A garota do blog

Good Morning and Welcome to the United States of America

2009-12-17T11:42:00.000-02:00

I keep turning around reflexively when I hear people speak English, expecting to know them. Except that I'm in the Atlanta airport right now, so English isn't exactly uncommon. A young woman with a foreign accent just came up to me to ask how to connect to the internet, and I explained it to her -- I'm so much more helpful in English! I'm sitting right next to a coffee shop with bagels and muffins and big cups of coffee, waiting for my flight to Portland in about five hours. Since it hasn't sunk in yet that I've actually left Brazil (I still haven't felt the cold Atlanta air, much less the cold Maine air), I'm excited to be back in the United States.

While I had pumped myself up over the past few weeks about my return home by reminding myself of what would be awaiting me back in Maine (my family, friends, the cold, Christmas, food), the past few days were spent thinking about what I would be leaving behind in Brazil. There was a lot of eating and not a lot of sleeping (I would estimate about 15 hours total over the past four nights). By 6:30 pm yesterday, when I got the call from my doorman that the taxi was waiting outside, I was quite sure I didn't want to leave.

My last full day in Brazil was Tuesday, and I took a hike to a lookout point for one last view of the city I had called home for the past 23 and a half weeks. I ended up covered in mud and sweat, with a bruised tailbone and mosquito bites dotting my ankles and shins, but it was definitely worth it. Rio has many problems, some significant, but nobody can deny that it was kind of an ingenious place to put a city. It will be a change going back to boring old Providence; even Maine pales in comparison to these mountains lining the beaches.

Next on the list of last-day activities was watching the sunset at the Arpoador, which, as I mentioned in my last post, is one of my favorite places in Rio. Although we were doubtful it would be a good one, as the sky was cloudy, the sun managed to poke out near the horizon, and the clouds only made the colors more vibrant.

Our plan was to spend one last night out on the town and return in time for the sunrise and a morning swim. The night would also serve as a last chance to eat and drink some of my favorite foods and drinks. As I sipped my last Brazilian caipirinha at Rio Scenarium I already was planning for my next one back in the United States. I have a feeling the cold lime, sugar, and cachaça won't taste quite as good in the snow, but I've brought back some mortars and pestles so I'm determined to use them.

Back in Copacabana, we stopped by the hot dog van for a last cachorro quente completo -- complete with peas, corn, raisins, potato sticks, a quail egg, and of course ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise. My last água de coco came at a stand on the beach, where we also shared some final fried manioc (and discussed how weird it is to use the English word "manioc" instead of mandioca or aipim, two of several Portuguese words for the same tuber).

By this time some of the weaker members of our group were starting to yawn. We returned to Sarah's apartment to crash on her couches (unfortunately the hammock had been taken down) for about an hour and a half, and then I put on my best camp counselor/mom voice and woke my reluctant friends back up just before dawn. We were a little more lively once we got a good look at the sky over the beach and saw that it had started to change color.

The sunrise was as beautiful as the sunset had been the evening before, and it marked the first time I had watched the two consecutively. The waves were huge and the beach still empty, and we took advantage of the abnormally warm water to throw ourselves into the surf.

There's so much more to say about Brazil, and I'm planning on continuing to blog so that I can say it. I'm sure I'll have a lot more free time now that I'm home Also, I'm convinced the 80-degree temperature drop and my general exhaustion is going to seriously hinder my efforts in avoiding catching swine flu from my mom, so I might be house-bound for a while if I succumb to it. Keep reading, I'll keep writing, and I will see many of you very soon!

Ó Mar Salgado

2009-12-14T13:08:00.001-02:00

I think we probably can all agree that I've come a long way since this picture was taken:

But the reason I dug up that picture is not to prove what a bathing beauty I used to be (although we all can be glad that I did not grow up in Brazil, where my fat little baby-self would have been stuffed in a miniscule bikini with no demure ruffles to hide my chubby hips).

The real reason is because I've been thinking about the ocean a lot lately, and my relationship with it goes back a long way. The first place I lived was an apartment in Portland not much farther from the water than my apartment in Rio is. For many years of my life, it was inconceivable to me that anyone could bear living more than half an hour from the ocean. This was one of the reasons I was excited to come to Rio, where the beach is a way of life.

I've gone to the beach quite a bit here, and my swimsuit tan can prove it. However, there have many more days when it's been too rainy or quite simply too hot for me to go to the beach. The super-hot days when I do manage to go, I simply lie on my kanga, sweat soaking through it, and when it gets to be too much I go wade into the ocean -- along with the tens of thousands of other people at the beach that day.

I do like the beach here. I really do. I like that it's so accessible and open to everyone, that it's perfectly to acceptable to go to the beach in all your spare time, that you can get whatever you want to eat and drink without even having to do so much as stand up.

I don't think I realized, however, to what extent I missed the kind of ocean I had grown up with until I traveled with the Brown-in-Brazil group to Ilha Grande last weekend. As its name suggests, Ilha Grande is a big island off the coast a couple of hours south of Rio. And, of course, we needed to take a boat to get there. The morning we left was brisk and cloudy, with bursts of rain every now and then. It didn't look like a great day for the beach, but it was a great day for a boat ride.

For me it was, at least. The old wooden boat took about two hours to lurch its way to the island, and several people ended up getting sick (including on my face, but that's a story for another day...). I enjoyed myself immensely, though. It reminded me in some ways of zipping around Casco Bay in a motor boat and letting myself be thrown in the air as the boat sped over the waves.

The next day was a lot nicer and we spent the day at what is now one of my favorite beaches. After being tossed about by some huge waves and showing my skills at beach soccer, some of us went over to climb on the rocks that formed the edge of the beach.

The rocks were a blast to climb on, and the view was amazing (unfortunately I didn't bring my camera for that part of the adventure). The waves crashing against the rocks reminded me of one of my favorite places in Rio: the Arpoador.

The Arpoador juts out between Copacabana and Ipanema, and at its tip is a huge rock that's always a bit cooler than the rest of the city, as it gets some of the best wind. In the past couple of months I started going up there to read and to sometimes watch the sunset -- it's definitely one of the best places in Rio for doing so.

I'm leaving Brazil in two days, and there are plenty of things I'm going to miss and that can never be recreated in the States. For example, I walked past a group of monkeys while I was coming back from the beach at Ilha Grande. That just doesn't happen in New England. However, there's a reason I like sitting on the rocks at the Arpoador so much.

I can stand on top and to my left is Ipanema Beach, to my right is my home of Copacabana, and in between them I can see the Cristo looking down at all of us. It's so Rio it's ridiculous. But then I can turn around and look out at the open ocean with its white-capped waves on windy days, and feel like I've suddenly found myself in a Winslow Homer painting.

I'm going to miss Brazil; I'm sure of it. But I'm pretty excited to go back home to Maine.

P.S. The title of this post comes from a great poem by Fernando Pessoa called "Mar Português". Oh salty sea, how much of your salt/ Is the tears of Portugal!

770 mL Day And Other Accomplishments

2009-12-03T21:40:00.003-02:00

Today was a day I had looked forward to for a long time. Today was my final Portuguese test, which symbolically, if not actually, marked the end of my Portuguese studies. I finished level five, and there are only five levels -- so I should speak perfect Portuguese, right? Ha. Yeah right. It mostly means that I know every Portuguese tense known to man -- and there are a lot.

Anyway, the real reason that I was looking forward to today was that it was 770 mL açaí day. (That's pronounced ah-sigh-ee for all you gringos out there.) I know you've all heard about this magical berry from the Amazon, with more antioxidants than blueberries; you've probably even had it in iced tea or some other flavored drink. But until you've come to Rio -- and for some reason it doesn't seem to exist in this form in other states -- you've never had açaí as it was meant to be eaten. That is, frozen, mixed with guaraná syrup, and covered with your choice of toppings.

I actually wasn't a huge fan of açaí upon my first bite five months ago. However, as with many other foods in Brazil that didn't seem very appetizing at first glance -- suco de abacate, farofa, cachorro quente completo (that is, avocado smoothie, manioc flour sprinkled on beans and rice, and hot dogs with ALL the toppings (including corn, mayonnaise, quail eggs, peas, etc.)) -- it quickly won me over. If it's possible to be addicted to açaí, I'm pretty sure I am.

Tuesdays and Thursdays I have (or had, I guess I should say now) an awkward two-hour break between my translation class and my Portuguese class. Since it's from 3-5, no one is ever around except for my friend Stephanie, who is also in those two classes with me. We were always looking for ways to occupy ourselves, sometimes getting açaí while we killed some time. This quickly turned into a habit, and eventually we would leave our translation class and head straight for the açaí stand without even having to discuss it. I worked my way up to 400 mL as the semester wore on (com paçoca no meio e em cima -- sweet peanut butter powder in the middle and on top), but to celebrate the end of both of our classes, we decided that today was the day to go all out and get the biggest açaí offered. That's 770 mL.

I was thinking the other day about how I don't eat much ice cream here. Those of you who know me well know that I'm obsessed with ice cream. In my essay writing class senior year of high school, I wrote my persuasive essay on how amazing ice cream was. So yeah, I like ice cream. And it's consistently 90 degrees Fahrenheit here. Today it was at least 97. Perfect ice cream weather. But here's the thing: açaí has replaced ice cream in my life. I never would have guessed anything was capable of that.

And yeah, 770 mL of açaí is as big as my face:

Apart from the açaí, today was rather stressful; besides the Portuguese test, I also had a translation and a revised translation due, as well as a third of a paper that I had forgotten about until I was reminded at 9:30 this morning. Twelve hours later, I am done with 4/5 of my academic classes, with only a short paper left for my Brazilian Literature class.

My iTunes must know that things are ending soon, since it just started playing "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." Seriously, it just did. You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last. But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast. I wish I could keep açaí; unfortunately, I don't think it would travel very well. I wonder what I will take away from this experience that will last. Great memories, photos, and friends, of course.

I just hope that many months from now I will also still remember how to use the future perfect subjunctive and the simple pluperfect indicative.

Boas Festas!

2009-11-27T12:11:00.000-02:00

Thanksgiving dinner outdoors is not something I ever expected to experience. However, the spring night with temperatures in the 80s turned out to be a perfect setting for a feast. Perhaps it was just my imagination, but the fact that I was sweating off all the liquid I consumed made me feel like I had more room for solid food, and the light summer dress I wore certainly rid me of the need to loosen my belt or unbutton my pants.

I wasn't expecting much from this Thanksgiving, but the fact that it didn't actually feel like it should be Thanksgiving helped me forget that I was missing out. There were hints of it, though. When I Skyped with my family I noticed that they were all wearing sweaters and that there were no leaves left on the trees -- it actually did feel like Thanksgiving in that part of the world. When I made the green beans I was bringing to yesterday's potluck, I remembered how at home the job somehow always falls to me to cut off the ends, though I usually get away with doing it in front of the parade or football game. So maybe it felt like Thanksgiving, if only a little bit, since my green beans were about three times the size they are at home. They didn't even fit on the cutting board.

In any case, my green beans and my Thanksgiving turned out wonderfully, though like no other Thanksgiving I had experienced with my family, where we always have the necessities and only the necessities (turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, green beans, pumpkin pie, apple pie) and where my brother and I get quizzed on Thanksgiving history. This feast included quesadillas with avocado, two different kinds of rice, lentils, açai sauce, and Korean BBQ-ed beef. However, there was stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green beans, and apple crisp, among many other delicious dishes, and we all said what we were thankful for before digging in, and there was even a hand-turkey drawing contest, so it was about as Thanksgiving-y as we could manage. I left stuffed, after seconds of both dinner and dessert, and that's really what Thanksgiving is all about, right?

When I finally waddled back into my apartment building last night, I noticed that there was a small, lit-up Christmas tree in the lobby that I could swear wasn't there when I left that evening. I would say that this signified the beginning of the Christmas season and the arrival of my holiday spirit if I hadn't already been bombarded by Christmas decorations for a month now. Whoever complains that Americans start advertising for holidays too early has never been to Brazil. With no Halloween or Thanksgiving to pace them (though we have had plenty of other days off, for holidays that no one seems to celebrate), Brazilians just leap right into Christmas in October.

I love Christmas. I love Christmas songs, and Christmas movies, and Christmas lights, and Christmas trees, and Christmas-themed hot drinks, and everything to do with Christmas. So I should love that stores were proclaiming that "Christmas has already arrived" as early as last month, right? Well, no. It just doesn't feel like Christmas when it's the sunscreen advertisement in a store window that is decked out in Christmas paraphernalia.

Or when the Celsius temperature could just as easily be in Fahrenheit near a similar display of Santa and snow back at home. (There are kids building a snowman farther down on the display. Many people here have never seen snow before and probably would have no idea how to go about building a snowman.)

Oh, and that was taken just after I had been discussing with my friends how it was a cool day. A cool, 86 degree F spring day.

I haven't listened to any of the Christmas songs in my iTunes library yet, nor do I have any desire to, and it hasn't even crossed my mind to watch Love Actually. All that will be saved for as soon as I step out of the airplane in Portland on December 17 and feel like my plane has been rerouted to the North Pole. I will pack the following week as full of Christmas spirit as I can, since I certainly am not feeling any here. Although I won't be able to go to the beach on Christmas at home, at least it will feel like Christmas.

Theater, Film, Literature -- Look How Cultured I Am!

2009-11-18T22:27:00.003-02:00

I'm a very thrifty person -- sometimes to a fault. This can lead to my mother complaining that I am not eating enough, or that I'm walking too much instead of taking a bus or a taxi, or anything else about my lifestyle that she can think of from 5000 miles away. However, last week I saw a play and two Brazilian movies for a grand total of 5 reais (almost 3 dollars), and I don't think there's anything worth complaining about in that.

The play was called Além do Arco-Íris, or "Over the Rainbow." Despite the fact that I am taking a translation class and learn for about four hours per week how words are polysemic, I was translating this in my head as "Beyond the Rainbow." It wasn't until the first notes of the song started playing that the beginning of the play that it all came together for me.

Nothing to do with Dorothy and Toto, this play was about a woman whose husband has just died. For much of it, she just sat around on stage and told us how sad she was, and reenacted their first meeting, and sniffed his shirts. Pretty cliché stuff. I thought I wasn't going to be able to take it anymore when the stage went mostly dark and she started reciting "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks...") -- in Portuguese, of course.

