domingo, 31 de janeiro de 2010

Nightlife


All sorts of things happen in Sao Paulo at night. It`s hard to guess how your night is going to be. It could be something like this....

It`s 10 o’clock and you are already on your PJs, watching American Idol with your mom, when you get a call from your friend, letting you know that she`s coming over because her boyfriend (affair? lover? friend with benefits?) is going out and offering a ride. She arrives 30 minutes later, announcing that she`s going to use your shower and dryer because she didn`t have time to get her hair ready. She asks for a towel and tells you to call a couple of friends to see what`s on tonight. You then find out your friends are at the bar around the corner and, after one hour of washing, drying, changing and making up, you and your friend go meet the group at the bar. When you get there you notice the bar is closing, because your friends are the only people that are still there. So you drink the rest of the beer and get in someone`s car to the next destiny. The four cars are parked in a gas station so you can get some more beer and the girls can use the bathroom. You spend 40 minutes doing that. Someone calls one of your friends from another bar nearby and that becomes the next destiny. You get in someone else`s car this time. After a few turns around the block you find a parking spot and the bar. You get a little more beer, vodka, and other weird drinks. Someone gets annoyed by the lack of music in this bar, so half the group walks to a Samba house down the street. There, one of the couples has a fight because the guy got too drunk and started to act stupid. They leave the place and you find out you don`t have a ride home anymore. It`s only you, the friend that had been with you from the beginning and her ex-(actual? only on holidays?) boyfriend. You enjoy the Samba and a couple more beers before you decide to leave the place. Outside you find the fighting couple discussing still; the girl is crying and complaining that she can`t find her cell-phone. Everybody tries to call her mobile and gets to the conclusion that she must`ve dropped it in the car. They fight all the way to the car and leave, while you and the two remaining friends realize it`s already 5 and you`re starving. So you walk 6 blocks to a Burger restaurant and have your meal. Before your friends finish their sandwiches you are already sleeping on your chair. The waiter wakes you up to hand you a napkin with the phone number of the pink shirted guy on the other side of the room. Judging by the color of his shirt you decide is not even worth to say you`re not interested. You leave the napkin on your dirty plate and head out to get a cab. Finally home, you and your sister, who just arrived 10 minutes earlier, watch the sunrise from the balcony and go to bed.

domingo, 3 de janeiro de 2010

Orkut Phenomenon


Orkut is the Brazilian Facebook. And for the teenage world in São Paulo, if you don`t have an Orkut profile you don`t exist. It became a matter of status, your popularity is based on how many friends you`ve got. Many kids started to add anyone they know, or don`t know but have something in common: same school, same neighborhood, same last name. Anything was a reason for an addition to your profile. Result: in a city of 18 million people where everybody is connected somehow through this one website, the gossip increased in a gigantic scale.
To have an idea of how it actually happens I`ll give you an example: When that airplane crashed in Amazon killing 200 people, their profiles were visited by more than 100.000 people in one night. The flight attendants` profile received as many messages of “rest in peace” and messages of support to their families as their mail boxes could hold. Freaky, I know. But that`s how much Brazilians socialize.
I also heard of many relationships that started and that ended because of Orkut. Many people meet old friends there and end up finding a boyfriend or a girlfriend this way. And some couples actually fight because of Orkut gossip, messages from other people that made them jealous (the messages or “scraps” on Orkut are open to everyone on your friends list to see) or the fact the guy had too many girls, or the girl too many boys, on his/her list.
Another interesting thing about Orkut is the photo album. Every time you post a new picture, this information is sent to all of your friends. So you go to your profile and see that one of your friends posted new pictures you go there and look, of course. That increases the number of visits on that profile page, which increases the person`s popularity. So guess what teenagers, desperate to be popular, do? They take thousands of pictures of themselves and post a massive number of them, in a regular frequency, so people will keep visiting their profiles and making comments. The mirror picture became very popular, you know, when you take a picture of yourself and your beautiful camera reflexes. That also made bathrooms a common background for the pictures. Almost every bathroom`s got a mirror, right?
There was this one case of a girl, profile name “Tata”, that liked to post this kind of picture. She had full albums with pictures of herself on the mirror. Well nobody actually checked all of them out, not even her, apparently, but somebody was paying enough attention to actually notice her terrible mistake. You know when you are ready to shower but then decide to use the toilet first? Well, behind the smiley Tata, on her bathroom picture, there was her mother. The woman was sitting on the toilet, naked. It`s easy to miss it, but if you zoom it you can actually see the woman there, and that she needed to lose some weight. Of course you can`t stop laughing when you see it. So the very attentive person that notice the woman couldn`t help but sharing it with the world. He made a webpage with the picture, and a red circle to emphasize the naked mom, and sent it to his whole list of friends. Naturally his friends kept passing it forward. It didn`t take long to the whole city have a copy of the picture and Tata`s profile receive messages from thousands of people. People made jokes, rhymes, poems and even songs about Tata`s situation and they were all posted on her profile. On that night she was receiving 10 messages per second. I can only imagine the girl`s reaction when she first got online after the discovery.