CH-CH-CH-Changes

Ten months after I had planned, and in a completely different direction, I finally left again on August 30th, with one hundred thoughtfully (and not-so-thoughtfully) selected pounds of my belongings and a series of one-way tickets. Whether this is a good idea remains to be seen, but I’m willing to give it a shot. Deciding that I wanted to come here was one of the easiest decisions that I have ever made (language classes, being a full-time student at a foreign university, exploring another culture and continent, capoeira, Lake Geneva, sailing, chocolate, traveling? Yes, please.), but I’m still not entirely sure how “maybe someday” became “now” or how I managed to convince myself or anyone else that it was at all a reasonable thing to do.

Careerwise (because I'm supposed to care about these things), I (think I) would like to work in language education and/or international education, and there are probably better things I could be doing to prepare me for that, but I’d still rather be the one learning languages and studying abroad than the teacher or the one dealing with other people’s student visa and vaccination requirements. Between the cheap tuition, subsidized student housing, permission (more or less) to work and high hourly rates for English tutors, I might not even go completely broke, and a year was about as much as I could take of job rejections and surgeries and being unemployed in the suburbs without capoeira or any social life to speak of, so here I am, and this is me starting a blog to chronicle my new life in Switzerland, which is, of course, abbreviated “CH.”

The name comes from my new capoeira name, which was given to me by CM João de Deus over breakfast the day after the batizado during my eight-day layover in Maryland/DC earlier this month.

The conversation went kind of like this:
Me: I actually don’t live in DC, I’m just visiting for the week.
Luana: Are you training somewhere else, then?
Me: Well… yes and no. I started capoeira when I was living here, trained here for a year and a half, and then I moved to Brazil and was training with another group for three months, but broke my foot and until last week I was living with my parents near Chicago, and not training because of my foot and because the closest school was an hour away. I just started playing again this week, here, and day after tomorrow I’m moving to Lausanne and will train with the group there.
[It later came up that I had spent a year in Chile, and that I haven’t spent more than two years in the same place in the seven since high school.]
João de Deus: Do you have a capoeira name yet?
Me: Not really.
João de Deus: Romeira.

It literally means “pilgrim” (I assume it comes from “Rome”?) but the connotation, I'm told, is closer to “wanderer.” I have not done as much wandering as I would have liked, and compared to most capoeiristas, I’ve barely wandered at all, but I’m working on it, I'm working on it.

“Volta do mundo” roughly translated means either a trip around the world or the turn of the earth. In capoeira, it refers to walking a few times around the roda, which capoeirsitas do when they need a breather or to calm down before resuming the game.

For once, I decided to go with a name that wasn’t specific to a particular trip or location, so perhaps this will be a general blog and not necessarily a Swiss one. And even when I am in Switzerland, there will probably be more capoeira-related stuff than normal people care to read about. Deal with it. :)