He's Back!!Hi!! I've been off the old radar lately in terms of updates of what I'm actually doing so I figure it's about time to do at least a brief post. I write best when I'm under time pressure, so I've opened the laptop with 22 minutes before I'm getting a lift to the beach for surfing. I know. A lot has changed. Let us return to Uruguay. Montevideo Part 2As it turned out, the visa was processed the day after I took my documents in. I sent emails stating that time was of the essence and to notify me of any progress, but by the following Monday, I had heard nothing. I was stressed that I would miss my flight from Porto Alegre (PA), so I decided to go back to the consulate and check up on the situation. Literally three minutes after arriving I was walking away with my visa dated the previous Thursday. They just gave it to me as if I should have known earlier to come in. I booked the reasonably long overnight bus to PA for Tuesday from one of the two bus companies which provided the service. The one I didn't choose showed the PA arrival time, and I just assumed that the length of journey would be the same for my bus. I obviously stressed out when we were behind schedule and it looked like I would miss my flight. Cursing myself for not checking, I decided to go to sleep because nothing could be done now. I awoke, departed my bus, jumped on a train then a monorail shuttle to the airport and a few hours later was in Sao Paulo (SP). It was raining pretty hard as we landed and the connection was delayed landing so we were added to another flight. There was obviously no announcement in English about these things so I had no idea what was going on. I subtly morphed in to a sheep and followed the crowd, picking up snippets of information from other travellers. We got a flight to the other airport in Rio de Janeiro (RJ) then free cabs to the airport we were supposed to land at. My couchsurfing host's apartment was on the way, so I abandoned ship, turning back in to a human in the process. Rio de JaneiroDiogo was my host for two nights while I waited for Nicholas, Corin and the mysterious Adam to arrive from their respective nations. We had a good time, I got what organisational stuff I needed done and we saw a bit of the Lapa nightlife. On the Saturday I headed down to Copacabana to grab the AirBnB apartment key and meet the others. Carnaval was insane. It literally could have happened on a completely different planet with a society which had developed variously varied social rules. We had a great time. Nuff said. Workaway FiveAfter 9 days of Carnaval and sight-seeing in RJ, I left my friends and caught a bus to SP, then one on to the bustling little beach town of Boicucanga. My bus arrived at 2am, but the other workawayers were still enjoying the Carnaval spirit of course. It was an interesting first exposure to them and they were reasonably under the weather by that time. I was there for another day with them, then Paulo the top dog and super friendly fellow drove me along the coast to Boraceia where I would be teaching. Boraceia is not a bustling little beach town, it's more of a boring little beach town. The drive there was in torrential rain and at one point we overtook a police car at 100km/h in a 60 zone when I could barely see through the windscreen for the deluge sheeting down upon us. There was pretty much no school that day (a Thursday) because nobody could get here due to the flooding. My little flat type situation is in the same building and adjacent to the school itself, which consists of an office and one classroom. School usually runs Monday to Thursday, but in this case we taught on Friday because of the previous day's damp outcome. Instead of a bell to notify students of the next class, the local high school (100m from where I live/work) plays Bittersweet Symphony. It'll be stuck in my head like Rolling in the Deep after San Fermin. The Teaching MethodWe use the Callan Method to teach English. It's a terrible way to learn a language. If you do a ridiculous amount of practice outside the lesson, then it's a good way to get your accent and verbal comprehension levelled up, but just following the lesson plan is useless on it's own. Basically there are a serious of questions I read from the book and the students (aged 8 to 32) read the responses. There is no real explanation of the meaning of the words, except what I sometimes read out in English using words they don't understand. If I just followed the book exactly, I'm sure nobody would learn anything at all. As it transpires, I'm not a full idiot and I'm a total badass rebel, so I don't just read what it says in the book. This throws off some of the students, but it's better for them to need to think and find it a bit difficult than to have them read from a sheet and have no actual concept of what English is. I think they like it on balance and if they don't I'm happy to play God and say it's better for them to do it my way anyway. Life in BoraceiaThe accommodation in Boicucanga with six people staying there is not as nice as the accommodation here. Humans are social creatures and I'm nearly totally alone here, but because of the things I want to get done (more on this later), I genuinely don't mind it. My normal day starts with surfing in the morning with Daniela (the lady running the school here who LOVES Australians because she lived on the Gold Coast for four years a while back). Breakfast, class from 10-11, reading/duolingoing/reddit/browsing for Democratic nomination predictions and polls, lunch, class again from 2-3, class 3.40-4.30, class 5.30-6.20, class 7.30-8.20, reading/duolingo/etc. Last weekend (13th and 14th) I went to Boicucanga to ill with the others on Ilhabela and at some super rad beach which most of the decent photos are from. Silas took as there and was just the best local host for the day, bringing all sorts of snacks and cool beverages, along with some goggles to see all the little fishes. He was a crazy driver in the kind of way is OK because he clearly knows that road and his car really well, but he was going way too fast along some