But then the pieces started coming together. There was the revelation of a secret abortion, an affair, and of course some fraud. If you think that's melodramatic, you ain't heard nothing yet. The big kicker came right at the end. We figured it out right as the main (and mostly only) character did (spoiler alert): she's actually dead too! Yeah, I didn't see that one coming. Unfortunately any mystery the play still held was quickly destroyed when the other character, who had been mostly clearing out the apartment until now, answered the telephone and said, "Unfortunately, the lady of the house died yesterday in a car accident." So that was a little abrupt.

I did enjoy it; it really wasn't as bad as I'm making it out to seem. The actress was quite good, and I was proud of myself for being able to laugh at the Rio-specific jokes. Plus we brought cookies.

The next day a Brazilian cinema chain was having a special day for national films, with each playing for only two reais. I skipped both of my classes (ok, I guess there's something for my mom to object to -- but it's not like I missed anything important!) and went straight to the theater.

The first film I saw was called Tempos de Paz, and it was about a Polish actor who comes to Brazil in 1945 hoping for peace, but who instead is almost sent back on the next boat by an immigration agent who suspects him of being a Nazi. It all takes place within a couple of hours, with the actor learning that things aren't so idyllic in Brazil and the agent learning about the importance of theater. And me learning about Eastern European immigration to Brazil during and after the Second World War.

I really liked the film -- though I distrusted the fact that the actor spoke such grammatically correct and fluent, though accented, Portuguese, despite never having been to Brazil before. I left the theater impressed and went to buy some chocolate before my next showing.

The next film was Besouro, about capoeira in 1920s Bahia, less than 40 years after slavery was abolished and before capoeira was legalized. The movie seemed to me to be kind of a Brazilian version of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. There was a little bit of flying involved. While very beautifully and fantastically made, I thought the characters could have been developed a little more. The love story was settled and over, as was the film, before I even realized what was happening (though I guess I did manage to finish my whole chocolate bar...).

After that I decided not to go home right away because the air-conditioning in the mall was heavenly. So I did some shopping! I haven't bought any Brazilian clothing yet, besides bikinis and my Flamengo shirt, of course, so I thought I'd look for some souvenirs. Brazilian clothing tends to be kind of weird though, with lots of flowy shirts with weird straps and no backs, so I didn't end up getting anything.

Instead I went to the bookstore. I was looking for a book by Fernando Pessoa, which I didn't find, but I ended up buying O evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ) by José Saramago, a contemporary Portguese author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. Harold Bloom called him "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today," so I figured I might as well try to read one of his novels, although they are known for being extremely difficult. Paragraphs are an average of a page or two long (the first chapter is all one paragraph) and individual sentences aren't much shorter. I haven't gotten very far yet, and it's definitely hard, but I found that if I read very, very slowly, I can kind of get the gist of what's going on!

The reason I haven't gotten very far is this: the next book I bought was Harry Potter e as relíquias da morte... aka Harry Potter number 7! I haven't read it since the week it came out over two years ago, and it's really fun to read in Portuguese. When else would I learn a word like "The Burrow?" (A Toca). I'm not even a quarter of the way through, though, and I'm already sad knowing that it will end soon. We will see if I cry as much at the end as I did when reading it in English.

Books in Brazil are kind of expensive (and people here don't really read! It's a vicious cycle....), but I think my mom will be glad to know that even if I end up spending my last month surviving on fried eggs and pasta and walking the 3.5 miles to school every day, at least I will be reading.

BLECAUTE!

2009-11-11T16:59:00.003-02:00

"O Brasil Apagou," read the headline of a newspaper I saw this morning, a picture of a single candle in the darkness taking up almost the whole page. Brazil turned off. It was slightly overdramatic, but the melodrama about the blackout that affected much of the country last night wasn't limited to the media. In my Portuguese literature class, the professor was talking this morning about the rise of the bourgeoisie and the materialism that was a part of bourgeois culture. The girl sitting next to me started to say something but stopped short. "Go ahead," my professor said. The student hesitated, saying that it had nothing to do with the short story we were discussing, nor with literature at all, for that matter. "Go ahead," my professor told her again.

"Well, the power outage last night," she began. "It really makes you think. We have all of these things, but when you really think about it, they're nothing." She stared wistfully off into the distance, perhaps contemplating ridding herself of at least one of her cell phones (tons of Brazilians have several, weirdly enough) or maybe her laptop. "Nothing," she repeated.

I won't say that last night's blackout changed me so profoundly. However, it was fun to compare it to any of the many power outages I have survived in Maine (email from my mom: "hope you told everyone that you live through much longer power outages in Cumberland all of the time").

It started a little after 10 o'clock. I was sitting at my desk when suddenly my computer shut off (I didn't have the battery in it) and my light started flickering and dimming. I went to the door and found my host mother, Glória, fumbling around for one of her cell phones (she has at least three) in total darkness. The light in my room was completely out by then but I nevertheless found my (singular) cell phone and turned on its flashlight to help Glória. That's right, it has a flashlight! "Tá ótimo, o seu celular," she and Ariadne, the other woman I live with, kept repeating all night. Damn right my cell phone is awesome -- the cheapest one in the store, its light still managed to beat all of Glória's super chique phones... combined.

Ariadne had been in the shower (I was planning to go after her, so thank goodness she didn't finish just a little bit earlier!) and was still soapy when she came to stand next to me and Glória at the window that looks out onto the street. I tried to get some info on what was going on and why, but once it was clear that they didn't have any answers, we just stared down at the street and observed.

There was still some light on the streets, since cars were passing, but the lack of street lights was eerie. Even the lights at the Copacabana Fort were out. "Os bandidos vão aproveitar," Glória kept repeating (She's big on repeating things -- usually it's "That's just how life is."). The criminals are going to take advantage of this. And that was the first difference between a power outage in Rio and one in Cumberland.

The next was that we didn't have any candles! Or flashlights! Completely unprepared, we were relying on just our cell phones and therefore did not do anything the whole night besides stand by the window and chat.

I tried to tell stories about Maine winter power outages, such as the epic ice storm of '98, but I think I fell short in describing the real extent of the situation when I couldn't remember the word for "heating" (and why would I have used that word here?). Or "fireplace." Or "ice storm" (tempestade de gelo?). It's amazing what Portuguese vocabulary I lack simply based on the weather here. And vice versa -- for example, I know all about surfing in Portuguese.

"Do you think anyone is trapped in the elevator?" Glória suddenly asked. Ahh! I hadn't even thought of that. It never was a problem on Field Road. "The doorman is going to have to stand at the door all night," Ariadne pointed out, since the door-opening button requires electricity. Another power-outage casualty that had never crossed my mind. Glória then told me a horrific story of a girl getting trapped in an elevator for a week while her parents were on vacation; it was only when they returned that they found her dead. So I was not only glad that I hadn't been on the streets or in the shower, I was also very thankful I hadn't been in one of the several elevators in my building.

Some things I learned during the blackout:

The description of what to do when in a car accident in Rio that we discussed in my Portuguese class back in July was pretty much right on target. At one point last night there was a loud crash: a taxi and another car had crashed in the intersection we were staring down at (No traffic signals! Glad I wasn't in a moving vehicle! Or the metro! I didn't even think of that at the time.). There was a lot of screaming and honking, one car drove off (no information exchanged, of course), and the taxi driver pushed his cab to the side of the road and made a lot of angry phone calls. No one, not even one of the many police cars who sped by, stopped to help him.
There are tons of bats who live in the trees right under my window. This doesn't have to do with blackouts at all; I'm just saying. I have had enough experience with bats in my bedroom for one lifetime.
My host mother is a compulsive liar. She got several phone calls from friends, and she tried to convince each one that we still had light. The story began that our whole neighborhood had light, and by the last friend she talked to, she was saying that it was just our building that still had light because we were chiques and it was only the poor people who were left in darkness. She even told this friend that the door that the friend always came in was actually the service entrance and that the social entrance was a lot nicer and around the corner. While this sounds exactly like something I would have tried to get away with, I'm suddenly worried that I have been putting too much faith into what she tells me.
Fish can survive in aquariums without a electricity for the filter or oxygen circulation for up to five hours. The thing Glória said she was most worried about was her "peixinhos," and she made me hold my cell-phone flashlight up to the aquarium for her so she could make sure all her little fish were alive. Thankfully, one of her friends told her they had five hours (though I'm guessing that was just an arbitrary number, as I had been thinking of making up my own prognosis just to get Glória to stop worrying about them). After that, however, we should just fry them up.
"Blackout" is spelled "blecaute" in Brazil. I loved being able to say "blackout" with a Brazilian accent the whole night and this morning, and hearing others use the word always makes me laugh. I didn't actually learn how it was spelled, though, until this afternoon when I was able to use the internet again and finally read the news.
Which brings me to one thing I didn't learn: why? OK, there are some explanations (it all started with a hydro-electric dam on the border with Paraguay) but I'm not going to lie, I'm still a bit suspicious, and nobody seems to be giving clear answers. I'm no conspiracy theorist, but if people can't seem to agree on where and when it was raining yesterday....

Anyway, after over an hour of standing at the window, we all decided to go to bed. I stayed up for a little longer and started the seventh Harry Potter book, which I had just bought in Portuguese. I was sweating without my fan, not shivering by the fire, and I was reading by the light of a cell phone and not a candle, and there was no Central Maine Power outage line to call for information, nor a hand-cranked shortwave radio for access to the outside world, but in the end, as I read about Voldemort and the Death Eaters in the dark, it didn't feel all that different from a power outage at home.

You Look Lost.

2009-11-05T14:14:00.012-02:00

I figured I had better finish up this chapter of my adventures before I go off on too many more. (I realized yesterday though that six weeks from right now I will be on my way back home. Crazy! I will have to stuff in my last batch of adventures.

After a wonderfully calm morning at the beach in front of our pousada, Sarah and I went to the front desk to check out and to make sure the bus back to Recife came by when we thought it did. The man there told us that it came by around noon at the square where all the vans leave from. We hurried up there.

That was when things go confusing. First of all, we had read that the bus left Maceió at 11 so it couldn't possibly get to Maragogi by noon. Also, we doubted it came through the town center, which was made up of a jumble of narrow streets.

However, no one was much of a help. Everyone we asked gave us different answers to our questions. The van drivers told us that we would have to take a van to Barreiros and catch the bus there, but we weren't sure if they just wanted us to pay for their vans. After much standing around in the sun and lugging our stuff from place to place, we made it up to a main road, where there was an actual bus stop. There, a trustworthy-looking young man told us that the bus did indeed pass by, but maybe not for a while, and it would be faster just to take the van to Barrieros where more buses come through.

So we finally did. In the van, we sat up front with the driver, who played us Eminem and told us how happy we was to live in such a paradise. He dropped us off at the bottom of the hill leading to Barrieros and told us we could either get a bus or a just slightly more expensive car there.

We sat in the shade with another young man who asked us questions until he suddenly sat up straight and whistled. A bus was coming by, and we ran to it, got on, and I promptly closed my eyes. It had take about a dozen people to get us on the bus to Recife, but we had done it.

We had plans to stay in Recife with Carolina and her family, whom we had found on CouchSurfing.org. We planned to go straight to her apartment from the bus station, but guess what? The bus didn't take us to the bus station. We go out in some unknown corner of Recife and had no idea where to go. I guess we must have looked lost, though, since someone came up to us and gave directions without us even needing to ask. This happened again when we got off the city bus in Carolina's neighborhood but didn't know where to go from there. It's a fool-proof technique: just look lost, tired, and sweaty, and someone will come help you!

Carolina wasn't home yet, but her mother and sister welcomed us into their apartment and gave us some water and snacks. While talking to them, we finally understood what we had slowly been realizing over the course of the week: in the Northeast, people's accents were next to impossible for us to understand! We had no idea where we were going, but we soon got into a car with Carolina's brother, who neither looked old enough to drive nor seemed to care about the basic laws of physics (there was a lot of needless acceleration and some screeching tires).

After a nice evening with Carolina and her friend in Recife Antigo (which is where we finally ended up), I was happy to go back and get into bed.

The next day, after a delicious breakfast, Sarah and I headed off to Olinda, a small colonial town right next to Recife. We went to about a billion churches and I took way too make pictures of colorful buildings. The views from the tops of the hills were gorgeous, though, and we found our way up to a lighthouse identical to the one we had visited earlier that week. The one actually had a padlock on the gate, unfortunately, and someone was guarding the entrance.

Mysteriously, after a much needed coconut water, we made it to the Museum of the Man of the Northeast, which we had tried twice to visit earlier in the week but had failed. It was very interesting and worth the trouble and confusion it took to get there (I think I asked more people for help and directions on this one trip than I have in the whole rest of my life).

Back at Carolina's apartment, we met up with some of her friends and siblings to go to a sushi rodízio. First of all, rodízios are the best thing ever: all-you-can-eat food. I had been dying to try a sushi one, and the restaurant we went to was absolutely delicious. I especially couldn't get enough for the strawberry sushi. i just ate lunch, but I'm getting hungry again just thinking about it now.

The next day we had been planning to visit a city in the interior, but our plans didn't work out. instead we visited a random castle in Recife, with an even more random collection of medieval armor, as well as a collection of art from the Dutch-influenced period of Brazilian history. Both the art and the museum itself were beautiful, and I learned some stuff about Brazil that I had never heard about before.

After a final dinner at a restaurant with foods typical of the region, we headed to bed for a few hours before our flight back to Rio.

That night, however, happened to be the night when Brazil moves to summer hours. BUT not all of Brazil, which we hadn't realized -- just the southern half, so Recife wouldn't be staying in the same time zone as Rio. What we didn't know was whether our flight would be leaving on Recife time or Rio time. After some clever research on the airline's website, we figured it out. And the flight wasn't even late! We soon made it back to Rio, where the sun was miraculously shining (though not for long).

And that was my trip. Recently in Rio, the sun has been shining quite consistently, but I'm about ready for some rain again. I tried to go to the beach yesterday and only lasted 30 minutes. You don't want to hear about the quantity of sweat I produced just lying there, reading my book, so I'll stop here....

Training For The Appalachian Trail

2009-11-01T21:50:00.008-02:00

Before we return to our regularly-scheduled programming, I'd like to remind you all that I am now three hours ahead of the East Coast. Over the past year, I've lost three hours, one at a time -- one in the U.S. last spring, one when I came to Brazil, and the last two weeks ago when Brazil switched to its summer time. When I fly home in December, I'll be regaining my three lost hours all at once. Weird, huh? I don't know how I feel about this. Time zones confuse me.

Anyway....

We arrived at the bus station with the goal of going south and a vague idea of some of the towns we wanted to visit along the coast. But when we mentioned some of these names to the guy selling us tickets, he didn’t seem to know any of them. “Do you have a map?” I asked. But of course not – why would he? He did, however, manage to pull out a list of towns that the bus does go through, and when we recognized Maragogi on the list and remembered the pictures of its crystal-clear water that we had seen on the internet, we decided to go there.

The bus ride was scenic but uneventful – perhaps too uneventful. The bus would randomly stop and pick people up or drop them off without anyone announcing where we were. There was next to no signage either, so when we got back to the coast and started seeing signs referencing Maragogi, we figured we must be there.

Except that the bus didn’t stop. When it seemed to turn away from the coast and we stopped seeing pousadas (small inns/ bed and breakfasts), we realized frantically that we had missed it. By now, however, there were no more seats left on the bus and people were crowding the aisle, and it took us a while to make it to the front. Sarah asked if we could be let off there, the bus driver practically screeched to a stop, and we got out. In what was pretty much the middle of nowhere, Brazil.

So we started walking. With all of our bags. In the hot sun. In order to cheer ourselves up, we pretended we were training for the Appalachian Trail. (Though if/when we ever do hike it, we’ll probably bring hiking backpacks and boots and leave the duffel bags and flip-flops at home.)

We finally made it to one pousada, faces red and sweaty and looking like the two biggest gringas Maragogi had ever seen. It was way out of our price range, though, so we kept walking, until finally we heard a honk behind us and found ourselves being passed by a old white VW bus. We waved it down and ran to catch up with it.

Vans are an integral part of the transportation system in Rio, so we had ridden them before. They’re often crowded during rush hour, and some people have to awkwardly stand in between the door and the seats. This van, however, was approximately 40 years old, maybe two-thirds the size of a normal van in Rio, and took “crowded” to an extreme. From my position squeezed amongst three large, hot (in terms of temperature and not attractiveness, unfortunately) Brazilian men in the back seat, I could count the van’s every occupant – and at one point there were 19 of us.

While I was marveling at the capacity of the little old van to keep put-putting down the road, dodging potholes and sliding over speed bumps, Sarah was near the front, grilling the guy who takes the money about cheap pousadas. We had originally told him we wanted to go to Maragogi, but he steered us toward São José da Coroa Grande – little did we know that this was because we were actually going in the complete opposite direction of Maragogi.

We were dropped off in the center of the town, a small but bustling fishing village that was probably the least touristy place we could have gone to. We walked around for a bit, still lugging our bags, looking for the mysterious pousadas the van-guy had told us about. People all around us were wearing swimsuits and cangas and walking to and from the beach, which was exactly what we wanted to be doing. So when we finally stumbled upon a colorful building called the “Hospedaria Shalon Mayim,” complete with a Star of David on its sign, I told Sarah that I was counting on her Jewish cred (her dad is Jewish), we practiced our “Baruch atah Adonais,” and we went in.

A young boy was manning the desk. And he had a room for us! Cheap, and complete with a fan! However, without windows. And one of the walls was actually a padlocked garage-door-like contraption that led outdoors. And the tiny TV had an antenna that had to be knocked every once in a while to clear out the fuzziness. But the biggest surprise was probably the “Exclusive Property of the Lord Jesus” sign in the open space outside the rooms. (In retrospect, this should not have been a surprise at all. Why would there be a need to lodge Jews in São José da Coroa Grande?)

We finally made it to the beach and then to seek out some food. Yet somehow the town had none. We found some bread and what turned out to be the worst cake either of us had ever eaten. Our hunger was finally sated, however, when later that evening São José da Coroa Grande turned into a par-tay. We each had a delicious cachorro quente completo – a hot dog with ALL the toppings – and a “Swiss” crêpe (I have no idea how the Swiss really make their crêpes, but these are simply crêpe dough on a stick with a small candy bar melted in the center). We watched little children play in the center square and enjoyed the feeling of being the only gringos in the whole town.

After some unsuccessful searching for internet and a successful morning at the beach the next day, we decided it was time to move on. We found another van, told them we wanted to go to Maragogi, and were surprised to find that the actual town was significantly farther from where we had gotten off the bus the day before. Oops. But once in Maragogi proper (where we were actually happy to find other tourists), finding a pousada was a lot easier. We found a beach-front one with internet (!) and cable TV and a bountiful breakfast for about twice the price of the previous pousada – but it was definitely worth the splurge. I have taken very few more welcome showers than the one I took that night.

We decided that snorkeling was a must. After managing to talk down the price by using our sick bargaining skills on a young boy who soon became our new best friend (i.e. we shared a lot of thumbs-up after we kept good on our promise to tell NO ONE on the boat about the price he had given us), we shipped off to the reef that lines the coast in those parts.

Wow. Snorkeling was pretty awesome, and as I told my brother, I felt like I was living “Planet Earth: Shallow Seas.” The water was clear, the fish were cute and colorful, and it was cool to watch the waves crash against the reef, several kilometers out at sea.

After we returned after sundown and enjoyed several cups of much-needed hot coffee, we set out on a trek that would lead us to our second best friend in Maragogi. The waiter at the one open restaurant that looked like it was for the local folks and not tourists sat us down, mumbled the available dishes in the fastest Portuguese I have ever heard, and then chose for us when we stared at him blankly. We ended up being served carne de sol and some big hunks of mandioca, which is kind of the local equivalent of steak and potatoes. It was good, if a little lacking in excitement (or vegetables).

The next day, after a breakfast for which I have no words (it was that amazing), we decided to explore some of the other towns in the area. We took a van to Japaratinga, home of a beautiful and deserted beach, and asked around for the way to a couple of the other towns we had read about. We wanted to visit a lighthouse and see the manatees, but everyone we asked seemed to be borrowing the Maine saying, “You can’t get there from here.” We decided to set out by ourselves and prove them wrong.

With sunblock breaks every half-hour or so and plenty of water, we walked about six miles through paradise, only coming across a few fishermen and youngsters playing in the water. We thought several times of stealing one of the many fishing boats lying around, or perhaps one of the horses we passed, but we never went through with it. After all, we were still training for the Appalachian Trail.

After finding the mysterious balsa (small ferry) that we had heard about all morning, we arrived in Porto de Pedras and enjoyed the most refreshing coconut water I have ever had. We had made it, but we still needed to climb up the impossibly steep hill to the lighthouse that was had seen from several miles away and used as inspiration for our trek. We ignored the “entrance prohibited” sign though we were unsuccessful in our attempts to break into the lighthouse itself. The view from the hill it was on was beautiful enough for me, though.

The way back was about a million times as efficient: we took moto-taxis! It was the first time I had ever ridden a motorcycle and I was kind of scared to death as I had nothing to hold on to and my driver kept spinning around sandy curves and hugging the curb to avoid speed bumps (though going over the speed bumps when he couldn’t avoid them wasn’t actually any better). I gave up my dream to marry a moto-taxi driver and decided that it might be better if I were the driver myself, as I would have more control. Unfortunately I have no plans to move to the northeast of Brazil to do so, as the heat there almost killed me.

After another dinner at our friend’s restaurant (He chose our meal again for us: fish and salad, this time. And of course more mandioca, which, though unbelievably tasteless, was actually growing on me.) and of course some ice cream, we went to bed, absolutely exhausted but ready for more adventures the next day.

To be continued! One more episode left!

In Which My Weaknesses For Sugar and Small Children Are Tested

2009-10-24T22:52:00.003-02:00

So, my trip. I’ve been promising this post for almost a week, and I’ve been writing it for three days, so I figure I owe you guys something by now. However, I’ve decided to split the trip up into three parts. This first one is over a thousand words so if you’d prefer to just look at the pictures, go ahead! (But obviously you would be missing out on my sparkling wit and unparalleled wisdom, so choose carefully.)

(Also – is this title too creepy? Probably, but I'm also not planning on running for public office so I'll let it stand. I just want a Brazilian child to speak Portuguese with!)

Like I wrote earlier, we set off without knowing anything but our flight times (and even those we were a little iffy, as you’ll see later). Our plan was to fly to Recife Friday night, go to the hostel where we had first tried to make reservations, and then go to the hostel where they were going to send us because the first hostel was full (obviously we couldn’t go directly to the second hostel – this is Brazil, and I’ve learned the most efficient possibility is always automatically out of the question).

So, Friday afternoon I headed off in the pouring rain to Sarah’s apartment, bags in hand. We had originally planned to go bathing-suit shopping before leaving, but neither of us wanted to venture back outside – you can see why we were desperate to leave Rio! We settled for watching the latest episode of The Office while finishing up some leftover food that needed to get eaten: ice cream, a mango, and some orange glaze.

By the time we made it back outside and down the block to the beach, where the airport bus runs, the rain had mostly stopped. We were still shivering in our sweatshirts, though. And we shivered for almost an hour before the bus finally came. (The thing about buses in Rio: they don’t have schedules. And even if they did, it would be useless to try to follow them.) Once on the bus we shivered some more, as the air conditioning was quite unnecessarily on full blast.

We were a little taken aback by the amount of people who got on the bus at Rio’s smaller airport, Santos Dumont, where many domestic flights arrive. Why were they taking the bus to another airport? Also – we thought as we finally arrived at the airport about 30 minutes before our flight was supposed to leave – why are there so many people traveling at 9:30 on a Friday night?

Well, it turned out that almost every flight was delayed. We later learned that Santos Dumont had been closed, which answered the rest of our questions. However, we still didn’t know when our flight was going to leave, or, perhaps more importantly, which gate it was going to leave from.

After three different gates, three more hours, and almost an accidental trip to Belém, we handed our ticket to the gate agent. Wow, I thought – if they do this quickly, we might be able to leave just three hours after our original take-off time! Alas, when we got to the end of the tunnel we didn’t find the vehicle I was expecting. Instead of an airplane we got onto a bus!

So by the time we finally took off it was past 1:30 in the morning and I was half-asleep. Apparently when I am half-asleep, I think that every bout of turbulence is a sign that my death is imminent, so it wasn’t the most pleasant flight. I did manage to get myself fully conscious when the flight attendants came around with sandwiches and juice, however.

4:30 in the morning and we are standing at baggage claim in the Recife airport, mulling our options. Do we try to get a taxi and do the whole hostel charade in the dark in a city we’ve never been to? Or do we just lie down right here next to the baggage carts and take a little nap. We decided on the latter, obviously. For about five minutes until a security guard came to tell us that sleeping there is prohibited. BUT! he said, there’s better sleeping up in the food court anyway. And what do you know, up in the food court there was a whole colony of people sleeping on benches! We joined them and took a nice three-hour nap.

We finally made it to hostel number 1, where they were a little confused about our situation, and as they had told us earlier, had no space. It was cute and colorful, though, and the people were nice (and the breakfast they were eating looked delicious) so when they offered to clean out the laundry room for us and put down some mattresses there we accepted. And then we were finally off to explore Recife.

Recife is known for two things: for having lots of bridges and canals (it’s known as the Brazilian Venice) and for having lots of sharks. So we decided we’d skip the beach while in Recife and take advantage of the rest that it had to offer.

Recife was colonized soon after the Portuguese arrived in Brazil in the 1500s, and quickly became an important city in the sugar trade (a fact I definitely took advantage of – I have become quite addicted to sugar over the past three months or so). There are a lot of colorful colonial buildings, especially in the neighborhood known as Recife Antigo, which is actually an island connected to the rest of Recife by bridges.

We spent Saturday and Sunday checking out the sites and trying to figure out how the bus system worked (being in a new city made me realize exactly how well I know Rio now). On our second failed attempt to get to the Museum of the Man of the Northeast, we instead stumbled upon a children’s festival and small zoo and enjoyed some amazingly cheap food (one real for a hot dog, or a stick of meat, or a cup of ice cream, etc.). There was also a monkey eating a heart-shaped lollipop, which was pretty cute. (Not to mention the hundreds of adorable Portuguese-speaking Brazilian kids – it was a tempting place for a potential Brazilian child-stealer like me.)

We went to a market in Recife Antigo and had even more to eat (a common theme of this trip), this time some tapioca. While I had had tapioca in Rio before, they are especially obsessed with it in the Northeast. They pretty much make a tortilla-like thing by cooking little tapioca balls and often coconut, and then fill it with either something sweet like doce de leite, or something savory like meat and cheese. While I wasn’t a huge fan at first, since the tapioca itself has pretty much no taste, it is definitely growing on me.

We had signed up for two nights on the laundry-room floor at the hostel, so by Sunday night we were planning to get out of Recife the next morning. We had with us about six printed-out pages from a Brazil travel guide (budget travelers we are), but fortunately the hostel had a 1998 version of the same book, so we could fill in some of the information we were lacking. After much confusion over the names of towns and distances between them, we decided on one thing: we would go south.

To be continued…

Spring Break Recife

2009-10-09T16:48:00.002-03:00

This can't be a long post, since I have a plane to catch in just a few hours, but I figured I owed it to my readers to tell you why I won't be updating (or answering emails, facebook messages, etc.) for the next week or so: I'm going on Spring Break.

I'm pretty much the only person who's calling it that, but considering I was in cold cold Maine for my spring break last March, suffering through one of my many dental procedures, I'm going to make this one count. It's not even technically a whole week of vacation; we just have Monday and Thursday and Friday off, but I'm doing the Brazilian thing and skipping some classes (just two, as it turns out -- other professors cancelled theirs).

(Monday is Dia das Crianças, Children's Day. When I used to ask my parents why we had Mother's Day and Father's Day but no Children's Day, they would tell me that every day was children's day. Now that twenty years of keeping me in the dark about this holiday is up, I only hope it's not too late for me to celebrate.)

After a long and arduous decision making process, I ended up choosing to go to Recife with my friend Sarah. We have absolutely no plans besides a flight there and back, and a night in a hostel tonight. We're working on finding some Couchsurfers, as I did that with success this summer, but right now everything is up in the air. It will be an adventure!

