Carnaval (spelled in portuguese) has ended here in Brazil, and I ended up going to a few interesting parties during the week. Carnaval in Florianopolis is not like Carnaval in Rio or Salvador, but it is still interesting because people get into a festive mood. There were some street celebrations, but I didn´t go to them because people said that they were dangerous. The main one takes place in the center of Florianopolis (the main city, I am in a beach town away from the main city). It is some sort of festival where all the men dress as women (and so do the women), go to the street, there is lots of music and booze, and everyone parties. A friend of mine who is from Montreal went to that particular street party, and someone get shot 10 feet away from him. He said that the stampeed away from the gunshots was pretty fast. It also took away his urge to continue enjoying the festivities.

During carnaval I ended up going to more up-scale parties that cost about $50 CAD to get into, so it kept the bums out. They were fun, except one thing that pissed me off about the first one that I went to with a VIP entrance (all you can drink)... I ended up having to line up for drinks, and so I ended up buying tickets to go to the non-open bar part of the party. Typical.

In another typical Brazilian event, I went to the bank machine to try to get cash out over the past few days, and it was always empty .. it turns out that the people who put money into the bank machines are now on strike. I was able to borrow some cash from friends, but hopefully they will get the situation sorted out really soon.

Last night I went out to dinner with some friends (we were a group of 6), and one of the guys was Daniel Hilton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilton), He is the brother of the father of paris Hilton. The guy is a nice enough guy, but he seemed to me like he had some sort of wierd twitch or something. He sort of moved like a puppet, with someone pulling strings to lift his head and arms ... I thought he had probably done to much cocaine (which he probably has irregardless of his twitches). Later on I was talking with my friend Mike who knows Daniel, and he said that Daniel was jet-skiing on their private island, and he got a head injury.

We went to a Club later on, and Daniel and his friend decided to leave to go to a whore house instead of hanging out and having a few drinks. At the same Club, a guy who I was hanging out with had a package of matches spontaneously combust in his pants pocket, and he instinctively reached in and pulled every thing out of his pocet, which went flying all over the floor of the club (including a small square of compressed marijuana - which I had no part of). In the end he ended up with a pretty serious burn about the size of a silver dollar on his leg, a big hole in his pants pocket, and some friends that were laughing at his mis-fortune.

The following is a Rant about things that just seem strange in Brazil.

(Note: I have not verified that any of my explanations in the following paragraph are true, these are things I was told) .. They have two of every coin here, so for example they have two 25 cent coins, which look nothing alike, but it turns out that the original material that they used became too expensive, so they changed the design and the material, and left both in circulation. Also, apparently a large percentage of the coins here are false, but everybody accepts them anyway. They also have two of every type of bill, apparently they decided to come out with a new design for their bills (proabaly to make it more difficult to counterfit), but they were unable to get the older bills out of circulation ... and the counterfitters continue to make more and more of the older bills, meaning that they will never get the old style out of circultation.

I also was reading the newspaper the other day, and Brazil has a free-trade agreement with Argentina. They then went and signed a deal that allows them to put tariffs on goods that will damage industries that will be hurt by free trade. Ie. free-trade, without freely-trading (but they probably created more government jobs and beaurocracy in the process, so congradulations).