This is my third and final e-mail since I leave Saturday night for NYC
to return on Sunday morning. Airlines have been a bit crazy lately,
so it's probably pretty tentative when I actually get home :-)

Friday night we went to this club with live music and three floors of
rooms to enjoy, and it was a really cool place. Each section of every
room highlighted some sort of object such as telephones, cash
registers, tools, trays, etc. They were placed on the walls or in
display cases as decoration. Outside was the main party strip in Rio
where several bars, clubs and restaurants are filled with people and
music. There was a main stage on the ground floor with a great band,
but the dance area was a bit limited. Another floor had another live
band playing and there was a much larger dance floor so a group of us
danced there for most of the time since it was hopping. We got there
pretty early, and stayed until nearly 1 AM soaking it all in. That
was enough club for me though...I had to hand wash the cigarette smoke
off of my clothes later that night. The club was very open though,
much different than any club I've ever been to in America. There were
open windows and open ceilings everywhere.

Saturday night was probably the coolest night here in Rio. We went to
the Live Earth concert. There were 8 cities around the world hosting
a concert on all 7 continents including Antarctica (the scientists
there put together a band to play their own little concert) in order
to raise awareness for global warming. It was so packed with close to
a million people, so we snuck around the beach side of the concert and
watched from the side. There Pharrell, Macy Gray, and Lenny Kravitz
performed along with several other Brazilian performers inclidung O
Rappa, who the crowd cheered for the most. Pharrell was awful! He's
a recording artist and not a live performer I guess, and the fact that
he called the audience mother f@%&ers about 15 times really made the
whole experience not such a delight. Macy Gray was cool, sexy and
smooth. I enjoyed her the most. Lenny was Lenny and rocked the
house. People enjoyed him, but they were dancing and throwing hands
in the air mostly for O Rappa.

One of the girls in my group is getting married shortly after her
return from Brazil, so all the girls decided they wanted to throw her
a Bachelorette party at a nice restaurant near the hotel. Since I was
the only guy available that night, they wanted to invite me as well,
and you know me, I can't resist a party. An hour or so before the
event, I received a phone call from one of the party planners asking
me to make her a man...for some reason I assumed that she wanted to
dress as a man or have male clothes, so I said I'd see what I could do
and to drop on by. She knocks on my door with a big poster board and
asks me to draw a man so she could play pin the speedo on the hot
stud. My artisitc ability leaves much to be desired, but I decided to
accept the challenge. (check out the picture). There were 19 girls
and me, and we had delicious food and played pictionary with wedding
related terms and another game with clay that you'll have to ask me in
person or on the phone to describe so as to avoid a scandalous e-mail.
;-). The best part of the whole event was the waiters who stripped
for the girls after dinner was over, and even made out with one of the
girls (not the bride to be).

I have spent much more time at the beach of course and my tan is
slowly developing. It's been way too long since I've actually gotten
sun, that my skin is working very slowly. I'm still the whitest guy
on the beach most of the time. One increasingly annoying feature of
Brazilian beaches is the presence of hundreds of vendors that walk up
and down the beach selling sarongs, beer, sodas, ices, hats, shirts,
etc. I'm not familiar with all beaches in the world, but I do
remember last year in Italy this was not the case, so my suntanning is
frequently interrupted by people in my face or blocking my sun while
pushing their product. I did get my spidey tattoo this way, but now
with the Pan-American games here, they've increased by hundreds more.
In fact, at our final dinner inside a restaurant and several blocks
away from the beach, this vendor came by the large window trying to
sell us these zip-up purses. He was relentless.

This morning, as I was walking, I noticed this American walking with
two other guys with a soccer ball in his hand. He was tossing it up a
little bit and accidentally dropped it in front of this street cleaner
who immediately caught it with his foot, dribbled it like a pro and
knee-bumped it right back to the American's hands. The look of shock
on the American's face was priceless. EVERY guy in Brazil can play
soccer. Several of my classmates went to a game the other day and
when they got back, we laughed about how much testosterone they had to
bear while they were there. However, they were fortunate to learn
every profane expletive that exists in Portuguese.

Last night my friend J and I performed our YouTube-worthy Karaoke
song for the entire study abroad group to tears and laughter. The
funniest part was that the restaurant had 3 South Africans, and a
crazy Brazilian who spoke English only in idiomatic expressions. So,
we started the song, (we brought speakers and an iPod), and after the
first line, he yells out, "Oh, I want to DIE!" with an expression of,
"What torture are they putting us through?" It almost threw me off my
game. Fortunately, we got it all on video, and as soon as I upload
it, it will be available on YouTube.