Paranaue, paranaue, parana

I am a bit late in posting today – partly because the week has become less ‘blue’ (my barcode labels arrived – yey! I might have a 4th mutant – yey! my mug is back – yey yey!), and partly because I’m tired.

Although, thinking about it, I can’t be that tired… otherwise I would be sleeping already, right?

So I’m not all tired. I’m partly tired. Locally tired. More precisely, inner leg tired.

See yesterday I followed a German colleague of mine to Capoeira classes. To those who are not very familiar with this form of dance/martial arts: capoeira originates in Brasil, where the slaves developed a way of dancing which allowed them to simultaneously train their fighting skills without their owners recognizing it as such.

For those who haven’t been around too long – I love dancing. Currently lindy hop, mostly, but I have been caught belly dancing, hip hopping, ballroom dancing and even jazz and ballet’ing. On top of that, I’m a massive Portugal-freak. I adore the country, I love the language, and I have nothing but the warmest feelings for its inhabitants. Granted, Brazil is not Portugal – but they speak Portuguese (sort of … lol), so I’ll take it ;).

Still, I wasn’t sure if I would like capoeira. To be frank, I still don’t know. All in all, it is a very confusing sport: you play ‘against’ each other in the roda, where you move together, almost duet-like, while simultaneously attacking and ducking – but no points are measured. The more advanced capoeiristas did seem to touch one another, almost playfully, here and there, like saying : I could’ve got you there, but I won’t – but in general you are not supposed to literally hit each other. And if you do, you apologize. (Polite martial arts, who knew?)
Although our leader (I don’t think he’s an official mestre) said we did all very well in the roda, really, I have no clue what I was doing :D. We learned one kick during class, and 2 ducks (ducking is important), apart from that I was wiggling about a little bit on the music, trying to look a bit… well… as if I knew what I was doing ;). I’ve never been good at faking though… lol.

But I’ll be back! 90 minutes of free sport and a chance to learn something new and get to know some other people in the process, that can’t go wrong, now, can it? ;) The only annoying thing is I still haven’t regained full use of my left hand (I fell with Ts bike: my right knee looks like rainbow and I couldn’t lift a cup of coffee with my left hand for a week. I’m up to around 2 kgs at the moment, though, so things are definitely improving ;) ) – and since capoeira involves some nice acrobatics, I’m forced to skip these… for now. I look at the bright side, though: on way less to make a fool of myself!

(and… ahum… I now officially have a ‘sports’ category!)