sections which genuinely could have had kids running out on to the road which is pretty freaking stupid. This weekend I'm just staying in Boraceia and booking flights, surfing, cycling (I borrowed a bike from a student) reading and relaxing. I'm way too in to the US election nomination so right now I'm hating that Nevada is a whole six hours behind Brazil so I need to wait until 5pm for them to even start caucusing. I'm obviously a Bernie Sanders fan and I see HRC for the corrupt p.o.s she really is. People say Old Bern won't be able to get anything through congress, but if you live in a country that needs radical change, the only way to do that is to vote in the once-in-a-generation politician with reasonably radical ideas and show the rest of the government what you really want. He won't be able to get everything done, but if he wins it sure as hell sends a strong message to Congress which will affect American politics for the foreseeable future. I might do a separate post on this, though I know most people (if not all) people who read this blog don't find the topic very interesting. In reality, I'll most likely write a draft post and decide that it's not complete enough so it will sit in my wip folder for all eternity. Changing GoalsI'm sick of travelling. It's not the lack of having a base, the general hassles of taking buses and planes with luggage, any sort of homesickness or longing for people or places, or running out of clothes more and more frequently as things get old, develop holes and eventually (long after the hole development of course) are thrown out. I'm sick of being a passenger, and as I read and learn more about the good and bad things going on in the world, I'm realising that I probably have the potential to make a significant difference to one cause or another. Since finishing school I've spent four years at uni (learning, having fun, but actually making no positive difference in the world), two years in London (having an amazing time, learning, but actually making no positive difference in the world), six months living in France (learning, having fun, but actually making no positive difference in the world), seven months working in Melbourne (but actually making no positive difference in the world), six months cycling across Europe (having fun, learning, but actually making no positive difference in the world) and now nearly five months in South America (having fun, learning, but actually making no positive difference in the world). While I've become a totally different person in that time, with much more potential to make a positive difference in the world, I've not actually done anything useful. It's like saving up a bunch of gold, but until you buy items, it's not really worth anything. It's not that I feel like I should be doing something to help, it's that I just don't get as much of a kick out of doing what I'm doing and I really want to throw myself at a problem and help some cause significantly. So what to do? On the Wait But Why blog, one post suggests a Venn Diagram to solve this problem. One circle is “what I want to do” and the other is “what I'm capable of”. For me, the first circle contains “humanitarian work for the UN or similar, specifically reducing poverty through practical methods such as increasing migration”, “work for Elon Musk (all his projects are amazing)”, “something to do with what humans will do when jobs are lost to automation in great numbers”, “changing the way politics is in Australia” and “AI”. As I'm old enough to realise that I'm not capable of doing everything, I think a change in the importance of the cause will result a greater positive difference than where I am in the hierarchy within that cause. If I can positively influence the first machine with general intelligence in a tiny way, maybe that's better than being a high level engineer at Tesla or Space X (which I know I am in no way capable of anyway). I came to this conclusion thanks to a line in a song. You'll ever guess which song. Coming in a number 75 in the Triple J Hottest 100 of 2014, 360s “Live It Up” contains the line “truth be told it doesn't matter if you make it the whole way up the ladder”. It actually is a sweet song when you are trying to think about life and happiness. I know that everyone sees themselves (at least I did) as capable of being more than just a regular person in a fairly regular job (I'm the interesting protagonist of my story, because that's how it works in stories because that's what makes stories interesting), but maybe I don't need to be any more than just a cog in an important machine to make a big difference. Anyway, enough with the vague chat, what have I actually done about it? Not much, but not nothing. I've written to a few people asking for advice, and looked up a few degrees that I think would be useful depending on which path I go down. I'm eyeing off a Graduate Diploma of Computing at ANU (one year), then a Masters specialising in Artificial Intelligence (two years). This would purely incidentally put me two days ride from where I think my parents will be living which is kind of nice seeing as by the time I get there I won't have seen them for nearly two years (again). Poor old bears. Anyway, it's juts one of the options, Mum, so cool your warm jets and take Smelly Old Harry for a walk. And now:My immediate future plans are to stay here for about three more weeks, fly to Quito to meet my sister, workaway and travel with her for I think a month (excluding the week in with I'll fly back to London to see old mate Sanj get married which I'm pretty excited for), then I have no idea. I think I'll have enough money to continue travelling and workawaying for a few months more, but I do feel like a change of scenery a bit so I might go to the US (something I said I would never do from about age 8).
It's at this point that I ask for advice. Any advice? All new perspectives are welcome.
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Chris JonesJust a guy going for a bit of a documented ride. Archives
May 2018
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