Íris Lettieri 

Antigamente, uma das delícias de chegar ou sair dos aeroportos aqui no Rio (e também em São Paulo e Manaus) era a voz da Íris Lettieri, quem gravou as anúncios automáticos dos vôos. Era quase exatamente o oposto das vozes inexpressivas, destacadas e sem paixão que você ouve normalmente nos aeroportos do mundo. Ouça ela aqui (ou clique aqui caso o vídeo não apareça):



Há um mês, os novos donos dos aeroportos (foram privatizados pelo governo numa última tentativa para fazê-los prontos para a Copa) a substituíram, depois de 37 anos, com um voz mais "normal". Pareceu que isto era o fim duma época. Mas, em O Globo esta manhã, tinha boas noticias. A prefeitura fiz a voz dela um parte do "patrimônio imaterial da cidade" e os tons sussurrados dela vão voltar. Espero que aconteça antes da sexta, quando vou esperar o meu vôo para Londres. Ela era quase a única coisa que faz tolerável uma espera nas cavernas estéreis da sala de embarque no Galeão. 

Íris Lettieri 

Until recently, one of the delights of arriving at or departing from the airports here in Rio (and also in São Paulo and Manaus) was the voice of Íris Lettieri, who recorded the automated flight announcements. Hers was almost exactly the opposite of the featureless, detached and emotion-free voices you usually get in airports around the world. Listen to her here (or click here if the video isn't showing):



A month ago, the airports' new owners (many of Brazil's airports were recently privatised in a last-ditch attempt to have them ready by the World Cup) replaced her, after 37 years, with a more "normal"-sounding voice. It seemed that that was the end of an era. However, this morning's O Globo newspaper had some good news. The city council has decreed that her voice is part of Rio's cultural heritage and her breathy tones are coming back. I only hope that happens before Friday, when I will be waiting for my flight to London. She was almost the only thing that made waiting around in the sterile caverns of Galeão's departure lounge tolerable.

Bolos fofos 

Tem um aspeto do The School of Life que gosto muito: uma atenção aos detalhes em tudo o que a gente faz. Depois do sermão, a gente ofereceu estes pequenos bolos para a plateia com café, um para a tecnologia e um para a humanidade. São bonitos (mas, como quase tudo no Brasil, doce demais para mim.)

É a minha última semana no Brasil. O SImba chegou e a gente vai passar o dia juntos hoje. Ontem eu conduzi um dia de treinamento para os novos professores da escola e esta noite e amanhã vou ensinar duas aulas finais. A escola vai estar algo incrível aqui. Tenho certeza que é o lugar e o tempo certíssimo para ela. Espero de voltar em setembro ou outubro e tenho certeza que vai estar florescendo. Sem dúvida merece.

Nice cakes 

There's an aspect of The School of Life that I really like: attention to detail in everything that it does. After the sermon, we gave the audience little cakes with coffee, one for technology and one for humanity. They were cute (but, like pretty much everything in Brazil, too sweet for me.)

This is my last week in Brazil. Simba has arrived and we are going to spend the day together today. Yesterday I ran a training day for new teachers and tonight and tomorrow night I am going to be giving two final classes. The school is going to be something incredible here in Brazil. I am sure that this is exactly the right time and place for it. I am hoping to come back in September or October and I'm sure it will be flourishing. It certainly deserves to be.

Televisão em Porto Alegre/TV in Porto Alegre
Clique aqui caso o vídeo não apereça.
Click here if the video doesn't show.

O dia do sermão 

Chegou o dia do meu "sermão" em Porto Alegre. Isto é a palestra que dei em São Paulo o ano passado. Essa deu certo mas agora tenho mais confiança do meu português e me sinto mais relaxado. Vou tentar uma piada na começa sobre ele - assista a este espaço (você fala isso em português?). 
É um sermão porque a gente tenta recriar a experiência duma igreja (sem o Deus, obviamente, e uma produção do Alain de Botton). A gente tem "hinos" - Cérebro Eletrônico do Gilberto Gil (a tecnologia) e Tempos Modernos do Lulu Santos (a humanidade) - e uma cantora muito boa, Nina Mederos, e a banda dela. Aqui estão no ensaio:

A plateia vai chegar daqui a uma meia hora. A gente vendeu mais que 300 ingressos. Eu acho que estou pronto.

