Carnivale

Ok, so as Margie pointed out, it's been a while since we've updated this thing. However, seeing as she has already ably summarised what we've been up to over the past couple of weeks, I might just mention what we've been up to in the last weekend.

On the Saturday we went out to the Brasil Brasileiro festival. What seemed like it might just have been a small local festival of Brazilian Culture instead turned out to be a massive carnivale style parade, complete with dancing girls with giant headdresses, pigs armed with giant cutlery attacking the crowd, giant drum troupes, and giant puppets. In case you haven't picked up on it, the thing was giant, and it seems Brazilians (or English people getting into the whole Brazilian thing) don't do things by half measures. Then again, we knew that already after seeing how crazy the Brazilian soccer fans were during the world cup! I was going to put up photos of all the crazy goings on at the festival, but Blogger seems to be against that idea and isn’t letting me put up any photos at all, so you may not be seeing photos of any type for a while.

We started Sunday by doing a test ride down to Margie's work to see how long it would take her to ride to work in the mornings. It took about 20 minutes, a fair sight less than the hour and a half it has been known to take her to get there on the bus in the mornings. Ah London traffic. I dare say she'll be riding into work whenever possible.

Next we rode around the centre of town and saw a bunch of random things including a bunch of kids practicing parkour, free running or something similar. For those who've never heard of either of these before, they basically involve running around doing a whole lot of leaping and crazy acrobatics in environments which could easily kill you if you messed things up. The kids we saw were practicing under a bridge in a variety of places including jumping and up and down stairs, off walls, doing back flips on the pavement and jumping between walls with a 3 or 4 metre drop to into the Themes between them. It's obviously a really unforgiving environment to learn in, but I guess it encourages you to learn quickly! Crazy kids, but cool to watch. For anyone with broadband I'd recommend having a look at some videos of this stuff on the web including this. I never knew that it was actually possible to do what the Prince of Persia does in those video games, but it seems that it is!

Other things we happened to pass included a big dance festival in Trafalgar Square with workshops on how to do various types of dances. We saw workshops on African, Israeli, and swing dancing, but didn’t take part in them as, this being London, there was no where to chain up our bikes, so we just watched from the sidelines, storing away those dance moves for later busting out on the dance floor. One thing I thought was interesting was that the Israeli dance was move for move a total rip off of the heel toe polka we all had to learn in primary school in Australia! Someone's stealing someone else's dance moves, a la the B-grade movie "Bring It On" and I want to know who's responsible!

In other news I've just been given a job offer for an interesting looking job which I guess brings to an end my life of idle luxury and ever increasing housebound boredom. More on that one later!