Good lord, it was hot here today. The ther­mome­ters topped out at 40 degrees Centi­grade, which is 104 degrees Fahren­heit. That may have been the mea­sure­ment in direct sun­light, but it was still a scorcher. We do a lot of walk­ing here. I’ll guess that it’s about half a mile from our hotel to the school where the wood­wind classes meet, and a mile and a half or so from there to the arts cen­ter where most rehearsals take place. The three are in a big tri­an­gle, and we gen­er­ally make many trips through­out the day. That com­bined with the heat and humid­ity mean that we’re basi­cally sweaty all the time. I’ve about got­ten used to just being dirty all the time. Cool show­ers at night are a must, both to cool down and to get rid of all the sweat, dirt, sun­screen, and bug spray accu­mu­lated dur­ing the day. Unfor­tu­nately, we don’t have access to a pool, so we can’t cool down that way.

Today, Mad­Winds per­formed at a bank branch in down­town Jaragua do Sul. The bank, HSBC, is one of the spon­sors of the fes­ti­val. The gig was a lot of fun. We set up in the lobby next to a wall of ATMs and played for a half hour or so. The bank staff came out to lis­ten to us, and we drew a sur­pris­ing num­ber of peo­ple off the street. At the end, the man­ager gave us all HSBC ball caps and told our inter­preter that he’d like us to play again at another loca­tion next week. I’m hop­ing that will work out, espe­cially if that means we get to be dri­ven around more of the city. Our daily trav­els cover the same ter­ri­tory all the time, and we haven’t seen much else.

Well, my hour at the CYBER HOTT inter­net cafe is about to run out, so I’ll have to end it here. More later.