"CRAZY." That’s the word that seems to come up the most when talking to people about Brazil. But like your aunt with 10 cats, or Jaws, or popcorn-flavored jellybeans Brazil is a good kind of crazy. The people are crazy friendly and optimistic to the point of being delusional. The country is crazy beautiful and has like a million miles of coastline. The weather is crazy tropical, the vibe is crazy great, and if you like soccer they are playing like crazy, all over the place, all the time. But there are also those things that can make it a bad kind of crazy sometimes. For example NO Uber. I love Uber, use it all the time. And I get it, the cab drivers are mad at Uber for doing such a great job that they have to take them to court to try to stay in business. But in Brazil things are a little more gangster. Court? Pshaw. Caio Notaro told me about a neat little trick they use in Brazil that beats court any day. An undercover cab driver orders an Uber. He gets picked up and sets his destination at a rendezvous point where there are a bunch of his cab driver homies waiting in the bushes. When the Uber driver gets to the destination, he gets jumped, beaten, stabbed in the eyeballs or whatever, his car is torched and he’s left for dead, or just left dead, aaaaaaaand that’s the end of Uber. DJ Wade opened the app in Sao Paulo to find one Uber available in the entire city, which has roughly 11 million people in it. I’d like to meet that driver, or maybe not.

But yeah, we went to Brazil for the first ever Damn Am in the Southern Hemisphere, and it was beyond amazing. The crew: Milligan (judge #1), Hoffart (judge #2), Eric McKenney (registration), Bart Jones (photographer), DJ Wade (DJ), and myself (English speaking organizer / announcer). Schaefer and Filmer Frank were supposed to be with us also but their visas never came so that was that, they had to stay home.

Kelvin Hoefler (judge #3) and his wife Ana Paula (Portuguese speaking organizer) helped us set up the contest from start to finish. They rule. We had probably somewhere around 700 kids try to sign up to enter, and since we didn’t know who any of them were besides Caio and a small handful of others, we needed a grip of help deciding who to let skate and who to not let skate. Kelvin had just broken his leg at Tampa Pro so he was laid up and had nothing much to do so we put him to work watching videos of kids who wanted to skate. He settled on about 220 of them who looked like they could hang. In the end 186 of them showed up to skate making it the biggest turnout for any Damn Am ever. And you saw the edits, the kids rip! All of them. A couple things that you can’t help but notice about Brazil vs. the US: People make out in public a lot. Here someone would yell "Get a room!" out of a passing car window. There they don’t…well maybe they do but I wouldn’t understand it anyways since it would be in Portuguese.

A typical Brazilian has anywhere from 2 to what, 7 names? Felipe Rodrigo Silva Oliveira Santos Etc. I like to refer to them as Choose Your Own Adventure names. Apparently the rules are pretty loose as to where these names come from, they might be from your mom’s side of the family, your dad’s side, or both. The more names the merrier in Brazil. There is graffiti everywhere in Brazil. And I mean EVERYwhere. They have a unique style of ugly writing that they scrawl all over the sides of every single building. They call it Pichacao. I think they need to figure out a way to fight it because it’s hideous. They also have a lot of trash strewn about and there are sections of town you don’t go to no matter what. I don’t know if Kelvin Hoefler’s erratic lane changes and herky jerky acceleration / braking patters are representative of all Brazilians, but he drove out to the airport in Sao Paulo to help us all get back to the Santos with our million bags, so I was following him and it was like trying to keep up with Senna after a weeklong bender. High speed, cutting in and out of lanes, slamming on the brakes, speeding up, slowing down, and then occasionally throwing horns out the window at us, Heavy Metal!!! (Ana drove us back to the airport when we were leaving, and after promising she was a much slower / safer driver we got the same thing minus the horns).

Santos, where we did the contest, can best be thought of as Clearwater Beach in relation to Tampa proper. Sao Paulo is the big city, Santos the "sleepy" beach town an hour and half away on the coast. Although I looked it up and it has a population of 400,000+, so nothing to sneeze at. And I’m not joking when I say that the skatepark sits on the most impressive piece of real estate in the entire city, a tiny peninsula just big enough for the park, some churro stands, and that big sculpture that you’ve seen in a million photos by now which was created by artist Tomie Ohtake to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Japanese immigration to Brazil. Who knew. I could go on all day but you have better things to do. I’d suggest you try to come out for it next year, oh, and no, as far as we know none of us brought home any Zika.

























-Paul Zitzer