Sermon day 

It's the day of my "sermon" in Porto Alegre. This is the talk that I gave in São Paulo last year. That went well but now I am more confident about my Portuguese so I am feeling more relaxed. I am going to attempt a joke about my language skills at the beginning - watch this space. 
It's a sermon because we are trying to recreate the feeling of a church (without God of course - this is an Alain de Botton production). We have "hymns" - Electronic Brain by Gilberto Gil (technology) and Modern Times by Lulu Santos - and we have with us a really good singer called Nina Medeiros and her band. Here they are in rehearsal:



The audience arrives in half an hour. We have sold more than 300 tickets. I think I am ready.

Em Porto Alegre

Na galpão onde a gente vai dar as aulas

Acabei de chegar em Porto Alegre onde, desde amanhã até o domingo, vou dar quatro aulas para The School of Life e um "sermão" (uma palestra) sobre a tecnologia. Havia muito interesse nas aulas. A gente vendeu os ingressos para a primeiro dia (sábado) bem rápido e decidiu fazer mais um dia (sexta). Agora esta também é esgotado.
Esta noite vou fazer uma entrevista ao vivo na televisão as 2130, num programa que se chama Tudo+. Clique aqui para ver a página dele. Tem um sofa como nos programas de café de manhã na Inglaterra.

 

Estou um pouco nervoso (é ao vivo e em português) mais também empolgado. Comprei calças novas e tennis novas e cortei o meu cabelo.

In Porto Alegre

In the warehouse where we will be teaching

I have just arrived in Porto Alegre where, from now until Sunday, I am going to be teaching four classes for The School of Life and giving a "sermon" (a talk) on technology. There has been a lot of interest in the classes. The first day (Saturday) sold out almost immediately so we decided to do a second day (Friday). Now that too has sold out. 
Tonight at 9.30pm I am going to be interviewed live on television, on a programme called Tudo+. Click here to see more about the programme. There's a sofa like on those breakfast shows in Britain.

I am a bit nervous (it's live and it's in Portuguese) but also excited. I have bought a new pair of trousers and some new trainers and I have had my hair cut.

A minha estreia no jornalismo brasileiro
Em november, eu conheci os editores do Info Exame, uma revista parecida com Wired. Eles me pediram para escrever uma matéria sobre viver sem a internet por 21 dias. Eu escrevi, e aqui está.

Clique para ampliar.

My Brazilian journalism debut
In November I met the editors of Info Exame, which is a Brazilian version of Wired. They asked me to write a piece about staying off the internet for 21 days, which I did and here it is.

Click on the images to enlarge.

