Part 4.1 Kickin, trickin, shittin + some school stuff

Hi guys

It’s been one week again from my last post and much has happened since then. Just noticed also that it has been over a month year in Guadalajara.. Oh my god how fast the time goes by here. I love it! Also some bad things happened so far, I’ll write about them in the text. For making it easier to comment, I decided to divide this mega-update into 3 partitions, named 4.1,4.2 and 4.3. Hope you find it conventional, enjoy!

This blog story starts from the beginning of my third school week starting on Monday the 16^th of August. I’ll also add some of my experiences about the local climate and the macho culture of Latin America!

The beginning of the week started off pretty normally with some sports (gym, tricking, capoeira) and a lot of classes.

STOP: A little info from kimbo

Tricking

I have had to explain my sports hobby nearly as many times as the letters of my name so I think it’s time to write something about it also in here.

Tricking is a newly-founded sport which has developed from martial arts and different dances. It combines gymnastic moves with some martial arts kicks and also some moves from break dancing or capoeira. A really good local tricker from back in Tampere is Vellu Saarela, who trains in the same place that I used to. He’s considered to be one of the best in the sport so far and at least I got loads of appreciation for him.

Here's a clip to Vellu's newest video to get an idea what I'm talking about.

As said, tricking is a really new sport that still is pretty unknown. Internet and YouTube has helped it to become more popular and actually the whole things started just by some guys posting videos of their tricks on YouTube. Other cool trickers besides Vellu are Daniel Graham, Anis Cheufra, Jeremy Martinas, Mike Guthrie just to name a few. Check out their clips on YouTube (by searching their names), you’ll be impressed!

I went to my first acrobatic course in my school in Tampere in just under 2 years ago, but for around 6 months I couldn’t do pretty much anything because of my ancle injury and my living in Taiwan. The last year in Tampere I was officially in a “adult-gymnastic” group doing different kind of gymnastic moves, but I also did some tricking there also. I’m still super-bad at it, but trying to get better all the time.

I’ve found tricking a freaking hard sport to do, because it requires much body control, flexibility and strength (in addition to mental insanity), all of which I don’t have too much. However, I feel that it’s a good sport for me, mostly just because I’m like 1.5 meters long. So far I LOVE it, but have got some difficulties to find too many other trickers here in Guadalajara.

Capoeira

Capoeira is also a martial arts-like sport, but it's more of an art form, where two capoeiristas dance - or battle - with - or against - each other. It's more like an dance art that combines elements from martial arts, dance and music. The origen of capoeira isn't truly known, but it's said that it all started in Africa by the slaves. They weren't allowed to fight with each other, so they disguised the fight as a rhytmical dance and the guards couldn't stop them from doing it. The musical part is strongly affected by its origin and the dance includes different special instruments, like shown below:

I've done capoeira only for 3 weeks for now, so can't really tell too much info about it (except when copypasteing from wikipedia). I like it so far very much and I can train my non-existing kicking skillz with it. An example of capeoira dance is shown here.

Well, actually I had only 3 classes for 75mins, but that’s pretty rough for a exchange student right? Anyway, fun things happened when I was walking home in the school parking lot at about 21. Ray, a Mexican friend of mine saw me walking and offered me a ride home. I greeted and everything was cool until we got to his car. Then he suddenly looked at me, and realized that I was not Rouven, a German friend of ours, to who he had promised a ride home. Well he did a nice thing and drove me to the half way, where I did my other everyday habit: ate some good-ass tacos. I tried both tacos the lenguas (whole tongues) and tacos the tripas (intestines) for the first time. They both were very good.

On Tuesday 17.8 I did some capoeira which I also like very much. I want to learn it more for now tho, my “battling” looks pretty tragicomic at the moment. Besides capoeira I did the first squat training of my life. Result: 2 days of pain and stiffness.

Wednesday morning woke up at six and headed for the migration office for the second for the second time. It actually opens at 9am, but there is a hell of a queue every day and you really want to be there on time. Well, I arrived at the place at 8.15, got a reserve queue ticket and was in a good position. A little setback came when I arrived to the actual desk, because I had taken a wrong ticket and couldn’t naturally hand in my papers on this desk. I got a new number from the end of the line and started to wait for the desk next to the first one. The whole place is a real mega-hassle and I tried to capture it with my superb camera:

The place and was such a complete hassle that I actually found it pretty hilarious. I didn’t want to stress about it tho, and just went to buy some fruits and walk in the nearby parks on the waiting. I got to the desk after some 3 hours of more waiting and after a little more hassle and lack of information management I actually finally got my student Visa for the whole year. It can’t get any better than this, chido we!!!

On Thursday and Friday I had just normal school stuff. We also visited a big furniture expo here in Guadalajara, which was actually a pretty good experience. We were the only non-Mexican visitors there and everybody else were wearing business casual+, when we came there with shorts and slippers. We were supposed to interview the companies and figure out the way and the reasons that the companies are producing/importing/exporting their stuff to/from Mexico. Anyway it was pretty fun, as you can see from the pics.

School stuff

Mexican furniture?

Got some papers, must smile!

A screaming and a wondering man

I tried also to get a car already on this week and actually found a one really good looking. Too bad that Diego’s uncle, who was supposed to come with me to see/buy the car, wasn’t able to come on Friday and the car I desired have most probably been sold already by now. On Friday evening went to play some home poker with Diego and my Mexican buddies and had a really good time again! The only negative thing was that we were home not until 3am and had to wake up 6am to drive for 4 hours. But more of that stuff on the next part of this update!