São Paulo artist recreates Monica and Rachel's flat from Friends

Bruna Salvador Conforto is obviously a big Friends fan. The artist from São Paulo recently recreated a papier-mâché model of the entire flat from the series. 

The recreation, which took two years to complete, includes every little detail of the flat shared by Monica (Courtney Cox) and Rachel (Jennifer Anniston) in the series:

Check out the pictures:

Police car chases and crashes into plane suspected of illegal imports

I always tell my friends that watching the regional news in Brazil is far more exciting than it is back home.

Today's evening news highlight came from Ribeirão Preto, inner state of São Paulo. It's basically a dramatic showdown between the "Policia Federal" and suspected smugglers of electronic goods originating from neighbouring Paraguay which culminates in the police agents driving their car at speed into a suspect airplane in order to immobilise it.

Video is below courtesy of Estadão TV:

Straight out of a movie scene!

Brazilian TV - Programa Eliana Hair Shake Special

 
It's all too easy to laugh at trash TV but I've resisted long enough so it's time to share some Brazilian trash TV with you.

To understand this you have to know some background information on drag queens. When they do a show, and don't ask me how I know this, they will often climax with hair-shaking frenetic head movements. I'm not sure whether this is a Brazilian thing or it's the same all over the world (please enlighten me in the comment section) but it forms the basis for the Bate-Cabelo item on the Sunday TV show Programa Eliana on SBT.

Contestants take turns to shake their hair as madly as possible:

You can happily forward to minute 13:45 if you want to get straight to the hair shaking business. And if you're liking the program feel free to peruse the official channel here:

And if you want to know how the drag-queen pros do it, here's an example of the non-televised show version:

Now that's what I call hair shaking!

O Clone (The Clone)

I was having lunch in a canteen style neighbourhood restaurant the other day and I noticed there was a telenovela on the TV so I asked which one it was.  It turns out it was a re-run of O Clone, an all time classic telenovela (soap opera) based in Morocco. The first series’ plot is exceedingly complicated and I struggle to remember it all but in case you are thinking it’s a strange name to give to a soap opera, think again. One of the lead brazilian portuguese-speaking arab characters (oh, yes!) is cloned after his death when a close friend clandestinely inseminates Deusa, a lower-middle class woman, with some sort of human cell material derived from one of the other characters! And thus a new character is born who thanks to the introduction of a 10 year timelapse takes a key role in the second series. Great stuff.

If you are already hooked see below for a couple of clips from the series, it’s emotional stuff. So much so, it was dubbed and also became a huge hit in non-portuguese speaking South America and apparently arabic phrases were incorporated into the local language amongst followers of the series, quite an anthropological curiosity. One guy who was not so happy was the Morrocan ambassador to Brazil who apparently didn´t appreciate the stereotypical image portrayed of his nation, no idea why he thinks that….