Living unplugged
By David Baker

The act itself was simple. At 4pm on December 14, 2014, I unplugged my router and turned off the 3G on my iPhone, to spend 21 days without the internet. I’d chosen the timing carefully. With the end of the year looming, work was winding down. And it seemed a good time to put into practice an experiment I had been thinking about for most of the year: to see what life would be like away from the constant stream of digital data with which many of us now share our lives.
The first 24 hours were hopeless. I’d set an out-of-office message on my email, asking people to call or SMS me, and I’d printed off a few weeks of my Google calendar, but otherwise I hadn’t prepared at all.
I had to keep on reconnecting to get things that I had forgotten. It was eye-opening how much of my life existed in the cloud: bank statements and receipts for my end-of-year accounts, reference numbers for purchases I had made, phone numbers, files on Google Docs, and so on. All of these I had consigned to the net on the basis that I could easily get them whenever I wanted. Unplugging had removed them from my grasp. 
After a few days, though, things had settled down and I started to notice a change in the quality of my time. In my connected life, I would use the internet to fill the little gaps between bigger activities – checking for messages, reading something on Gawker or Buzzfeed, browsing my emails just because they were there.
Now those gaps became more meaningful in themselves, as times to pause, relax and think a little. At a bus stop, instead of poking around on my phone, I would just stay quiet for a few minutes, like a mental yoga session. To begin with it felt odd and boring. But, by not forcing myself to think of anything in particular, my mind became less cluttered and my thoughts became slower, gentler and more profound. Bigger issues came to mind, the things you think about on holiday but for which there seems to be too little time when you come back into the busy everyday world. I started to carry around a notebook to jot down decisions I made in these moments – and I have acted on almost all of them since then. 
I also started to see the world differently. Walking along the street without my phone in my hand meant that I looked at real things in a more attentive way and the world fell into a sharper focus. I’m not sure why this should be. I think it was because I was concentrating on things and people that were 20 metres in front of me, rather than on a tiny screen. But I think I also benefited from a psychological effect: by removing the digital world from my consciousness – none of that wondering whether I should log on and check something – I allowed my brain to focus much more on what was literally in front of my eyes. Colours became more vibrant and I started to notice things about my home town, London, that had previously escaped my attention. It was like being a tourist in a new place for the first time.
I spent most of last year thinking about our relationship with technology. I write for Wired magazine but I also teach, in London and São Paulo, at The School of Life, which tries to help people live life better, and at the latter I was meeting people who had been negatively affected by the technology world that Wired loves to celebrate.
A phrase came to my mind, coined by Henry David Thoreau, the 19th-century American philosopher who was observing the unexpected negative effects of the first industrial revolution: “Men have become the tools of their tools.” We invent something and then we become the slaves of it. Now, a quarter of a century into a the digital industrial revolution, it feels like we are making the same mistakes.
It’s not that humans are fools, far from it. It’s just that we can be so excited by new technology that we feel we have to engage with it unquestioningly, even if that makes our experience of life poorer.
I noticed this especially, during my unplugged 21 days, when it came to listening to music.
I am a huge fan of Spotify. I love its infinite-jukebox capability, the fact that I can think of a song and pretty much immediately play it on my Mac. I often flit from track to track, following up recommendations of others or using the Radio feature to discover new artists. This feels good at the time, but, looking back, I don’t think I remember many of the new names I listened to and I certainly don’t think I have in some way broadened my music collection. Instead I have heard a large number of songs in a fairly random order. 
Unplugged, all of this was unavailable to me and instead I rediscovered my CDs. By a fluke of disrepair, the track selector on my CD player was broken, and I could only play CDs straight through from beginning to end – just like we used to do with vinyl. This was a surprisingly pleasurable discovery and something I stuck to even when I remembered I could play CDs (and choose tracks) on my Mac. Instead of jumping from track to track, sometimes even before they had finished, I let an album play all the way through, listening to the music in the order that the band, composer or producer had thought hard about. I sometimes felt impatient for the instant skip or the jump to a related artist that the internet gives us, but that was easily compensated for by the pleasure of experiencing something that had been “curated”, to use that ugly online word, by someone talented who had thought hard about what track to put after what, a selection made by a human, not an algorithm.
By week two, I was barely noticing that I wasn’t on the internet. Out in the streets, I was enjoying not having Google maps and I rediscovered an old skill we used to have before smartphones became ubiquitous: planning a route on a map and holding that route in your head as you navigate the city. Thinking of journeys in this way – rather than the fragmented, “turn right”, “turn left” of GPS – made my city’s geography come alive again and fill with meaning. I began to think again in terms of north, south, east and west, about landmarks and distances, about the city has a whole. Journeys became more like adventures again, rather than dully necessary ways to get from A to B. Rediscovering the brain’s ability to hold even quite complex geography in mind was a timely reminder of the amazing operating system in our heads, something we can easily forget in our obsession with processor speeds and Big Data algorithms. 
The US psychologist Martin Seligman has taken a special interest in what he calls core human strengths – the apps, if you like, that run in our brain, things like creativity, curiosity, bravery and leadership, that technology is quite poor at. I found taking time off the internet provided an opportunity to rediscover these and cultivate them in myself.
Not looking at my phone in conversations with others let me give them my full attention, and as a result the conversations were deeper and more fulfilling. Talking through a question with a colleague, rather than rushing to Google to find an instant answer to something, helped us both grow in knowledge and insight. By setting the internet to one side, I was rediscovering that we, as humans, are actually pretty smart.
In fact, the absence of Google was the most noticeable change during my 21 days offline. I was shocked by how much I used (and therefore missed) Google, not only tools such as GMail, Google Docs and Google Calendar, but the basic Google search too.
In the early days of the web, companies such as Compuserve and AOL tried to set up portals through which we would access a kind of filtered version of the internet, curated by them. These didn’t survive long and, on their demise, we celebrated the “fact” that the internet could never be ringfenced like this. But somehow, perhaps because it has been much subtler about it, we have allowed Google to do just this. Only when I didn’t have Google did I realise how often the Google home page was my starting point for researching something online. And if Google chose not to show me a site or a piece of information in response to what I am looking for – a worry that we had about Compuserve and AOL – I almost certainly wouldn’t notice the omission. 
When I went online again after 21 days, the first thing I saw was a Buzzfeed link someone had sent me of funny local-paper headlines from around the UK. I usually like these things: they pass the time and they are pretty funny. But, being away from it, I found my expectations of the internet had grown and I realised I wanted more from it than just recycled humour and pictures of cats.
I realised that I could take much more control over what I saw on the internet and what I ignored, developing a relationship with it that was more measured and grown-up. The new sense of time I had gained by not being online I now wanted to preserve. And I liked things like having the map of my city in my head.
This was the real lesson of time offline: the real world is incredible but it is often eclipsed but its flashy digital counterpart that is constantly calling for our attention. I think the time has come to put the internet in its place, as a tool we use to do amazing things, but just as that, as part of a bigger world that I have rediscovered is just as stimulating and exciting.