My host mother has told me that I need to make sure to obey her this time. Last time she told me to wear sunscreen I got horribly burned (but let me point out how proud of myself I am that it took three months in a tropical country for it to happen) and now she thinks I'm some kind of rebel. She didn't really understand that lobster-red is not necessarily an unknown color to my skin. But I'm bringing a full bottle of sunscreen to Recife because if I come back burnt she might just kick me out of the house.

Right now it's 66 degrees and pouring rain in Rio. It's 82 and sunny in Recife. According to my weather widget, every day next week in Recife is a sun with a high of 86 and a low of 77. I could not be more excited.

É a vez do Rio!

2009-10-04T13:01:00.006-03:00

Breaking news isn't exactly my forte, so I'm assuming everybody who's reading this already knows that Rio de Janeiro beat out Chicago, Tokyo, and Madrid to be the host city for the 2016 Olympic Games. You might also have seen pictures of the tens of thousands of Cariocas dressed in yellow and green, cheering on their city on Copacabana beach last Friday. Well guess what? I live on Copacabana beach, and I was there rooting for Rio along with them.

I'm not sure I knew that Rio was in the running for the 2016 games before I came to Brazil, but the news was hard to miss once I got here. "Eu quero!" signs were all over the city, and on the morning of the decision, several planes flew above the beach, trailing banners which read, "Vamos Torcer! É a vez do Rio!"

The planes urging people to cheer because it was finally Rio's turn weren't the only signs that something big was happening that morning. As I walked down Copacabana, several helicopters -- though no uncommon sight in Rio -- hovered overhead. It seemed like everyone was taking advantage of the excitement, including the guy walking around the beachside bar with a sign that read "Olympics 2016 Rice beans beef with french fries." That's probably the most common meal that exists in Rio, but on Friday it was something special.

Long balloons in yellow, green, blue, and white were being handed out by the dozen, and I snagged a few to play with while I waited. This little boy had the same idea:

There was a live concert in front of the Copacabana Palace hotel, and I stood in the crowd as the Brazilians danced and sang along. When the first news came, no one was expecting it, and a collective gasp quickly turned into cheers. The two big TV screens read "Chicago has just been eliminated." The music continued, and I waved my balloons with the screaming crowd. Just a few minutes later the next message came: "Tokyo has also just been eliminated." The woman next to me turned in excitement. "Eliminated! They've been eliminated!" she yelled to me, as if she couldn't quite believe it and wanted to confirm that I had seen the same news.

Though the news about Chicago left the next hour or so slightly anti-climatic, the Brazilians in the crowd weren't losing any of their energy. I moved farther into the crowd, trying to find my friends, and found myself centered in front of the stage, packed in too tight to move any farther. But don't worry, I made some new friends.

When the IOC chairman flipped over the card and read out "Rio de Janeiro," I neither saw it nor heard it. But suddenly the screaming was several times as loud and a blizzard of shiny pieces of confetti -- that I was still pulling off of me that night -- fell from the sky. I felt myself being lifted by one of the Brazilians next to me as I tried to capture the moment on film.

That was the best I got. It was chaos. A woman next to me asked me if I won. I figured the best answer was that I had, and she told me that she had too, and then gave me a big hug. I told her congratulations. Another guy found out I was American and asked me how long I would be here for. I'll be staying until December, I said, and he replied, "Well then, you must have my flag." He handed me the Brazilian flag he had been waving; it's now hanging on my wall. I told him congratulations as well.

Judging by how the Brazilians have welcomed me to their country, I know they'll be good hosts for the rest of the world. There are certainly huge problems in this city -- poverty, homelessness, transportation, crime -- that need to be remedied before then, and I don't think they'll find the most perfect and efficient solutions for them, but somehow they'll pull it together. Somehow things just work out in Brazil.

Even so, it will be no easy task. But when I saw the pictures of President Lula crying in Copenhagen, I remembered why I had supported Rio all along. Even though Chicago is his hometown, I can't see Obama reacting with the same outburst of emotion had Chicago been picked instead. The pure pride and joy that Lula and most Brazilians felt upon hearing the news is reason enough to have chosen Rio, and to bring the Olympics to South America for the first time. It really does mean a lot.

The crowd sings "Sou Carioca" (I'm Carioca) not long after the news was announced

P.S. Check out more photos from Friday here.

Provas, Provas, Provas

2009-10-02T09:40:00.002-03:00

This past week was week one of two weeks of midterms (or, as they are called here, provas de G1). I managed to survive a week of presentations, written tests, and papers -- and, surprisingly enough, for a brief moment it felt kind of like I was back at Brown. I actually had to use my free time to study and do work! (Though I was doing reading on the beach last Sunday, so I don't know if that counts.)

Tuesday morning at 7am I had my first written test here, this one for my class on the health of the worker. I was slightly worried about it because the assigned book never showed up in the library and the professor never responded to my email asking for her Powerpoint slides. When I complained about this to my dad, he reminded me that everyone in my class was "in the same boat." Not exactly, considering everyone else in my class was Brazilian and not only spoke fluent Portuguese but had actually written essays for tests in that language before.

While we did have to write short papers in my Portuguese classes at Brown, they were always assigned for homework, so I could use a dictionary and spell check and stop to think about what exactly it was I was trying to say. That's added to the fact that they were on subjects like "describe your ideal family" or "describe your plan for a vacation in Brazil" -- which didn't inspire the most complex analysis, I must say. But now not only did I have to answer three essay questions in two hours without any outside help, I actually had to answer the questions in a way that would show my professor that I wasn't a complete idiot (a common misperception in this country).

I have always taken my ability to write for granted. In fact, out of the four language skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking), I think I'm best at writing, not only in English but probably also in French. It's not that I'm illiterate in Portuguese -- though it certainly sometimes feels that way as I do the readings for my Portuguese literature class -- but oral and aural skills played a bigger role in my learning the language than written ones.

This is something I have always been grateful for -- it's more helpful to my life in Brazil to be able to understand what the people I live with are saying than to be able to read 19th-century Portuguese literature. But it is also something that worried me a bit coming into this week.

Luckily, my fears were mostly unfounded. I pulled off the essay questions on Tuesday morning with plenty of time to spare. And for the paper on Brazilian literature that I had to write for Wednesday, I used a hint that my Portuguese professor gave us Tuesday afternoon. It all boiled down to looking like I could write in Portuguese. Adriana, my Portuguese professor, was explaining to us the use of the word cujo/a(s), which pretty much means "whose", and which is completely avoided in spoken Portuguese. But, she said, if you can use it correctly in writing, we send you straight to level five. Since I somehow fooled the Portuguese department into putting me in level five, I figured I might as well throw a few cujos into my Brazilian literature paper to see if I could fool that professor as well into thinking I could write Portuguese. I haven't gotten my grade back yet, but hopefully it worked!

I still have a couple more tests next week, but I'm not too worried right now. It's a beautiful day out, it's been declared an optional holiday for public workers, and I'm skipping surfing class to party on Copacabana beach with 100,000 Brazilians from 10am until whenever the party ends (perhaps all night, depending on the news from Copenhagen). But I'll write more about the Olympics later!

Happy Spring!

2009-09-25T14:16:00.007-03:00

Since surfing class was cancelled today (I don't know why the instructors thought someone of my talent and ability couldn't handle the crazy waves after several huge rainstorms, but that's another story), I have devoted my day to reading Amor de perdição. I'm supposed to have read it by Monday, and I'm on chapter 2 (out of 20), and I have to give a presentation to my class on chapter 18 on Wednesday. And since I read the chapter and a half that I have read on the bus, I didn't look up any words and thus have only a vague idea of what's going on (it's kind of a Portuguese version of Romeo and Juliet, though written in prose -- and I feel like a Shakespeare reader who only two years ago didn't know a single word of English). So obviously that's going well.

Hence today's post. I've been promising it for a few days, and you all know there's nothing I like better than a little procrastination.

The last day of winter came this week, while I was busy recovering from an unfortunate attempt at an obstacle course (more on that later). I have officially spent, what, six months in winter in the year 2009? And since I'm planning on leaving Brazil on December 16, I'll be out of here before summer even technically arrives. So in all of 2009, I'll have spent approximately two weeks in summer (and less than one in autumn -- and can you really count December in Maine as autumn?). What a year!

The first week of spring started off with a bang: a presentation in front of my Brazilian Literature class. And since, for reasons impossible to understand, no Brazilians wanted us in their group, five of us Americans in the class made our own group. And guess what? We owned them (besides the speaking correct, grammatical Portuguese part of course).

My part of the presentation involved talking about how different authors reacted to the modernization (most French-ization) of Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the century. Since being French was very chic and à la mode at the time, the government decided to build several institutions, like the Municipal Theater and the National Library, based on French architecture. Even the Avenida Rio Branco, a main avenue through centro, was styled after the Champs-Élysées (the names link to a cool comparison of old postcards). The authors I discussed pointed out that there were bigger problems to deal with in Rio, and that most of its citizens couldn't even afford to benefit from things like theater. The title of our presentation, a quote from Orestes Barbosa, was "Há, sem dúvida, duas cidades no Rio." There are, without a doubt, two cities in Rio.

Things aren't much different today. There's the city I live in -- tall apartment buildings, some quite beautiful, many on the beach; chic hotels; cars with tinted windows -- and there's the other city -- the favelas. Rio is known for being quite distinctly divided between the two. The poorer people live on the hills, os morros, while those with more money live "on the pavement," o asfalto. The visibility of the favelas was startling to me when I first came to Rio, but after a few months here it's easier to see why most middle-class Brazilians seem to pretend they don't exist (except when complaining about crime) -- they have become part of the natural landscape of the city.

(I don't know who took this picture; I found it when googling "morro asfalto Rio")

It's harder, however, to ignore the young boys sleeping alone on the sidewalks with plastic bags stuffed in their t-shirts to keep warm, or those who chase after you shouting "Tô com fome, tô com fome." I'm hungry, I'm hungry. And then on the other side there are my classmates at my private university, the guys in polo shirts and the girls with long, straight, light hair, who play on their iPhones during class. So yeah, I'm with Orestes on this one: Há, sem dúvida, duas cidades no Rio.

But I'm getting too deep. Let's rewind to last Saturday, when I went with a group led by the international office at PUC to a eco-tourism farm. Though I can't say I really had it together the whole day (I just hope I didn't represent the U.S. too badly), it was tons of fun.

It started off at the delicious and bountiful breakfast with which we were welcomed to the fazenda after a two-hour bus ride. As the line wound around a large table of food in a tiny room, someone backed into me -- while I held a cup of hot coffee. I didn't burn myself, but I returned to the table with a huge stain down the front of my t-shirt. I went to go wash it off (leaving my t-shirt completely wet but not actually completely clean) and came back only to have a friend tell me that I also had coffee on the back of my shorts. Not sure how that got there.

So I was already soaked when we went off on our trek through the Mata Atlântica, the Atlantic rainforest. While we were protected from the sun for most of the hike, it was incredibly humid, and let's just say there was some sweat involved. The views were beautiful though, and the hike ended at a pond where a donkey was tied up next to a cooler of water.

As we sipped our water, we were given an option: we could walk back, or wait for the raft to arrive and go back on it. There were quite a few of us there, and we wondered if we would all be able to fit on the raft. It's big, we were told, and we voted for the water route.

When I imagined a balsa in my head, the raft that we soon saw another group of students paddling around the corner towards us was not exactly what I had in mind. I'm not sure I can even use the word "paddling." When someone pointed out to Linda, the international coordinator at PUC who was with us, that those were in fact not oars but simply bamboo sticks, she cried out (in English), "Of course they're bamboo sticks, you're in the jungle!"

After the hike came a delicious and filling lunch, but not before I made the ultimately tragic decision not to put on my bathing suit before eating. We ate right next to a pool, but after I finished I found that the room where we were keeping all of our stuff was locked. So I went to play soccer with a couple of friends instead.

I returned sweaty and gross to the pool area, and saw more friends waiting in line at the obstacle course. "Come over and do it with us!" they shouted. "Do I need my bathing suit?" I yelled back. "No!"

This obstacle course was over a pond, and there were two different routes. We made fun of some Brazilians struggling over the easy route, and decided to go for the hard one. When it was my turn, I set out barefoot and without a helmet or gloves (which the Brazilian group had been given). I bet you can guess what happened next.

I fell into the water after making it maybe a quarter of the way through the course. Fully-clothed, of course. My arms and legs were exhausted and my feet were cramping and I decided the pain was stronger than my pride, so I let myself fall off the metal triangle section of the course (and no, I was not the only one to fall off). So I'm going to delay my plans to audition for the next season of Road Rules or Fear Factor or Wipeout or any of those shows that are actually a lot harder than they look, ok?

Since my bathing suit was actually my dry change of clothes by this point, I decided I might as well go down the water slide completely clothed as well. And then I put on my bathing suit and wrapped myself in my canga, completely exhausted for the bus ride home.

O Último Capítulo

2009-09-11T23:20:00.006-03:00

Today was a special day in the country of Brazil. The last episode of Caminho das Índias, the novela that has entranced all of Brazil (or so it seems) for the last nine months, was finally aired, and I watched it.

How could I not? The novela das oito, the prime-time soap opera that doesn't actually start at 8, despite its name, is a cultural phenomenon here. Not even Survivor or American Idol at its height could have ever competed with the novela. At least three of my professors, if not all of them, have mentioned Caminho das Índias in class. And not just as in, "Hey, did you see the episode last night?" (it's on every night but Sunday). More like, "blah blah blah characteristics of psychopaths are as follows: blah blah blah. You know Yvone from Caminho das Índias? She's a perfect example of a psychopath because blah blah blah." It's a teaching technique -- and one that works, because everyone knows who Yvone is.

Apparently this novela has increased Brazilian interest in India, where approximately half of the action takes place (the other half takes place here in Rio). Though I had seen some episodes previous to tonight's, it was never quite clear to me what the link was. Why are these Indians (well, Brazilians dressed up as Indians) all speaking Portuguese and what is their relation with these Brazilians? At least one Brazilian was married to an Indian, but that's as far as I got. The ridiculous thing was, the Indians didn't even look Indian -- because they were Brazilian. The women were usually dressed in saris, but when the men wore suits, it was impossible to tell who was supposed to be from which country. I don't think that would fly as well in the U.S.: a TV show about India whose actors aren't actually of Indian descent.

The Brazilian with whom I was watching was crying within the first fifteen minutes, as were most of the characters. I didn't cry, but at least I didn't burst out laughing, as I had felt like doing in most of the other episodes I watched. If I had cried, it would have been during the epic scene when Raj came into the house with Maya, who had just avoided getting her hair cut off (???) and said, "As you can see, I didn't die," and everybody started crying. The father (I don't exactly understand whose father) kept sputtering, "Explain this; what is all of this" (he was as confused as I was). But since Raj and Maya's baby had just come home as well, and someone's sister or brother had also just announced that the baby would soon have twin cousins, and the father-figure joyously cried, "My whole family has returned" (some from the dead, apparently), it was a nice moment.

I don't really know what else happened, besides that Raj and Maya realized that they had "built a love" (in a scene set to Frank Sinatra's "I'm in the Mood for Love") and that the final scene had them say "I love you" at the same time, and that Maria Bethânia (a very famous Brazilian singer, and the sister of Caetano Veloso) randomly showed up to the red-head's wedding reception (I seemed to be the only one surprised by this), and that it was revealed that this random old guy was actually the father or grandfather of pretty much everyone on the show (instead of the dead old guy whose portrait everyone was always bowing to). Some of this, however, I actually already knew because it was on the front page of the paper a few days ago. No kidding.

Luckily I can leave all that confusion behind in just a few days. The new novela das oito starts Monday! It's called Viver a Vida and it looks promising. It seems to take place in Paris and Jordan and perhaps some other random locales (do they pull them out of a hat?). Since I'm starting this one from the beginning, hopefully I will be slightly less confused. I will finally feel like I can fit into society since I will understand more of the references. And maybe it will even help me with my schoolwork as well!

If you happened to miss any of the 203 episodes of Caminho das Índias, don't worry: you can check them out on YouTube here.

UPDATE: Of every 100 TVs turned on in Brazil during the last episode, 81 were tuned to Caminho das Índias. According to Wikpedia, the American program that comes closest to this in terms of market share is the Academy Awards of 1970, with 78% (the finale of M*A*S*H is next, with 77%).

O Português Brasileiro

2009-09-08T20:27:00.008-03:00

Recently I've been thinking a lot about Portuguese -- specifically Brazilian Portuguese -- as a language. I guess that's what happens when you take a Portuguese language class, an English to Portuguese translation class, a Portuguese literature class, and a Brazilian literature class all at once.

So here's the deal: I've come to understand that I didn't really speak Portuguese before I came to Brazil. Well, I spoke written Portuguese, but apparently that's so different from spoken Brazilian Portuguese that some people consider it a diglossic language.

For example: no one, and I mean NO ONE ever uses the future tense. It's just not done (you use the "going to + infinitive" form instead). Likewise with the pronoun "lhe." I've never heard it used outside of the classroom.

Similarly, no one ever uses the standard third-person objects either. Instead of saying "Eu o vi," you say "Eu vi ele" (I saw him). As you can imagine, this rejection of almost everything I ever learned in Portuguese class was a little confusing for me, but it actually makes for a much easier language to speak.

One of my problems while learning French was remembering to put the direct and indirect objects before the verb. I'd arrive at the end of a sentence and realize I had left out most of the meaning. And once you've said the verb in French, it's usually either awkward or downright impossible to turn around and add your objects. One of the first times I realized that Portuguese would be easier for me than French was when I learned you could just say "Tenho três" (I have three... cookies, pillows, plates, whatever), you don't have to add that pesky little French pronoun en: "J'en ai trois."

In my translation class, the professor is always reminding us not to forget our mid-sentence prepositions ("It was the book on which I wrote an essay"). As someone who already struggled with this problem in French, and someone still unfamiliar with the limits of the rules of written Portuguese, at first this seemed like a ridiculous and unnecessary reminder to me. But I'm coming around: If I can get away with forgetting to add in a preposition in the middle of a sentence, why not? Half the time I don't even know which preposition to use!

Now, I'll be the first to admit that I quite often misplace my prepositions when speaking in English (that is something up with which I will put -- though I do try to avoid it in writing). And of course the French take all sorts of shortcuts in casual conversation as well (for example, avoiding the "nous" form -- which Brazilians do too). Every language definitely has a difference between its written and spoken forms. But it seems to me that Brazilian Portuguese takes it to an extreme.

The guest professor in my translation class today gave this example: If a Brazilian is talking about toothpaste, he'll call it "pasta de dente." But let him take out his shopping list, and he'll write "dentifrício." When the professor pointed this out, my Brazilian classmates nodded in agreement and laughed as if they suddenly perceived something that they had never before realized. Really?

The reason he was discussing this was to explain why Brazilians have such an awful time writing dialogue. I haven't read much Brazilian fiction yet, but apparently the dialogue is horrible and stilted, and it's only started to improve in the past 30 years. Spoken Portuguese has such a stigma here that it's hardly ever actually put to paper.

Writers in English, this professor continued, are able to write fantastic dialogue because they actually write what people say, and the way they say it. Think of how often you read a person's accent transcribed almost phonetically into letters and words -- though they might not be words that appear in any dictionary. He gave the example of Huck Finn and Jim, neither of whom speaks Standard English, but whose two different dialects are quite evident through the written word. Brazilians just don't have the capacity to handle this in writing.

Though the Portuguese first arrived in Brazil over 500 years ago, Brazilians have been extremely slow to distance their written language from Continental Portuguese. On the other hand, according to this professor, the first strictly American dictionary came out just five years after we declared independence. And yet spoken Brazilian Portuguese has strayed even farther from written Continental Portuguese than American English ever did from British English. (Brazilians often have an extremely hard time understanding people from Portugal, who also have a really funny and ugly accent.)

Thankfully, Brazilians have given up on some weird quirks of the Portuguese language (like joining two objects -- lhe + os = lhos (instead they just leave one for after the verb) -- or putting the objects inside of verbs in the future or conditional tenses -- falaria para ele ("would speak to him") = falar-lhe-ia (no joke, that's really what they do in Portugal!)). And they've completely mixed together two whole forms of the second-person, leaving only one way to conjugate a second-person verb, which is really all I care about (it happens to be the same way to conjugate a third-person verb, which just makes things even easier). So it's definitely an easy language to speak -- now if only Brazilians would accept that they can sometimes write that way too. Though, like I said, such writing has become more and more accepted in the past 30 years, due in part, according to my guest professor, to the popularity of the novela, or soap opera. Which will be a topic for later in the week.

I found this article on Brazilian Portuguese really interesting and informative (though according to Wikipedia it "has multiple issues"). Check it out if you're still interested.

Pão de Açúcar x 2

2009-09-03T22:14:00.008-03:00

I was talking to my parents yesterday, and they had a few requests for my blog. Since they are my parents, I decided to appease them. However, let it be known that if any of you have a request for a blog topic, I just might fulfill yours too.

My mother, though she willingly listened to another long-winded story about horrible Brazilian bureaucracy (her reasoning for why Brazilians aren't standing in line to be my friend: they're all too busy standing in other lines), wanted me to write about the things I actually like about Brazil. I could write a book about the things I like about Brazil, but I enjoy blogging about things that make me angry (pretty much I just like complaining), hence the last few posts. But here goes:

Rio de Janeiro is perhaps the most beautiful city in the world. It is also, according to some research published by Forbes today, the happiest. Those are two pretty good qualities for a city to have (though I will also point out that Portland was recently named by Forbes as America's most livable city, and Brown is of course the college with the happiest students). Though I don't have any hard data that points to Rio as the official most beautiful city in the world, I will try to prove it to you through a few pictures.

A few weeks ago, Sarah and I took the bondinho up to the top of Pão de Açúcar, or Sugarloaf, one of Rio's famous peaks, where we watched the sunset. First of all, let me just say that it's nothing like the Sugarloaf you Mainers know and love. People will be skiing down Rio's version when hell freezes over. But check out this view:

That crescent of sand on the left side of the photo? That's where I live. Oh, and did I mention that there are monkeys hanging out on top of Pão de Açúcar? We weren't lucky enough to see any (though I have seen some out my classroom window at PUC), but we did see plenty of these signs:

We did, however, get to witness a spectacular sunset. I managed to take over 150 photos in less than 2 and a half hours. Most of them look something like this:

Those spots flying in front of the mountains are birds, and the Cristo is standing on that tallest hill, to the left of the radio towers. This view is to the right of the first photo, and the harbor pictured is Botafogo.

As the sun went down, we watched the lights come on around the city. Here's a photo of the tall office buildings in Centro (on the right side of the photo), where all the business/financial stuff goes down (this photo is of a view even further to the right of the previous one -- these three photos pretty much fit together as a panorama):

I think Rio has the perfect balance of beach and mountain. Oh, and it's in the middle of a huge rainforest, the Mata Atlântica, as well. There's always some natural beauty to look at, no matter where you are in the city (and some say that it has the most beautiful people as well).

While coming back down from the top of Pão de Açúcar, I heard a Frenchman describe it like this: "Paris c'est joli, mais Rio c'est beau." Paris is pretty but Rio is beautiful.

***

Moving on to my dad's request (everybody who isn't a supermarket nerd can stop reading right about now). Supermarkets in Rio aren't actually that different than they are in the U.S. There just seem to be a lot more of them. And believe it or not, one of the biggest is actually called Pão de Açúcar. It's not quite as beautiful as the natural landmark, but I do know of a huge 24-hour one where they actually sell real American peanut butter. (Though when I went to go buy some, I didn't have enough cash on hand to do so -- it's not exactly a cheap import.) Why don't other countries like peanut butter? Dad, if you can get Delhaize to take over a Brazilian supermarket company, that's going to be one of my first requests: cheap and easily available peanut butter.

Zona Sul is another big supermarket brand. They have tons and tons of locations, but they aren't always big enough for my needs. The one that's on the block next to my house is always too dark and crowded, and I can't find everything I want (remember, though, that I'm comparing everything to the Hannaford standard, so nothing is going to compare). They also are really into making things cheaper only if you have a cartão Zona Sul, which I do not have, so I'm not a huge fan of that. I'm used to no cards, no coupons, no hassles: low prices every day.

What Brazil does very well with, however, is fruit. There are literally whole supermarkets devoted to fruits and vegetables, with some other basic necessities way in the back. And fruits are cheap, too. The other day I got a huge avocado, three apples, and three bananas for about 2 American dollars. Avocado on toast is definitely one of my favorite foods to eat here.

So, Dad, I will do some more research for you, and maybe even take some pictures of various grocery stores. If anyone out there wants to suggest any topics for future blog posts so you aren't subjected to my dad's lame ones, go ahead.

PUC-Rio vs. Brown

2009-08-31T17:11:00.004-03:00

So I'm officially the worst blogger ever. This is really disappointing to me -- and probably to some of you as well -- since I found enormous success with my previous critically-acclaimed blogs. But apparently now that I am on my own, without a blogging partner to push me along (miss you Emily and Cecilia!), I'm a total failure. I've actually been avoiding blogging because I know that I never fully described Salvador, and I promised to. But I decided that I'll just post my pictures on Facebook, with captions that will be just like a blog entry cut up into little pieces, and that will allow me to move on with my life. I'll post the link once I've done so.

So, moving on....

The big news is that school started! Actually I guess I've had about two weeks of classes by now, so it's not really news anymore. But anyway....

PUC-Rio is about as different from Brown as you can get. First of all, it's not a residential campus, so all the students still live at home (or have families of their own -- there are a lot of middle-aged people here). This can make it sometimes feel like high school, as people drive or take the bus to school -- or even get dropped off by their parents.

It was a bit of a surprise, my first day of class, when I sat alone in the classroom for about 10 minutes before anyone even arrived. Everyone was still crowded downstairs, gossiping in their little cliques. (When students finally started arriving, I hid my head in a newspaper so no one would talk to me.) The professor was even later. Apparently this is the norm in this country. There's no official break between classes at PUC, so students and professors make one themselves -- often fifteen minutes both before and after each class. Even with this informal break, students sometimes show up in the last hour of a two-hour class. And the professor just says, "Tudo bem?" If I were that late to a class at Brown I'd be too embarrassed to even show up at all, or I would come with a damn good excuse.

Turns out I didn't need to worry about people talking to me -- everybody already knows pretty much everybody in all of their classes, so it's not just my pale skin and light hair that make me stand out (although I am getting tanner, I also am unfortunately getting a bit blonder). Students here only take classes in the department that their major is in, and Brazilians can't seem to grasp why, for example, you might take a literature class if that's not what you're studying. (Though I did make a spur-of-the-moment decision upon arriving in Brazil to add a comparative literature concentration to my public health one. So I can feel pretty legitimate taking classes in the Letras department.)

So, long story short, nobody has been standing in line to make friends with me. And I have been too overwhelmed lately to try to initiate friendships. Not that I'm good at doing that in English either -- how did I make friends back in the U.S.? Luckily there are plenty of awesome international students here, so it's not like I'm wandering the streets of Rio alone....

I'm glad I have American friends for another reason: they can marvel with me at the ridiculousness of some of the things Brazilians do. Let me point out a few:

First of all, professors give out a programa on the first day of class. This usually has a short description of the class as well was a bibliography. Well, turns out that you don't need to buy the books on the bibliography. In fact, it's most likely not even a complete bibliography. Each class, the professor will write on the board a bibliographic entry for a random reading that wasn't on the programa and suggest that you do it for the next class. That's right, suggest. Plenty of my classmates don't do the reading, and don't even show up with the text. Maybe that's because getting the readings is impossibly annoying.

Each class has a pasta, a file folder where the professor puts the readings for the next day. This pasta may be located at one of several Xerox places on campus. There, you ask for your pasta number, sort through the pile of texts in the folder, and chose the ones you want copied. They copy them for you (though, infuriatingly, not double-sided), and you pay a few reais, depending on how many pages you had copied. I'm not sure why no one has introduced to them the idea of a course reader, bound and ready with all the readings before the semester even begins. Not only do you not have to get the pasta after every class, you don't need to scrounge around for change, and you always know what reading is coming next! You Brown kids can tell I'm missing Allegra Copy.

(Obviously this whole system was impossible to figure out on the first day of class. I sat there trying to remember if I knew what pasta meant, or where such a thing would be located. Fortunately my professor was kind enough to show me the ropes when I went up to her after class and told her I had absolutely no clue what she was talking about.)

