475: Brazilian Carnival, Decolonizer coaches, and $500k / year with a newsletter
Last week was Carnival in Brazil, and it was mental.
Think many many thousands of people descending on the central areas of towns to pack the streets shoulder to shoulder with partying. Ostensibly from the same origin as Mardi Gras, to partake in excess before Christian lent.
In other words, it’s the classic global tradition of street drinking, which I have discovered I have aged out of. There’s a reason why people like to party in venues with people they know and space to move.
Still, the street bloco parties are quite something, as the Brazilian flavor of street drinking has an extra aspect to it - people are just going that much harder.
More interesting to the traveller may be the parades, with all the crazy costumes and samba and floats parading down a dedicated municipal sambadrome.
We watched our local edition in Florianopolis, (and you can even see our poi in the audience of this timestamped livestream of the event!), but honestly, I’d say go to Rio de Janiero.
No matter where you go the streets will be packed with authenticity. Rio simply has the biggest celebrations, friendliest locals, best tourist infrastructure, and accessible beaches. Bahia de Salvador in the north apparently also an even more traditional one with equally large parties.
Tech
This site Blocos de Rua was super helpful to locate where the Blocos go, as they are led by musicians with instruments through a designated street path.
This longread about life working for iPhone manufacturer Foxconn in China was a scary and eye opening look into the front lines of hyper global capitalism.
This former Airbnb engineer makes $500k/year through writing a newsletter about product management and curate the community around it. His writing advice: ‘find something you care about and say something that hasn’t been said yet’ is something I’m keeping in mind as I explore what I want to do next in my career.
History
In my ongoing quest to enwoken my perspective (in response to aggressive negative feedback of my takes on social media), I’ve discovered ‘decolonizer coaches’.
The space doesn’t seem to be well mapped yet, as one cannot search for them like a normal therapist, but here’s one I had a strong call with so far.
She has a masters in Divinity and worked in the Peace Corps and the like before doing this work, and has offerings in conjunction with indigenous coaches to get both perspectives.
Here’s another example. Have you heard of such offerings?
Fun
This channel does a good job of showing you what the Bloco parties are like on the ground. They have different themes with costumes and whatnot - there is even a Beatles themed Bloco!