Delayed 14/07/2010

Writing from the international airport in Santiago.

On my way to New York to do my acting scholarship.

It’s been a painfully stressful ordeal to organize, which is part of the reason I haven’t written for so long. In short, I need a student visa to do this, and Western Union sent my visa fee to the wrong place, meaning I missed the June course, and went home to London instead. It came to light that I could get unpaid leave for the July course, but I had to come back to Sydney to get my visa, as the process isn’t transferrable. As such, my trip was cut short, and I didn’t get to catch up with as many people as I would have liked. I’m pursuing legal action against Western Union for lost earnings and the additional airfares incurred, which has been incredibly time consuming, and still to be resolved.

Anyway, I’m in transit having just been to Brazil for my capoeira schools biggest festival of the year. I was in Bahia for a week, and Rio for 4 days, where the festival was. Although it’s winter, I can see why so many people fall in love with Brazil. It’s truly beautiful, and culturally rich and ethnically diverse. I found Salvador particularly interesting because of the strong African influence, a lot of which is nigerian.

The standard of capoeira, as you would expect, was pretty spectacular, although, amongst it all, there were some quite dubious merchants who call themselves capoeira masters (usually in the tourist districts) who actually don’t have much of a clue about it at all.

I’m only a yellow belt, but I genuinely thought I had better technique than the guy I did a one on one lesson with on the beach in Salvador.

In any case, I caught up with my team in Rio, and 9 of us stayed in a one bedroom apartment (true Australian style), somehow without getting busted by the apartment owner. It rained everyday, so it wasn’t the typical party atmosphere that the place is known for, but it was still great to just hang out with people and watch the masters perform and teach us.

With the whole trip being organized at such short notice, I only got the chance to learn some very basic Portuguese beforehand. And even then, I was rather hesitant to. I was hoping that I could just speak Spanish and pretend that I’d had a stroke (hey- it sounds about the same).  In retrospect, however, more Portuguese would have been immensely useful, even if it is the ugliest of the latin-based languages.

The salsa congress was on again this year in Wellington. I only got clearance from work to go to it 2 weeks beforehand, but I really wanted to do another performance. I set myself a pretty high standard last year, and wanted to build on it. I got Adrian and Antonio to help me again. I had a song in mind that I liked, however, I didn’t love it like I loved the song I used the previous year. A lot of people told me that the dance I did was better, but personally, I wasn’t quite as enthused about it. As with every congress, though, it was still a great party, and a chance to catch up with all of my dancing friends.

Some of you from London might remember my African cooking, which I hadn’t done for ages (actually, not since leaving London). There are very few west Africans in Sydney, meaning that sourcing ingredients to make this was very difficult, but over the course of a month, I managed to get everything together, and had a dinner party at my place. Now, whenever I have a dinner party, I will invite quite a large number of people, as I know that at least half won’t be able to make it, or will flake at the last minute. I was aiming for 14, but in the end, 25 people were there, and curiously, there were only seven guys. My male friends and I were looking at each other and thinking “ this is the best party EVER!”. And it was. I pimped off one of the girls to one of my capoeira team-mates, and they seem to have really taken to each other, which is beautiful to see.

On getting back to Sydney from London, I went to the gym straight from the airport. Being a Saturday morning, it was pretty quiet. One of the other members was sitting at one of the stations as I walked past him, and he asked me what my sporting background was. I told him I played rugby for many years. He told me that he had a client who is launching a new brand of mens underwear, and the he thought that I’d be prefect to use a a model. “How long would it take you to get a decent set of abs?” he asked. I lifted up my shirt and said “ How about these?”. “Oh.” He said.

He asked if I could do some poses for him in the changing room, which I agreed to.  I’ve done swimwear/underwear modeling before, and so thought nothing of posing in my underwear, which was fine, until he started asking me to re-shuffle my “anatomy”. I reluctantly complied, but I guess you could argue for there to be some relevance to it. However, when he started helping me to do it, I got really, REALLY uncomfortable. Thankfully, it was only for a matter of fractions of a second, but even that was enough to make a lasting impression.

With my leaving for Brazil and the US in a couple of days, he asked me to meet him in his office the following day. Still feeling a little uncomfortable, I asked to meet in a public place. He flat refused, so I said thanks, but no thanks. Shame- it sounded like a good opportunity: modeling on the product packaging, on a billboard, and on TV. On balance, though, aside from any potential safety risks, any deal may have involved performing services that I simply wouldn’t have been prepared to provide.

I think I’ll stick to acting. At least the porn companies are open about what they expect. I think they’re auditioning for “Tiger’s Got Wood”.

I’ll keep you posted.