The next obstacle was using the computers. Sarah and I both had to print something out one day after class, so we went to tackle it together. When we went to the window outside the computer lab, expecting to sign up for a computer, we were told we needed to go to the window upstairs to choose a new password. We already had passwords which we had used to register for classes (which was a whole 'nother story) but apparently a second one was required. With new passwords, we went downstairs, typed in our matricula number (which inexplicably drops the first number, adds a G to the beginning, and adds another number to the end when you are using a computer) at the window, and were given receipts that assigned us computers.

I found the document I wanted to print. I went back to the window to ask how I could do so. The man there told me that I could do it on the computer itself. DUH! I'm no idiot. I asked him if I had to pay, and he told me that I got 100 free pages per semester, and that I could pick up my document at the end of the hall. So I pressed print and went to the end of the hall. Where I saw a stack of divided shelves, each one labeled with a number 0-9. On each shelf were stacks of paper. I rifled through some of the papers but was at a complete loss for how I would find mine. I went back to the help window. "Umm, how do I know where my paper is?" "It's in the shelf labeled with the last number of your matricula." DUH!

I went and looked in the "6" shelf, and sure enough, my document was there. Only attached to the front was an extra piece of paper with my name and matricula and time printed and other random and completely unnecessary information. Every document printed there has this extra sheet stapled to the front. So yup, I'm definitely missing the SciLi too.

It's a good thing that I don't actually need a lot of books because the bookstore is just as impossible. There is absolutely no order to the place. Sure, books are organized by genre, such as "literature" and "psychology," but that's it. Harry Potter might be next to Os Lusíadas. I tried to look at every single book spine to find the few books I do need, but it's impossible when they are neither ordered by title or author. (I'm sorry, Mom, for ever criticizing your plan to alphabetize all your books.) Brazilians can't even agree on which direction to write the title on the spine, which results in a lot of head twisting. Furthermore, the bookstore doesn't even have all the books students need! Which is fine for some of my literature books, since I can just find them at another bookstore, but what random bookstore is going to have the textbook for the health class I'm taking? One of my classmates mentioned the fact that the bookstore didn't have the textbook to my professor; she knew nothing about it and suggested we all use the library's copy. I'm definitely missing the Brown Bookstore, which has every book you need, organized not only by department but also labeled with what class it is assigned for.

So yeah, there's a lot that I miss about Brown. I kind of want to send Ruth Simmons down here for a year and shape this place up. But PUC-Rio is one of the best schools in Brazil, and I can't really complain -- after all, I'm planning on going to do some reading at the beach tomorrow in between classes. You definitely can't do that in Providence.

I Hate Brazil, part 2

2009-08-21T15:01:00.003-03:00

So, here’s where I left off: Marco beckoned me back down the now-empty hallway (I suddenly feel like I’m writing myself into a romance novel, or a horror film – the reality was definitely closer to the horror genre).

It was now a little after 4:30. Marco brought my file over and laid it on top of a file cabinet. “Do you understand Portuguese well?” he asked. That was not a good sign.

He told me that I was supposed to have registered myself before 30 days were up. I tried to convince him that it wasn’t my fault, that it was really the fault of the Brazilian Consulate in Brazil. He was having none of that, however. He told me that if he sent it in then, the file would go to Brasilia and be sent right back. SHOULDN’T THEY ALREADY HAVE ALL OF MY INFO IN BRASILIA? I wanted to ask. But unfortunately that is not how things are done in Brazil. I couldn’t yell and complain my way out of things – I needed a friend in Brasilia, or a federal police agent boyfriend, or some other ‘in.’ I had none of the above.

“Here’s the thing,” Marco told me (I am paraphrasing). “You are probably going to have to pay a fine.”

“OK,” I said. I had been prepared for that. I brought extra money. I just wanted to get out of there.

“But,” Marco said – and this was a big ‘but’ – “you need to talk to the person over there.” He pointed across the hallway. Nobody was sitting at the desk. “But” – yet another ‘but’ – “she already left for the day. You are going to have to come back tomorrow. Very early.”

“I have to come back tomorrow?” I asked, hoping that my Portuguese comprehension wasn’t actually as good as I had thought. “Tomorrow? Very early?”

“Tomorrow, get here early and go talk to the woman who sits over there. Then come back over, find your file” – he stuffed it in the ‘L’ folder as he spoke – “and I’ll be able to finish it.”

I left the office wanting to cry. I actually almost went into the bathroom to do so, but I was worried that I would miss the next bus and what I wanted most of all was to be back in Copacabana. By now it was 5 pm and the sun was preparing to set (It's winter here!). I had lost the whole day waiting in the waiting room, only to be told I had to come back the next day.

So, after returning to Copa and complaining to anyone who would listen (except for the annoying 'hairdresser to the stars' who sat next to me on the bus and who I just wanted to shut up about his own problems he was encountering in trying to marry a Brazilian in order to get citizenship), I went to bed, prepared to wake up even earlier the next day – I wanted to be first in line to get a number. And I was; after getting on the bus before 7, I made it to the airport and explained my situation to the man in charge of the numbers, who sent me straight in to talk to Rosângela, the woman in charge of the fees. Things were looking good.

Then, as she was plugging my information into the computer, she asked me if I had my entry form. "What?" I asked, confused not just by the Portuguese but by the fact that I needed to have yet another form that I hadn't been told about. Rosângela pulled out a example of the customs form that I had filled out on the plane over a month ago -- and that I was almost positive I had thrown away with my boarding pass and baggage claim receipts all the other unnecessary papers I had accumulated over my 24-hour long journey. "No," I told her, with certainty.

She looked at me like I was an idiot. "But this is an official document," she protested. "You need to have it. Or else you will be fined."

I felt like crying yet again. I was absolutely sure that all my friends who had gone to the federal police in weeks past hadn't needed such a document, and that Marco hadn't told me the day before that he was missing anything. I told Rosângela this, and she shot back at me with: "Well then I am absolutely sure your friends were fined. It's an official document."

I wished I were in the US right then, where not only would I have complete command over the language to tell this woman off (though my Portuguese apparently improves with anger), I would also know the right way to get around this. She obviously held the power in this situation, and I didn't know what the Brazilian response would be -- I wanted to just refuse to pay, but I thought she would just see me as a stubborn, stupid American who thinks she's always right. BUT I WAS RIGHT.

So I let it be for now, and she made me fill out several forms to which I knew very few of the answers (and didn't understand the Portuguese legal jargon), and which she ended up ripping up several minutes later. She told me I could pay the fees when I was leaving the country, and she stamped "Did not pay fee" in my passport. Then she sent me out to the waiting room to wait for Marco.

And Marco didn't come. Rosângela had explained to me that he would be parking his car, and that he liked to sit down and have a cafezinho before coming into the office. But time passed and Marco still didn't come. By the time it was almost 9:30 I got fed up and sneaked back down the hallway without a number, ready to pull my file out of the folder and hand deliver it to Brasilia myself.

I pretended that my number had just been called and went up to an open desk. I explained to the woman there that I had been there yesterday, and where my file was, and that I had just needed to talk to someone about paying a fee and that now I was all set. She started putting my data into the computer; once again, things were looking up.

Not so fast. Rosângela was called over, and the fees were discussed, and after I joyously listened to the new woman explain to her that I DIDN'T NEED MY ENTRY FORM (I wanted to say "Haha, I told you so" but wasn't sure how well that would translate into Portuguese), my hopes of getting out of there soon were dashed yet again.

I was sent back over to Rosângela's side of the hallway, where she prepared even more forms, so that I could pay the fee on the spot. I pulled out my wallet; she laughed at me and told me I had to pay it at the bank. So I went to the other side of the airport WHERE THE BANK WAS CLOSED. Not for long, luckily, I just had to wait for 10 minutes outside its doors for it to open at 10 o'clock.

Fee paid, I went back to Rosângela, gave her my receipt, she crossed out the "not" in my passport, and I went back across the hall. Though Marco finally arrived at work at almost 10:30, my form was still with the other woman and I had to wait as a French family with four children who had been living here for five years sorted out their immigration issues with her.

Then, suddenly and anti-climatically, with no teary goodbyes to Marco or Rosângela, it was over. My information was on its way to Brasilia, my passport was in my hand, and I was shooed out the door. The sun was directly overhead as I climbed onto the bus I had come to know all too well, and I settled into a seat and closed my eyes, ready to sleep my way back to Copacabana.

A (Not-So) Brief Interlude Of Hating Brazil

2009-08-16T22:43:00.003-03:00

(Be prepared for a rather long and angry rant about Brazilian bureaucracy. Sorry if you don’t want to read it; I’ll be back with more Salvador and other exciting happenings soon.)

I’m sorry I haven’t been blogging lately, but I was afraid if I blogged about my experience with the federal police in the midst of it, my blog would no longer be appropriate for children on account of the amount of swearing.

I realize that saying I had a horrible experience with the federal police makes it seem like I got arrested or something, but don’t worry, I just was registering myself with them so that they wouldn’t come after me and arrest me.

Let me start at the beginning: Every foreigner staying more than 30 days in Brazil must register at the Federal Police before those 30 days are up. I knew that I would have to do this, as the command was stamped in my passport when it was returned from the Boston Consulate with my visa. What I didn’t know, however, was that in order to so I would need my original visa application form. This form was returned to me with everything else I had sent to the Consulate, including letters from my school and from my parents, a bank statement, a certificate of good conduct from the Brown Department of Public safety, and other documents.

So what would have made me think to take my visa application out of that pile of documents and bring it with me to Brazil? NOTHING. I can’t think of one good reason why I should have to bring my visa application with me…. To prove that I applied for a visa? Well, duh, I obviously applied since I HAVE A VISA IN MY PASSPORT. When I arrived at Brown first semester of freshman year and it was time to sign up for classes, I didn’t have to bring my application with me – obviously I applied! I got in, didn’t I? And it’s not like I wasn’t in their computers – they even sent back my handwritten application the first time I applied and made me reapply through their online form. So they should have this document somewhere in their computer system, right? WRONG.

So, as soon as I found out that I would need my visa application to go to the federal police, I sent an email to my parents asking them to send it to me, which they did, after spending hours trying to scan it in case that would work instead (but apparently a copy wouldn’t be accepted). So I waited and waited for the envelope to come, but my appointment with the federal police came and went (the international office at my school organized trips for groups of students). Finally the document arrived, several days after it was supposed to, and the night before I left for Salvador. While I was in Salvador, however, I would reach my 30-day limit. Once I was assured that the police wouldn’t hunt me down and that I would just have to pay a small fine, I resigned myself to visiting the federal police after returning from Salvador.

Last Tuesday, I went into school (though classes were cancelled) to talk to the international office about visiting the federal police. I went with a friend from the program who also had neglected to bring her visa application with her, but who wasn’t in as much of a hurry since she had arrive two weeks later than I had. Unfortunately, at the office we were pretty much told that we should go by ourselves, and there were blue busses that ran along the beach that would take us to the airport, where the police office was located. And we were told that we should go early.

So the next day I went across the street to stand on the beach at 7 in the morning and wait for the bus. And I waited and waited and waited. Forty minutes later I was about to give up when I saw the bus. I flagged it down and got on. Almost an hour and a half later I was at the airport, but was suddenly at a loss for what to do. My instructions had pretty much ended there. Should I get off at terminal 1 or terminal 2? I went with my first instinct and chose terminal 1 – though once I entered I once again had no idea where to go. I managed to find the military police office (so many different types of police in this country!) and asked where to go.

Once I found the federal police office, its waiting area crowded with Brazilians and foreigners alike, I went to the desk and got a number, 808. Currently the counter was at 761. I figured I was in for a long wait, but I went to get fingerprinted ahead of time so that I would be all ready when my number came up. Getting fingerprinted was actually the highlight of my day – though I apparently was a little tense, since the guy kept telling me to “relaxar” as he inked my fingers a couple of times each. Despite the excitement involved, I hope that was one of the few times in my life I need to be fingerprinted (though unfortunately it will now be a lot harder to get away with any crimes I choose to commit).

After washing my hands, I sat down and waited. And waited. And waited. When, two hours after I had arrived, they had still only been through 6 numbers, I went to go get a cup of coffee and a salgado. Unfortunately there isn’t much to do at the airport in Rio, so I soon went back to the waiting room and tried to read my book. Stupidly I had only brought the book I am reading in Portuguese – and I’m no good yet at reading in Portuguese. It couldn’t keep me occupied for very long so I took out my notebook and thought about constructing a crossword puzzle. After hearing some people speak French, I got jealous and wrote a short essay in French on how much I hated reading in Portuguese and loved reading in French, and how much I hated Brazil and loved France (the second part is actually not true – no offense, France, but I think I kind of like Brazil more). By 3:00 I had been there for six hours doing practically nothing and was considering drafting a suicide note.

The worst part was all the women and families with babies who kept going in EVEN THOUGH THEIR NUMBERS WEREN’T CALLED. I found out later that the federal police meet with one number from the queue, then one “de prioridade” – i.e. with small children or who are friends of a friend of a federal police agent. I spent a lot of time wishing that I really had followed through with one of my many plans to steal a small Brazilian child, or that I had at least thought to pretend I was pregnant.

Finally, as the crowd thinned out, my number was called, and I joyfully went down the hallway that for seven hours I had been dreaming to walk down. I sat down at the desk of a man who I later learned was named Marco and signed several lines on a form, and glued two pictures of myself to the form. Then he told me to go back to wait outside, and I left all my documents with him.

Though I was upset at being made to wait again, I knew it would be nothing compared to the time I had spent waiting earlier. The office was supposed to close at 5, and it was already 4:30. So when Marco came out holding several passports in his hand, my heart leaped.

However, I soon realized that none was the dark blue of my American passport.

He handed the other passports out and then pointed: “You, come with me.”

Duh duh duh duh … TO BE CONTINUED

This Is Why I Haven't Been Responding To Emails (part 1)

2009-08-12T00:03:00.005-03:00

I got home tonight and found that the wireless internet now requires a new password, which ruined my plans to catch up on my emailing tonight (sorry to everyone whose emails and facebook messages I have been neglecting – I will get on that soon).

