Arame Making

Last weekend we cut wire from a discarded car tyre (there was a huge pile of random trash in our street, again) to make arame (wire string) for my berimbau – my old wire snapped a few weeks ago while stringing.

Tools/materials: Carpet knife (not the best choice, a decent serrated knife would have been more effective), cut protection glove, gardening gloves, pliers, sanding paper, trash bag.

Might sound like a weird way to spend a Sunday afternoon while nursing a headache, but it made me extremely happy and also a little proud. As a friend told me, there are many capoeiristas who have yet to make their own arame. I might not be a very good capoeirista (saw a video of me playing for the first time last week, looked horrible), but I’m pretty motivated right now. A little too motivated, maybe, my body is not happy right now. I’ll elaborate on that in one of my next posts.

The arame is not perfect – too thick wire – but good enough for practising at home.

Ding dong dong.

Anybody home? YES.

Sorry for two months of radio silence.

I’ve been busy getting used to a full time job in which I have to concentrate a lot – during the first month I just came home and went to bed, too exhausted to survive even one full capoeira class per week. Now after a little more than two months I’m starting to build a routine of juggling work, 2-3 capoeira classes/week (one week I even made it through 4 1/2!), household chores (though I still neglect these a lot), weekly choir practise (I cut myself a lot of slack here, too), and much needed down time. We got a sofa and I enjoy just sitting and reading in peace for an hour or two instead of filling my head with random internet stuff. I’m rereading A Game of Thrones so I’ll finally be able to get to the second volume, but there are some other books I started reading as well.

Today we came back from a short trip (four nights), some first photos are up on instagram.com/starfishskies. We hiked up rock formations and down into forests, slept and read a lot, we even watched normal TV. Yesterday we spent the evening in a swimming hall where they have different fun things like a pool that leads outside where they put on fog and lights at night, and a pool with salt water where you can float, watch lights and listen to underwater music (totally my thing, so relaxing).