Les Miserables

Tonight we had a wonderful time at the house of my friends... Brazilian music, mixed with some steaks and beer/cachaca. Great dancing and singing added on.. I don't want to forget these great moments... ever.

About 3 p.m. I went home and just around the corner on a big avenue I saw something I can't forget. A woman and two boys sleeping on the street. This is not unusual here, but this time two things hit me very deep.

The memories of the party and the bar just 20 meters away full of young talking and laughing - what a fucking contrast! We were happy, the people at the bar were happy, but these 3 people were fighting with life. It had been really hard on them...

The smaller boy was about 7 years old. He had hugged the woman, just like a child hugs his mother... Indeed, she was his mother. I know this because I saw their faces... I saw they loved each other... Sleeping like angels... The other boy was a little older, I guess his brother. So it was a family surviving on the streets of BH... They were very poor, the boy had no shoes... May God be with them...

Inhotim: Nature and Art

Inhotim is a very beautiful and harmonic place, designed to merge wonderful nature with modern art. It is located near Belo Horizonte. About 20 small buildings are spread all over the park containing interesting art works. Unfortunately I don't have photos from inside, but you can look at the site . The most surprising fact was that this place is private, but non-profit. Students pay 5 R$ (about 2 Euros) to enter - about one caipirinha in a bar. And the best restaurant I have ever seen is there.

Here are some pictures of our trip. Barbara, Denise, Gabriel and me.






What does this statue mean? A small angry man, sitting on the head of another man. Both sitting on books. Big man's brain on the floor, instead he has a squared box-head. The small man looks like Napoleon or some dictator. The big guy looks to me like an educated, but obedient man who would do everything the small man says. Including war.


Cool colorful cars. Note the shield of the left car - LGB which stands for lesbian, gay and bisexual people.






Wonderful palms...











These models were real people from Minas Gerais. The artist captured them dancing - something that people here love to do, and do it really great. Now everybody sing it:


"The boy is young, the boy is young.. but hey - she's beautiful and she feels good!
The man is old, the man is old.. but hey - he can walk, so he can dance!
The girls are girls, the girls are girls.. but hey - this doesn't matter, it is fun!"


Going to Bahia.. in the carnival time. Magic time.








She's beautiful...

Hugging and Kissing

Have you heard that small things can change the world and make it a better place? It is true... Just hug and kiss your friends every time you meet them. And again when you say good bye. This will make you feel much better... and will make the world better.. Just try and you will feel it. It's the easiest thing to change this world!


Don't believe me? I wouldn't believe it too... But since I am in Brasil, I believe it. Here, instead of greeting your friends with a moderate handshake, it is the most natural thing to kiss them and give them a warm hug. And the same when saying goodbye. And when you meet someone for the first time you give them 2 or 3 kisses!

Now imagine you get kissed and hugged about 20 times.. every day!! It is a warm feeling that makes you so much more happy and relaxed. It is a kind of love you recieve and transmit to others... It just removes the daily stress and frustration. Instead, you get love.. And because everybody does it, it makes everybody more smiley, more happy and less nervous and less aggressive. What a change!

PS: I want to dedicate this post to my wonderful friends here, and all to the warm people in Brasil who treat strangers as friends.

PS: I will try to implement this when I come back in Germany, so people - beware {O} {O} {O}

PS: Here only men and women kiss, but men and men don't kiss, they only hug or give a special handshake. I guess hugging among men is somehow prejudiced by the fear of being taken for "gay". But I think men should hug, it's a kind of friendship.

PS: This guy gives free hugs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3x_RRJdd4

Young Genius at the Lab

Today I met Gabriel, a 16 year old guy in our little lab.. He is still at school, but he was working on some project using Ontologies (these are highly abstract models containing wisdom, that is used by computer software, so it can understand the real world).

As we programmers are passionate about programming, our first question is very often this one: "What programming language do you work with?". So he was working with Java, but mentioned that he also loved Groovy (just like me), because of it's elegance and he also knew about Rails and Grails. It turned out that his real love was C++ because his true passion was game programming... GAME PROGRAMMING!!! Game programming is maybe the most challenging area of all software development! It has everything - mathematics, graphics, artificial intelligence, networking...

So we continued chatting about some C++ IDEs for Linux and he knew and had used three popular IDEs. And he also knew about source control... And all the time he was talking passionate about our craft.. In perfect high-level English. Man, what amazing knowledge with 16!

The best thing was that he had started programming only 3 years ago.. What a quick progress! I could only admire Gabriel and imagine him working on some crazy AI stuff at Google after 5 more years. Keep on pumping Gabriel...