Anyway, instead of reading, conjugating verbs in Portuguese, or doing anything that would be helpful in my life, I found myself watching John Tucker Must Die. Dubbed over in Portuguese. While you all know how much I love this movie, I realized that I could do something else at the same time: blog. So here I am, writing in a Word document which I will figure out how to post tomorrow.

I was supposed to start classes tomorrow morning. However, while on our weeklong vacation in Salvador da Bahia (which I will get to in a moment), we found out that the beginning of this semester had been postponed until next week! As a public health student, I’m not exactly a fan of swine flu, but as a Brazilian student, I think it’s probably the best thing that could have possibly awaited me upon my return to Rio.

So, Bahia. Wow. A lot happened, and hopefully I will be able to get to it all, though it may take more than one post.

We flew out of Rio the first of August. The flight was a lot different than a domestic flight is in the U.S. First of all, I didn’t have to take my shoes off at any point. I carried my water bottle right on the plane. The plane was significantly late without much fanfare, as if that kind of lateness happened all the time (which it does). There were some drunk men sitting just a couple of rows in front of me playing drums on their armrests and singing loudly. The flight attendants wore weird white sleeves that weren’t connected to their shirts.

Arriving in Salvador, we found a huge screaming crowd waiting to greet us. Just kidding. They were waiting for the arrival of a soccer team from São Paulo, who came out of the terminal right behind us. One little boy started crying when he managed to sneak under the police barriers and get the autograph of one of the players. And this was the visiting team!

The hotel we stayed in was a nice one, with a delicious buffet that included pasta and scrambled eggs (depending on the time of day), two things I had been craving for the past month.

In fact, the hotel we were in was nice enough for Angela Davis as well, as she was staying there almost the whole time we were. I sat near her at breakfast and tried to spy on what she was reading on her computer (her breakfast companion/colleague was reading “Is It Ethical to Study Africa”) and on what she was eating for breakfast (peanut butter). I also sneaked around the hotel lobby trying to take a picture of her while she sat at the bar but I was too shy to talk to her (though several of us studied her Wikipedia page in case the need to have an intelligent discussion with her ever arose).

Ok, I have to wake up to go register myself in this country in just a couple of hours (I’m finally going to be legal! But I’ll get to that in another post), so I’m going to end here. I will be back later with more on Salvador.

Rain, Rain, Go Away -- Or I will

2009-08-01T12:09:00.002-03:00

This has apparently been the rainiest July in the history of Rio. Or something like that. And this is supposed to be the dry season. I'm beginning to think I'm back in Providence. At least I've never seen the temperature slip below 16 degrees Celsius (61 Fahrenheit). Unfortunately, now that I've spent four weeks in Brazil, a rainy 17 or 18 degree day is cause for some serious complaint, and daily (or twice-daily) hot chocolate.

The hallways in my apartment building are all outside, which means that they get rained on. I know this is hard to picture and doesn't make any sense (and I'm not doing a great job of describing it), but rain comes in through the top -- like above where a courtyard would be, only there is no courtyard -- and falls sideways into the pathways that lead from apartment to apartment on each floor. The halls have drains in them, but the rain still manages to puddle up!

It's finally looking like a sunny day in Rio this morning -- and I'm leaving. I'm headed with the group to Salvador da Bahia, in the northeast of the country. I know it's going to be warmer, and I've heard that the weather report predicts sun as well.

I wish I had time to write more, but a taxi is picking me up in front of my apartment in 13 minutes. I will report back on Salvador after I come home next Saturday -- and after that real classes start!

Adventures Out Of Zona Sul

2009-07-27T11:58:00.012-03:00

As you can tell from my lack of blogging, I've been pretty busy. We've started (and are actually almost done with) our intensive Portuguese classes, and I even have been doing a little bit of homework. In July! What?!

However, I have also had plenty of time for exploration. On Saturday, since the forecast was rainy, my friend Sarah and I decided to go to a museum. We visited the Fort of Copacabana and the Military History Museum next door. The fort is located on the strip of land that juts out in between Copacabana and Ipanema, and is practically next door to me (which will be helpful,

I guess, in case we ever get attacked). Walking out to see the cannons gave us a great view of Copacabana beach. Here's a photo of just a small section of the beach (my apartment building is to the left, just out of the shot) and of the favela that climbs the hill behind it.

After checking out the enormous, rather new-fangled cannons on top of the fort, we went in to the museum to see if we could find out what they could have ever possibly been used for. Seems to us that the only time the fort was really attacked was by a small group of rebels from within the military. I actually don't understand why more people haven't attacked, since it's a pretty nice area -- I'd certainly want to conquer it if I had an army of my own.

After a trek through several centuries worth of military dioramas, we headed off to a lunch that an Ultimate Frisbee player Sarah knew had invited us to. I tagged along so she wouldn't have to go alone, though I had no idea where we were going, what we were doing, or who we were going to be dining with. Luckily Sarah knew, right? Wrong.

After using all forms of transportation available to us (walking, bus, metro, taxi), we found ourselves at the Frisbee player's aunt's house in the middle of some Zona Norte neighborhood neither of us had ever heard of. Well, if we knew where we were, we wouldn't have heard of it. The lunch, which had originally been scheduled for 1, was in fact not so much of a lunch as an all-day party. We stood around talking to the Frisbee player and his aunt, as some other people came around with plates of meat that we grabbed at with our hands. There was also a big cake which we didn't get to try, since we made up an excuse to get out of there before it got dark (which happens around 5:30, since it's the middle of winter). Our host and his party were slightly sketchy, all in all, but I enjoyed talking to his aunt, and not just because she stuffed our bags with candy before we left.

We made it back to Zona Sul and were incredibly relieved to step out of the metro station onto the now dark streets of Copacabana. It was nice to realize how much this place now feels like home, and how comfortable I am here (especially compared to parts of Rio that we literally found were off the map when we tried to show our friends where we had been).

After another epic adventure -- this time, the opening of a single bottle of wine, requiring four Americans, two knives, two forks, a long-handled spoon, a nail, a pot, a Nalgene bottle, and a sieve -- I was about ready for a calm, leisurely night. That is, until Sarah and her roommate Jessica's host mom arrived to give us a lecture on taking advantage of being young and in Brazil. Though we had a field trip the next morning for which we had to be at school at 7 am, she urged us to stay out until 4 -- we only need two hours of sleep, right? I decided that though she looks like she's late-middle aged, she must be actually younger than me; after all, she can dance hip-hop.

So I didn't make it to 4, but I still didn't get enough sleep to allow me to wake up comfortably and happily at 5:45 the next morning. However, I did see the sun rise over the beach as I walked to the bus stop, which gave me motivation to stay up until then some other Friday or Saturday night. And when I got to school, I watched the clouds change color over the Cristo, which was pretty cool (it looks pretty small in this picture, but it's bigger in person -- though I haven't made it to the top yet).

Sunday was a field trip to the imperial city of Petrópolis, which my little brother will be happy to learn means "city of Peter." It was named after Dom Pedro II, the second (and last) emperor of Brazil, who summered there to escape the heat of Rio. Apparently, where the city is located up in the mountains (just an hour or so from Rio), the temperature can almost reach freezing point in the winter. I'm not sure that I completely believe that, since it seemed like t-shirt weather to me, but for Cariocas, it seems like anything below 70 degrees is pretty darn cold.

Anyway, in Petrópolis we visited a "Crystal Palace," which looked kind of like a greenhouse; a nice cathedral; the house of Santos Dumont, who in this country is considered the inventor of the airplane; an all-you-can-eat restaurant, which are quickly becoming my favorite; and the Imperial Palace. The Imperial Palace was the best museum ever, since immediately upon entering you are given slipper-sandals which you slip over your shoes and which allow you to skate across the shiny wood floors. Pretty fun.

Then, while we waited outside the museum, a band in kilts and those furry hats that British people wear (I know, that is a completely false generalization) marched up the hill. You never know what you're going to see in this country.

On the drive back down to Rio, the mountains seemed to be strange sea creatures swimming through a deep pool of mist.

Flamengo v. Botafogo, July 19

2009-07-21T22:57:00.009-03:00

Well, I feel more like a Carioca now -- I went to my first futebol game. And survived.

At first I was a little hesitant, since I knew I would have to keep this rite of passage as secret as possible. You see, my host mother is a Fluminense fan. And I would be going to watch Flamengo, their arch-rival.

The best comparison I can think of is Red Sox v. Yankees. You couldn't pay me to be a Yankees fan. And I told my host mother that as long as I was living in her house, I would be a Fluminense fan. One night over dinner she went on and on, describing how Flamengo players are sore losers, how they are all hot-shots who don't play as a team, anything and everything that made me begin to detest Flamengo as much as the Yankees. So how could I betray her so early in our relationship?

Well, I was excited to go to Marancanã, the biggest stadium in South America. And Sunday's game promised to be a good one, since both Flamengo and Botafogo are teams from Rio, which mean that both fan-bases would be out to cheer on their team. So Sunday afternoon, while my host mother was gone, I sneaked out of the apartment.

I will definitely say it was worth it (though I may change my mind if Gloria kicks me out of the house). We chose to sit in the upper levels, where the hard-core fans sit, and on each of our seats was a red flag that we waved in time with the chants (which I never quite mastered).

I won't give the play-by-play, but the score was 1-2, with Botafogo ahead, with only a few minutes left in the game (weirdly enough, there wasn't a clock in the whole stadium). By this time, I was cheering intensely for Flamengo (shhhhh.....). I had finished my cachorro quente (a very literal translation of "hot dog," which comes in a sealed plastic bag -- not bad, though). I was singing the one chant I had figured out (Fla! men! go!). And suddenly, Flamengo scored to tie up the game.

The crowd went wild. We might actually win! But just as suddenly, and without any warning, the game was over. It was a tie, and it was time to leave. And this is where things got even more exciting.

As we went to leave the stadium, we were prevented from going out the exit which was nearest to us. That was an exit for Botafogo fans. See, they have to designate specific entrances/exits for each team's fans, so they don't kill each other. As we made our way around the stadium, many people took off or covered up their jerseys so no one would know which team they were for.

We were making our way all the way around the corridor that runs around the stadium, trying to find the exit, when suddenly the crowd we were a part of turned around and started sprinting in the opposite direction. Caught in the stampede, I turned to run as well and followed several of my friends a few yards backwards and then off to the side. Everyone stood still for a minute, trying to figure out what had happened, but soon we were back on our way. I never learned what the big scare was, only that it would be pretty easy to be trampled to death and that I hope that's not how I die.

Finally having exited the stadium, we walked along the sidewalk toward the Metro. We walked without incident for a little while, when again the crowd started moving against us. This time there were a lot fewer people, and they walked calmly. We walked a few more steps before finding out from a passerby that there had been gunshots just around the bend. We watched as the police arrived, and then kept on our way.

So, I survived my first futebol game. And enjoyed it immensely -- the extra excitement after the game was over was just a perk. However, I'm still in a huge philosophical conundrum. Which team shall I support?

Bruxos vs. Trouxas: Watching Harry Potter in Brazil

2009-07-16T21:41:00.003-03:00

It's beginning to feel like a tradition: watching Harry Potter movies in foreign countries. Actually, it's only happened twice, once here and once in France, but it's a bizarre (and exciting) enough experience to leave quite an impression.

I was in France when the fourth movie came out. That's the one where different wizarding schools -- including a French one -- come to Hogwarts for the Triwizard Tournament. In the version of the movie dubbed in French, the students at the French school don't have French accents. Or rather, all of the witches and wizards have French accents, even Harry, since they're all speaking French.

Also -- I still get a kick out of this -- in French they call wands "baguettes"! It really threw me at first when someone told Harry not to forget to bring his baguette. I mean, I know the French are obsessed with their bread, but would they really go so far as to work it into this British story? Then I figured it out, and felt just a little bit stupid.

So I found that watching Harry Potter dubbed over in French was not the most authentic experience. When I realized that I would be in Brazil for the opening of the sixth movie, I knew I wanted to watch it with subtitles. I also wanted to watch it at midnight (if only to watch it at least one hour ahead of everyone in the United States). However, the movie theater near my apartment did not have a showing that fulfilled both criteria, and I didn't want to be a long bus ride from home at 2:30 in the morning, so I settled for waiting 19 hours after it officially opened.

I went to buy tickets the day before with several friends, and we discovered that though there were about a dozen tickets left, they were all in the front row. Apparently this movie theater has assigned seating. Though we worried about neck pain, we decided it was worth it.

I wasn't yet sure how Brazil felt about Harry Potter (despite the sold-out theater). Then I sat down at 7 pm yesterday and the noise began. The teenagers in the theater screamed like crazy for every character when he or she appeared on screen for the first time. I guess they were all reading the subtitles so they didn't have to worry about missing any of the lines. Ron -- aka Rony here in Brazil -- seemed to be the fan favorite, followed closely by Draco Malfoy ("EU TE AMO, DRACO!!" yelled the girl directly behind me).

While I luckily could understand the words as the actors spoke them (well, when I could hear them through the screaming), I looked down at the subtitles occasionally to see what bizarre translations the Brazilians had come up with. Quidditch became Quadribol -- not half as cool. Muggles became Trouxas, which is actually a real word in Portuguese, meaning (according to my dictionary) someone who is gullible, a sucker. An idiot. I thought that was a little blunt. Not all Muggles are stupid -- we're just... Muggles.

The word for wand in Portuguese is not nearly so misleading as it is in French, but they did seem to change a lot proper nouns in the Brazilian version. Brazilians just find it impossible to pronounces words that end in most consonant sounds (hence lapee-topee, webee-sitee, etc. -- and apparently "Rony").

All in all, it was a great experience. I no longer have any doubt that Brazilians are into Harry Potter (though perhaps not all of them -- my host mother didn't have any idea what I was talking about until I told her, "You know, the kids who do magic"). And now I have some essential vocabulary to add to my list of Portuguese words.

Você fala português?

2009-07-13T19:33:00.002-03:00

As I spread the news about my departure for Brazil over the past few months, the question I was most often asked was this: Do you speak Portuguese? And I probably gave a different answer every time.

Sure, I speak Portuguese -- I took it for three semesters. But that doesn't mean I speak it well. In fact, now that I'm actually in Brazil, I feel that I speak it more poorly than I did in the classroom. I don't think I've once used the subjunctive during my week here. And the future and conditional tenses don't get much use either.