BOXES
How to renegotiate our relationship with the online world

1. Retract
The idea of “always on” was invented with the invention of broadband and we can always uninvent it. Twenty-one days is a long time offline, but how about a few hours, a day, a weekend? Experiment with disconnecting completely from the internet for periods of time and see what emerges to take its place. You might be pleasantly surprised.

2. Reflect
With this new offline time in your life, start to notice what’s important to you and gives you pleasure, maybe conversations with friends, losing yourself in a book, exploring your city with new eyes. Take Martin Seligman’s online questionnaire at authentichappiness.org to discover what you are especially good at. Take time to think of what you value in life and what your sense of purpose is.

3. Return
With this new knowledge, come back to the world of technology and see it is a set of tools that we can choose from rather than a collection of apps, social networks and sites we have to keep up with. Experiment with times of day when you are online and times when you are disconnected. That way you we can regain control over technology. 

Life at School
The School of Life is the creation of the writer Alain de Botton and is dedicated to bringing together the best ideas from any age to enrich our daily lives. The school is renowned for its innovative approach and since its launch in 2008 more than 50,000 people have taken part in its courses. The author of this piece, David Baker, teaches at the School of Life in London and São Paulo.

Carnaval
A primeira coisa que eu vi, quando sai da minha casa a quinta passado, foi um cara num carro, no banco da motorista, a porta aberto, o motor ligado, vomitando no chão. O carnaval tinha começado. A cidade se tornou num parque de diversões enorme. Em todas as lugares, especialmente no Centro onde moro, quase 24 horas por dia, tem tido festas na rua, nos boates, nas praças e numas casas particulares. Era quase impossível dormir, mas quem queria? Estava gostando muito. 
Muitas pessoas usavam fantasias. Isto é o meu amigo Alfred a outra noite.

