Bloco X: The Journey

ok, I'm back. Wow, two months off the computer, that was fantastic!! But due to popular demand... here's the Bloco X report.
Bloco X is the mega-bloco of Europe. It forms up really just twice a year, for a rehearsal and then for the European Cup (and sometimes for some other little things like the World Cup)

Movie is worth 10,000 words department: Here they are last weekend in Vienna.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzXf31QcFa8&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6Qign6k-bg&feature=related

Here are the ten thousand words. Part 1. The Journey.
so, what I did was, I knew I couldn't go to Vienna, so instead I went to Bloco X's huge rehearsal weekend in early May. Is it a rehearsal, a camp, or a four-day party?

So, on Monday April 28th, at 7pm, I turned in my final grades for my biology classes at the University of Portland, and on on April 29th at 4am on I was headed to the Portland airport. Hadn't gotten much sleep Sunday or Monday, of course, doing all my packing and ALL my grading for my four university courses; and then I was in the air Tuesday night over the North Atlantic, arrived in London at Heathrow Wed morning, had a humungous long bus ride out to an airport I'd never heard of (Stansted, home of the famously cheap Ryan Air. Deja vu of the old People Express, man, I haven't been cattle-prodded in quite the same way since back in the 80's in the gray Newark International Airport with the original budget airline People Express. I tell you, it really took me back.)

But, the fun part was, I was wandering around the Stansted airport through the RyanAir mobs, and suddenly they they were! THE BRITS! Rob, Charlotte, Phil and the other Phil, Bethan, Lauren, Aileen and the rest - all my original pack of London friends that I met in Rio two years ago. Plus some new friends too. (well, ok, so they're not all exactly Brits, but that's my mental category.)

It is cool, to travel so far across so many continents and countries, to be so bone-weary and semi-lost, and then out of the blue to see familiar friendly faces beaming at you.

Only a few very long interminable hours later, we'd slogged our way through the RyanAir flight and were in Berlin! Germany! Stuck at the airport for seven hours! (the photo on my facebook page was taken at this point; running nearly 72 hrs w/o sleep by then; I can't remember who took the photo).

They turn out to speak German in Germany. It was a shock to suddenly be somewhere where I REALLY didn't know the language. I've gotten used to being able to more or less fumble by in Spanish, and fumble fairly well in Portuguese, but now I was in a place where I knew NOTHING. (I'd meant to study some German before this trip, but decided I would need Turkish even more. So I focussed on Turkish. Which did turn out to useful.) You always hear about how "everybody in Germany knows English" which is almost true until you meet the one waitress who really DOESN'T speak English, and then you're reduced to the silliest, most helpless, hopeful sort of wide-eyed pantomime.

Hours trickled by and our promised ride did not appear. We'd all found ourselves a cozy little airport bar but my London friends were all getting pretty tired and I was seriously clobbered. Finally, a German sambista with a car (one small car) appeared, and our invaluable German-fluent friend Phil worked some miracle on a gullible taxi driver, and so we wedged, and I mean STUFFED ourselves, our surdos and caixas and bags and bodies into our 2 vehicles. Something like 10 samba musicians plus drums and bags in two cars. Aileen & I ended up really packed together, TIGHT, an enormous suitcase on top of us and cutting off all the circulation to our legs. It was the sort of situation where you start calculating how many hours you can go before necrosis sets in. I thought, two hours without permanent damage, maybe three?

Off we went on a many hours-long (more than three) ride through the mysterious dark woods of northern Germany. We were trying to find the Bloco X samba camp, which was in a new place this year, buried deeply in an unknown dark forest by a vast lake, in the middle of the night.

We drove and drove and drove. We drove through Berlin, where my impression was, Berlin looks like the top of a suitcase. (I couldn't see a thing except the top of the suitcase. I was in the middle of the back seat ) Through the dark night, past tiny German villages and into deep, mysterious woods. This was my first time in Germany and, the further we went into the woods, the more medieval and Brothers Grimm it started to feel to me. I kept listening for wolves.

We got off the main road and into a maze of tiny forest roads. It was 4am. Still no samba camp. We took to pausing every now and then and listening to the trees, hoping to hear the sound of distant drums. (or wolves?)

Finally - we heard drums! A few more winding turns of the road and we were there! Buildings! People! Music! 4:30am. (Have I ever been this tired? Even when I'd been up all night at Mocidade, and up all night the night before?) We piled out and there, at last, were the sambistas! And OF COURSE THEY WERE STILL PLAYING! Camp didn't even officially start till the next evening, but as soon as we showed up, a couple of leader types started clapping their hands, rousing everybody up with "Let's start rehearsal! The Londoners have arrived! Go wake up so-and-so," I'm not kidding, they were dead serious; they were honest to god calling a rehearsal at 4:30 in the morning. I knew right away: These are my people.

So we all strapped on our drums (I was still hauling out the pieces of my disassembled caixa from my bag, looked away for a minute, and dang if Rob hadn't put my whole drum together for me. Thank you!!!)

OK, so, we got going, and even with this small 4:30am, camp-hasn't-even-started-yet bateria, I could see they were GOOD players. I immediately knew I was going to be out of my depth, on caixa anyway. They all play em cima. They all swing like hell. They all do the fancy double-right. uh-oh... Why on earth hadn't I thought of practicing em cima before I left home?

We played till well past dawn. Good thing because I couldn't have found my bunk in the dark anyway.

I'd slept a grand total of 3 hours Sun night and 3 hrs Monday, none on Tuesday, none on Wednesday, plus 3 flights, a long bus ride and the squished-est car ride of my life. On Friday I slept nearly the entire day; everybody in my dorm room was wondering if I'd died.

And what did Bloco X turn out to be? Part 2 tomorrow. But the upshot is, I think I'll be going back to Europe every year.