I told myself that what was more important than grammar (sorry, Mom) was an effort towards communication. So I've been making an effort to talk to my host mom, tell her stories and ask her questions, even if my Portuguese isn't all that comprehensible all the time.

For example, in Portuguese questions are usually asked with a simple inflection -- when written, they look just like statements with a question mark. So sometimes when I'm stumbling over the nasally sounds of the words, my voice doesn't manage to pull off a proper inflection, and my host mom thinks I'm merely pointing something out, so I don't get the answer I'm looking for.

Other times I throw in a French word here and there (with a Brazilian accent) without noticing and wonder why my host mother is confused. In my head, French and Portuguese mix to form a strange and incomprehensible language. For example, I thought to myself just a few minutes ago, "Tenho mal au ventre" -- "I have a stomachache," half in Portuguese, half in French (my host mother told me I looked thinner yesterday so I ate a lot this afternoon to make up for it). Sounds perfectly good to me but if I said it out loud no one would have any idea what I'm talking about.

The intensive Portuguese classes that I will be taking for the next few weeks start on Wednesday, so hopefully that will help me straighten myself out. In the meantime, I'm working on a list of words that I've learned since I got here -- mostly vegetables, since my host mother is obsessed with them. And perhaps I'll make an effort to use the subjunctive every once in a while, thought it's been kind of nice making statements without any sense of doubt.

How Not To Be A Gringo

2009-07-12T11:26:00.014-03:00

This past week, I went on a trip with my program to Paraty, a small historical town about four hours south of Rio de Janeiro (as you can see from the map, we didn't even get very far -- Brazil is an enormous country). The drive there was almost as interesting as the time spent in Paraty. The first hour or so was spent just getting out of the city -- favela after favela, horse-drawn carts on the highway, buildings in various states of construction and decay. It still amazes me how many people live in this city; it's by far the biggest place I've ever lived.

Finally we made it out to the coast again and it was as if we had entered paradise. Each beach

town we passed, nestled between rolling green mountains, seemed more beautiful than the last. I took some pictures from the bus which, though they are of bad quality, give a good idea of what the scenery looked like for several straight hours.

Paraty was historically an important port, first for the gold

trade, then for slaves, and finally for coffee. Cachaça, Brazil's famous sugar-cane distilled alcohol, has been an important export throughout that evolution. In fact, we visited a distillery outside the town and got to see both the stalks of sugar cane and the final result in bottles (which we also got to taste).

One of my favorite things about Brazil so far is the amount of places that sell food by weight -- even ice cream! One day in Paraty I had a large serving of ice cream (four different flavors, since you scoop them yourself) after lunch and then a smaller serving of fruit sorbets after dinner. I'm looking forward to starting a similar ice cream shop at home.

The town was beautiful (white houses with brightly colored trim) but we also spent a lot of time exploring the bay and the islands in it. We spent a whole day on a boat, stopping at beaches, swimming with fish, and eating lunch on an island. The next day we slid down a natural waterslide made of rock and

then took another boat to yet another island for more fresh fish. None of us could believe that this was a program actually sponsored by our school -- and that we are getting credit for doing this (among other things, of course... eventually).

I am already loving Brazil very much, and I kind of never want to leave. However, I haven't quite mastered the art of fitting in with the Brazilians yet (and my slowly-improving Portuguese isn't helping much). However, our tour guide in Paraty gave us all a leg up with a lesson on how not to be a gringo when going to the beach. Apparently, Brazilians don't bring towels, water, or books (all things I had been planning on bringing) to the beach. After having been to the beach several times, I'm not quite sure yet what you are supposed to do without any of these items -- besides drink beer, of course.

However, so far I have succeeded at one very important thing: I haven't gotten sunburned. I had to lather myself with sunscreen like a gringo to do so, though.

Making Friends With Doormen

2009-07-06T19:31:00.003-03:00

I left off my last post with my arrival in Rio de Janeiro. It's now about 36 hours later, and so much has happened that I can't even begin to describe it all. And I don't want to subject you all to a minute-by-minute account of the past two days. But I will write a little about where I'm living and what I've seen so far.

We were instructed not under any circumstances to leave the airport without a program representative, so after waiting for our baggage (there were five of us on the same plane) which passed by on the slowest conveyor belt any of us had ever seen, we were glad to find someone already waiting for us. A driver was there to drive us to our host families, and since I was closest to the airport, I was dropped off first. The only problem: it was not the right apartment building. When I told the doorman that I was looking for apartment 709, he told me that that didn't exist in that building. There was no 7th floor. I tried to remember what the correct address was, and the doorman suggested that I leave my big bags in the entryway with him and go check out another apartment building across the street.

Luckily enough, that was the one. I went back to get my luggage from the first doorman, who was very nice and as helpful as he could be in the situation, and dragged it across the street where that doorman called up to my host mother. By the time I dragged all my stuff to the seventh floor (on the elevator, of course), I was sweating buckets. Gloria, my host mother, answered the door in her bathrobe -- she had thought I was arriving in the evening. But luckily she is very nice and wasn't too unprepared.

Gloria is divorced, with no children, and she gets lonely living alone so she rents out her extra room to people like me. While we had a delicious lunch of vegetables, rice, and beans she taught me what each vegetable was called in Portuguese (I found out quickly I don't have a very large vocabulary of words like that) and I told her what several were in English. One struck her as very funny: batata is Portuguese for potato, which sounds slightly similar to the word for doorman in Portuguese (porteiro). She decided that she was going to start calling all of the doormen in our building "batata" -- and there are twelve of them, apparently. I tried to convince her that "potato" isn't actually all that similar to "porteiro," but she didn't fall for it.

So when we left to go to the Hippy Fair, she announced to Jorge his new nickname. And when we came back, Daniel had taken his place, and she told him the same thing. I'm sure the doormen love me right now.

The Hippy Fair is a an outdoor market that takes place just a ten-minute walk from my apartment every Sunday in Ipanema. I'm living in Copacabana, near the border with Ipanema. I can see the ocean from my bedroom window, and the beach is just a block away. Yesterday night Gloria and I watched fireworks over the beach from the window. It's a really great place to live, cheaper than other neighborhoods in Rio, with a lot to do and of course a fantastic beach. Plus, about half the students in my program live in Copacabana.

Today we took a tour of Rio, through many different neighborhoods, and ended with a delicious dinner. I don't think I had realized exactly how enormous the city is -- hopefully I will be able to see a lot of it during the next six months. There are definitely a lot of beaches to go to! And the great thing is, it's the dead of winter right now (i.e. only in the 70s). It's only going to get warmer, so I can do things outside the whole time I'm here. There is already so much I want to go and explore. Plus, even at this time of year, the water is much warmer than it ever gets in Maine.

I officially ended my vegetarianism this evening with some nice steak and sausage, and I have to say it was delicious.

The Awkward Morning After... Or, Why I Am Only Flying First Class From Now On.

2009-07-05T22:18:00.003-03:00

Yesterday morning, approximately twenty-four hours before I landed in Rio de Janeiro, I left my house. My whole family drove me to the airport, and while I was worried that getting there only an hour and a half early wouldn't leave me enough time, those fears immediately disappeared when I saw that there were eight people in the security line when we arrived. And not a single person in the check-in line. So no, I didn't miss my flight, but as soon as I got on my plane I realized there was an even bigger problem: I just might die aboard it.

I boarded the plane only to find out that it was probably the smallest and oldest one I had ever been on. Even with just one seat on the left and two on the right, fewer than half of the total seats were filled. I found mine easily and immediately pulled out the safety instructions, since I was worried I would need them. That document told me that the plane I was on was an Embraer 135, and that the final assembly of this aircraft was completed in Brazil. I couldn't decide whether that was a good or a bad omen.

So picture this, the auspicious start to my journey: I'm in row 5, and I can hear everything that's going on up front. Everyone's on the plane but the cockpit is still open when I hear a man's voice: "I've never done this kind of plane before." Please don't let that be the pilot, I think. Luckily it's not; I am pleased to realize that it's just an airport employee on the breezeway wondering about paperwork.

A few minutes later, everyone is buckled in and the flight attendant (singular) is walking back and forth down the aisle taking notes. The woman across from me suddenly decides that she wants to move up two rows. "Sorry, ma'am" -- the flight attendant sends her back -- "I've already done the weights analysis." Um, excuse me? I have several problems with this. First of all, I'm sitting in the aisle seat but since there's no one next to me I was planning on moving over to look out the window. I guess I won't be risking that now. But my second problem is this: what if I need to get up to go to the bathroom during the flight? I don't want the loss of my weight to cause us to crash -- while I'm still locked in with the toilet. Lastly, what did she do -- estimate everyone's weight as we walked on? But what about our carry-ons? She has no idea how much my Portuguese dictionary or my Portuguese verb book weighs. Or maybe there was a secret scale we walked over while entering the plane. I would have loved to steal a glance at the flight attendant's notebook to see what kind of calculations she used for this "weights analysis."

Just before the plane takes off, the pilot announces not "Flight attendants, please prepare for departure," but simply "Phyllis, please prepare...." This is actually kind of cozy after all.

So obviously I made it to New York alive. When I arrived, I quickly found my gate (though after making my way through a long winding maze of temporary hallways across the tarmac), and lo and behold, one of my classmates from my Portuguese class was sitting there already. I was glad to find a travel partner since I still had a long journey ahead of me.

The flight from New York to Atlanta was quite uneventful, as was the five-hour layover in New York. Nick and I got to the gate before the plane that was leaving from there before ours had even boarded, so we just found an empty corner to settle in. None of the dozen or so TVs listing the departures even had our flight yet. So we waited. And waited. And ate. And wandered around a little. And waited.

By the time our departure time was nearing, our gate had been moved to the other side of the terminal -- which gave us another way to kill time. By the time I boarded the plane, it was over 12 hours since I had left my house. And I still was only in Atlanta.

The taxi toward take-off was promising. Out the window, we could see fireworks -- and I had thought that I would be missing them this year. The nice Brazilian man next to taught me how to say fireworks in Portuguese. Once we were in the air, we flew over several other fireworks shows -- a perfectly fitting last memory of America for the six months I'll be away.

However, things started going downhill from there. The talkative eight-year-old girl in front of me said to her father, "Let's play a game, Dad. It's called Sky Mall." You can imagine how painful that was to listen to. I couldn't be too mad, however, since I am sure I have played similarly obnoxious games before. Just perhaps not as loudly.

I couldn't really forgive her, however, for reclining her seat and leaving my legs awkwardly splayed to the side. She wasn't even sleeping! She just kept talking. When I tried to rest my knees against the back of her seat, her bouncing almost dislocated my knee cap.

But eventually I settled into a slightly comfortable position and closed my eyes, deciding to forgo watching "Seventeen Again." However, every time I started to fall asleep I was jolted awake when I felt the man beside me tap me on the leg or shoulder. I would lift my eye mask each time and see that he was actually asleep. And that was when things started getting really bad.

For the next several hours, the man fell asleep on my shoulder and spent the whole night caressing it. Like, literally caressing my shoulder and arm. Very gently and lovingly. He would occasionally wake up suddenly and apologize profusely and turn away, but within just a few minutes he would be at my side again. It definitely ranks up there as one of the most awkward experiences of my life.

Eventually I gave up even trying to sleep and just played Solitaire on my iPod, staying as close to the wall as I could. Out of my window I could see what I assume was the Amazon rainforest, stretching out in the darkness as far as I could see. The perfectly full moon reflected orange on some body of water below. The sky was black except for the occasional shooting star. I was finally in (well, above) Brazil, and it felt incredibly surreal.

After several more apologies from the Brazilian man, he managed to stay on his side of the arm rest and I managed to get an hour or two of sleep. However, soon it was light again and we both woke up to an intense awkwardness as the plane descended into Rio and we ate breakfast next to one another. I didn't know what to say to him -- should I acknowledge all that transpired between us in the night? Or should I just pretend it was all a dream? Luckily I didn't have to choose -- he complimented me on my very soft and comfortable shoulder.

I decided right then that from now on I want one of those bed-like chairs in first class every time I fly overseas. However, my experiences with Brazilian men can only get better, right?

Happy 4th of July... I'm leaving the country

2009-07-04T01:56:00.000-03:00

Well, I'm off to Brazil in just a few hours. After leaving Portland International Jetport at 11:05 am, I'll arrive at Antonio Carlos Jobim International Airport (cooler -- and more accurate -- name) at approximately 8:19 am on Sunday. It will be a long two days, with layovers in both New York and Atlanta, but hopefully the Brazilian sun will be well worth the journey.

Did you know that Atlanta is only about 150 miles closer to Rio de Janeiro than Portland? And it's about 1000 miles from Portland to Atlanta. So I am taking two flights and spending over 10 hours just to go a tiny fraction of the way to my destination. If only the Portland International Jetport lived up to its name and actually had international flights....

If you find it slightly ironic but also slightly fitting that I am leaving my family, my friends, and my country for almost six months on Independence Day, don't tell me -- you have no idea how many people have already made that joke. But it's true, I will be exchanging fireworks for Seventeen Again (with Zac Efron) and Escape to Witch Mountain (never even heard of it), and hot dogs and hamburgers for airplane peanuts and a big box of Mike and Ike's. However, rain is in the forecast tomorrow for Maine (as it has been for the past month), so I'm sure I won't be missing much.

If you've read this far and are still wondering what I'll be doing in Brazil, here's the deal: For the first few weeks, I'll be taking some intensive Portuguese classes and learning more about Brazil. After that, I'll be enrolling in classes at PUC-Rio, the Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro. I'm hoping to learn about Brazilian culture and literature, as well as public health in Brazil (both because I know it will be fascinating and because I kind of need to graduate). I know I'll be living with a host family in Copacabana (just one block from the beach!).

And that's pretty much all I know. I'll report back, though -- that's what this blog is here for. I decided it would be more efficient than postcards or mass e-mails or even Twitter (random great quote about Twitter I read today: "Nobody expects to learn anything significant from a tweet, and nobody does. The point is just to create the frantic sense that something is happening."). However, if even this blog isn't significant or intimate enough for you, I will also be available on Facebook (obviously), on email and gchat (louisahsmith@gmail.com), and on Skype (louisahsmith). Or any other modes of communication you may think of.

I hope you continue to follow my blog, and I'll see you from the southern hemisphere!

P.S. I'm still looking for a catchy title for this blog. Suggestions?