Estes caras estava se divertindo na Lapa.

Aqui estão mais, do outro dia em Copacabana (tinham muitos Fred Flintstones).

Até os cachorros tinham fantasias.

Podia também comprar fantasias, perucas, tintas de corpo, acessórios, flores artificias, plumas e muito mais de vendedores no calçado. Eu cheguei em casa uma noite, depois um dia na praia de Ipanema, onde tinha um bloco de milhares de pessoas, coberto de tintas glitter de vários cores, com barba azul e um grande sorriso. Infelizmente não tem foto.
Embora tinham muitas pessoas na rua, bebendo, não tinha brigas (ou ao menos nada que eu vi; os jornais têm reportado números de assassinatos durante o Carnaval, então deve ter). A gente em Inglaterra poderia aprender muito dos Brasileiros. Em vez de brigar, as pessoas dançam.
Gostei muito do carnaval mas estava um desafio. Em Santa Teresa, tinha música e pessoas festejando 24 horas por dia e, por três ou quatro dias estava impossível dormir, viver normalmente ou até pensar.
Fui para muitos blocos e festas mas o melhor era uma festa na rua que passei com uns amigos uma noite fora do Sambódromo. Lá, você podia ver todos os carros esperando entrar nas desfiles deles, e milhares de pessoas se vestindo nas fantasias deles. Parecia seis peças de natividade, cada uma com um elenco de dois mil pessoas, esperando entrar no palco.

E um de mim.



Agora o carnaval acabou. Ele coincidiu com uma greve de garis no Rio e, nos dias seguintes, as ruas estavam cheias de lixo e daquele sentido de desapontamento que você sente depois uma festa boa. Passei a fim de semana em Paraty com um amigo, num lugar bem calma e tranquilo depois do Rio, e agora o trabalho e a vida normal recomeçou.
Vou esta semana para Porto Alegre para ensinar para o School of Life. A semana que vem, vou ensinar duas aulas aqui no Rio. E depois, ai, volto para Inglaterra.

Carnival
The first thing that I saw, when I left my house last Thursday morning, was a guy in the driving seat of his car, the door open and the engine running, being sick on to the road. Carnival had begun.
The city turned itself into a huge amusement park. Everywhere, especially in Centro, where I live, there were parties nearly 24 hours a day, in the streets, in clubs, in squares and in people's houses. It was almost impossible to sleep, but who would want to? I enjoyed it immensely.
Lots of people were wearing fancy dress. Here is my friend Alfred the other night:

These guys were enjoying themselves in Lapa.

And here are some more, in Copacabana (there were lots of Fred Flinstones.)

Even the dogs were in fancy dress.

You could also buy costumes, wigs, body paint, accessories, artificial flowers, feathers and a whole lot more from sellers on the pavement. I got home the other night, after a day on the beach in Ipanema, where there was a street party of thousands of people, covered in glitter multicoloured glitter paint, with a blue beard and a big smile. Unfortunately there isn't a photo.
Even though there are loads of people drinking in the street, there are no fights (or rather none that I saw – the papers have been reporting carnival murder figures so I guess there must be some). We in England could learn a lot from the Brazilians. Instead of fighting, people dance.
I went to lots of street parties (blocos) but the best was when I went with some friends to a party just outside the Sambodromo, where the famous glitzy parades take place that we always see in tourist shots of Rio de Janeiro. There, you could see the floats waiting to go into the arena and thousands of people getting into their costumes in the streets. It was like six school nativity plays, each with a cast of 2,000, getting ready to go on.

And one of me.



Now carnival is over. It coincided with a binmen's strike in Rio and, in the following days, the streets were full of rubbish and that sense of disappointment that you feel after a good party. I spent last weekend in Paraty, Rio's Brighton but nicer, which was calm and peaceful, and now work and normal life has begun again.
This week I go to Porto Alegre in the south to teach for the School of Life. And next week I will teach two classes here in Rio. And after that, gosh, I am flying home.