous gym in Rio and people from all over came to train there. Most of them were Brazilian but sometimes other fighters came from places like Peru, Ecuador, Malaysia, Norway and one guy from a random, French-speaking island in the Caribbean. They all stayed for different lengths of time so it was hard to know how many people actually lived there at any given time but I'd say it was usually between 5 and 14 fighters, plus the five-person family and Nico and I.
Living with a bunch of dudes means that the kitchen and bathrooms aren't usually as clean as one would hope but it means there's always people around and something hilarious is almost always happening. One of my favorite parts, too, was that no one really spoke English. Almost everyone spoke Portuguese and there were a couple who spoke Spanish so I got to practice beautiful languages every time I wanted to talk to someone! At one point, an English-speaker came and I got to translate for him and the rest of the guys which was really fun for me, too.
One of the other best parts of living in the house was that I spent some time almost every day sitting with Dona Maria, my 82-year-old bestie who taught me a lot of the Portuguese that I speak today. We got along so well that she told me she thinks we knew each other in a previous life (and I can't argue). She's super sweet but doesn't take any bullshit from anyone. She's said some hilariously inappropriate things that I'll have to blog about one day in the future, as well.
For now, I'm not sure if I'll be living in the same house when I get back or not but that place is definitely one of my favorite homes that I've had. I'm grateful to Nico, Dona Maria and her family and all the guys for making it such a blast!
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