In January two thousand...
and
seventeen,
my classmates and I from...
a Master's
study
in Sweden,
we drove from
the North of Sweden, 390 kilometers,
to the North of Norway,
which is...
a very northerly point in the world,
and
the temperature
was minus 30 dregrees.
And there was, maybe...
Two hours of daylight per day.
The rest of the time, darkness.
And...
We went to see the Northern Lights,
Aurora Borealis,
ethenical name.
Where the sky
becomes green, and blue, and purple,
and dances around like this...
So we made this trip for five days.
On the first day, there was...
We were driving at 2am
and the sky was flickering and dancing.
And we were so excited we thought, this is amazing
everyday will be the same.
And...
we passed by a mountain
and the mountain blocked the view of the sky.
So when we emerged the other side,
the lights had gone.
And then for the next five days,
nothing!
No lights, nothing at all.
Completely,
normal sky, just black night.
No Northern Lights whatsoever.
So we manage to see it for two minutes
out of five days,
but we still got to see them, right?
I love being on the stage!
My training is in New York where I graduated from
The American Academy of Dramatic Arts, in New York City.
And they trained me to be able to act and perform on the stage.
So when I...
I was coming here in Long Beach,
I'm in Los Angeles, but I went to Long Beach.
There was a wonderful playhouse there,
called The Long Beach Playhouse.
I didn't tell anybody,
I was going to audition for the play.
I waited, I didn't tell my children, I didn't tell my mother.
I was divorced at the time...
And I saw the ad in the paper and I'm going...
"I'm gonna do this play. How exciting!"
So I went for the audition on the second night,
not the first one!
And I went to audition and they go...
"Where did you come from?" I go, "Los Angeles".
I got the part.
It was the best part ever!
It was a Neil Simon play that was called...
"Lost in Yonkers"
And I had a magnificent part that made me feel
wonderful!
We did this play for about six weeks.
It got great reception, wonderful reviews
and I was lucky enough to even win an award.
We went in,
we got in the back of the moto taxi,
we got dropped off at the top, we wanted to...
We were hiking the Dois Irmãos...
You have to go through
Vidigal favela to get to the hike.
And...
After four or five days deliberating,
if it was a sensible idea for
three pasty,
pale...
English guys that clearly looked like tourists.
We did... We went for it
and the Uber driver
dropped us off outside of the favela
was shouting and waving his hands
in Portuguese, and we obviously couldn't understand...
And all of this things were adding up to
our heart rates were there pouding.
We've heard all the stories, we've met some local guys
they were like, "No, this is stupid,
you will never do this, don't do this, this is crazy."
But we did it! And...
We got to the start of the hike,
and the hike takes you...
Above Vidigal and above Rocinha,
And the views were just breathtaking.
You know, when you get the top,
you can see the whole panoramic view,
the Sugar Loaf, the racing course.
Copacabana, Ipanema, the beaches.
And then it was great. But we didn't consider
that we have to get back down again,
and so, we hiked back down to the top of the favela
and then we realized that
there was no moto taxies waiting to take us back down.
So...
We stood there for 15 minutes thinking, what do we do?
The sun was going down, and it was getting dark.
And then all of sudden this:
a 90's, 60's or 70's VW Campervan
drove directly to us
and just started flashing.
And so we thought, this is either...
a good thing to get down or it could be a realy bad thing,
you know?
So we got in, gave the...
He's like a 7 or 8 year old boy
with just some reais...
And we just gave him whatever we had
and went straight down, got through the...
got to the bottom,
got out of the Campervan,
semi-jogged/ ran down the street to the...
I think it's Ipanema Beach,
and them just hugged each other for like five minutes.
We survived and we had a great experience.
Number one:
True or false? This one is true.
Okay, so number two:
True or false?
This one is true again!
Number three:
Number four:
And this one is false,
because it was getting dark.
And number five: