Rio Grande Do Sul

Greetings!!

Tudo bem (Response: Tudo bom or Tudo)

In Brazil things aren’t only backwards but they are backwards, parallel, diagonal, and all other ways around.

Things Backwards

· Popular Styles: Although I am no connoisseur on the ways of high fashion, or any fashion at all, as the typical college male dressing code of a Polo shirt, SSBDs (Short Sleeve Button Downs for those uninformed) and slacks or khakis does apply in Brazil. Anything less than what is to be considered stylish clothes is dressing down. Nostalgic T-shirts that have been worn and washed so many times that they feel like magic on your skin would quickly be in the trash in Brazil over preference for the graphic tee, since these shirts with character no longer contain that new, fresh look. Further, (possibly due to a Brazilian band called ReStart pronounced He-Starch) bright, obnoxious colors are all the rage, on women and men alike. I have seen lime green jeans, purple pants, sky blue tops, fluorescent pink shirts and everything outside and in-between. I promise that I will not bring this new trend back to the U.S. and I will continue to wear Mountain Khakis, Slacks, SSBDs, old, flavorful T-shirts, athletic jersey apparel, Wrangler Jeans as worn by Brett Farve, and other.

· Airport Due-Diligence: Although Customs at Brazilian airports are no laughing matter, judging from Yagel and my first domestic flight they need to reallocate some of their resources to domestic travel. First off, concerning the shrewd individuals, in airport security, who have decided to sit in front of a device that emits X-rays for their occupation while looking at a obscured vision of your luggage on a screen were not able to use their detection skills to see the shaving razor that Yagel mistakenly left in his bag. After Yagel and I calmly waited to board our plane at our assigned gate attempting to pay close attention to the intercom announcements (although they were in Pork and Cheese), unbeknownst to us our gate had change. So when I was about to walk onto the gangplank towards the plane as I handed my ticket to the gate attendant, on a whim I decided to ask (in Pork and Cheese) if this was in fact the flight to Porto Alegre. To my surprise, since I had already been handed my ticket it was not. This flight was traveling to Porto Seguro, which is over a 2-hour flight north from Sao Paulo (and we were going to the southernmost state in Brazil to Rio Grande do Sul). I can only imagine if Yagel and I had boarded the plane and somehow, if our seats had been empty, we would have landed in Porto Seguro while thinking we were actually in Porto Alegre. We quickly got out of line then went to the correct gate or so we thought, and then were told to move again to another gate where we eventually boarded our plane to Porto Alegre. Wary to all who engage in domestic travel in a foreign nation where you don’t really know the language.

Things Diagonal

· Everyone Loves Dogs? Maybe too much in Brazil?: It is a pretty establish fact that most people in the United States of America love dogs; if I am wrong, and you are part of the dissenting few, please watch the film “Marley & Me,” if you are not weeping uncontrollably at the end of the movie then you simply are heartless. Well, in Brazil like in America, dogs are everywhere. The difference is here that there streets are filled with packs of stray dogs, as well as almost every Brazilian household having a so called guard dog which every time anyone walks by their households gate barks uncontrollably. I don’t know if they don’t have a pound here, or Brazilian dog catchers need a refresher course, but the howl of packs of dogs can be heard at all hours included with the hoof beats of horses and the never ending sounds of cars.

· Irregular Sized, Close-but-no-Cigar Children’s Characters (Such as an overly fit Barney): Although I have noticed this Brazilian trend of portraying things as “close-but-no-cigar” previously, during Yagel and my trip Rio Grande Do Sul, we saw a peculiar sight that verified Brazil’s inability to accurately represent, then copy items from American pop culture. My epiphany of this fact occurred in Gramado where Yagel and I saw a person dressed up in a “Barney” costume, handing out fliers and such for promotional purposes. The “Barney” we saw in Gramado was not an accurate portrayal of the real purple dinosaur because this “Brazil-Barney” looked like it had enrolled in a weight-loss program endorsed by Dan Marino because “brazil-Barney” was missing about 200 pounds of fluff. This skinny, shapely, fit “Brazil-Barney” was to be sure a peculiar sighting.

· Bouncers as Dancing Police: You Can’t Dance if (HOW) you Want To: Apparently in Brazil the long arm of the law controls the way and intensity of your dancing skills. When Yagel and I went out in Novo Hamburgo, my dancing intensity, moves, or who knows what exactly irritated the bouncer. The bouncer came over to me and told me that I was not allowed to cut a rug in that manner and that my type of dancing was not allowed in this particular bar; my reaction was to simply play the ignorant American card and simply dance in the same manner (however the heck I wanted). He came over to me again later, and reminded me that there were rules on one’s dancing intensity which I simply ignored yet again. The band “Men Without Hats” who had the hit single “Safety Dance” would have not approved (Original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7movKfyTBII and The Glee Version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG4WOUB3wB4). On a side note, “Safety Dance” was meant as a protest song.

· Roosters Crowing: Apparently roosters in Brazil did not get the Memo (about the TPS Reports), because in Brazil you hear roosters crowing at 3AM instead of when the sunrises (the crack of dawn). Apparently rooster’s biological clocks are yet another thing “Lost in Translation.”

· Bigger is Always Better: So Why is everything so small??? Although there is still a very prevalent American attitude of “bigger is always better” concerning food, size of stores, etc., in my opinion America has begun to embrace and appreciate quality over sheer size, and quantity (even though Costco is still the best store in the world.) The rise in popularity of Microbreweries, boutique stores, etc. proves to me that America has seen through the messy façade of size towards quality in the appreciation of the small town American ideal. In Brazil, this is not the case; the biggest thing is always the best. This mentality makes its claim in popular music, in the enormity of shopping malls, etc. The puzzling factoid though is that most Brazilian goods are small. They have small cups (which is so frustrating, because I would kill for a huge glass of sweet tea), small cars, and small this and that. Everything is still small here so maybe that’s why the bigger things are automatically associated with being better.

Things Parallel

· Late Night TV: One thing very similar is the type of programming for late night TV, worthless, mind-numbing television. For example, the other night I watch the movie “Snakes on a Plane” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4t6zNZ-b0A), which is so terrible it cannot be put into words.

September 1^st to Current:

Today, Yagel and I once again woke up at the trade school with Rafa (who we have been calling “boneca” which means doll in Pork and Cheese). Yagel and I decided to teach the morning class together, then during the afternoon class I did both of our laundry while Yagel taught the class, since Yagel and I were heading to Rio Grande do Sul the following day. Laundry, in Brazil, is a taxing, terrible process that takes an inordinate amount of both will power and energy. Although there is a washing machine at the trade school, washing machines in Brazil are basically large tanks of water that slowly oscillate. So what I decided to do was actually expedite the process by engaging in hand washing as well, by sticking my hands in the washer while it was slowly, slowly spinning. Also, dryers are an extremely rare commodity in Brazil, so one is forced to ring your clothes out to an inch of their life so that they will be able to be dried when they are hung on the clothesline.

As I previously alluded to Yagel and I were heading to the southernmost Brazilian state “Rio Grande do Sul” the following day. We were going to be visiting my child-hood live-in housekeeper, Diva and her family. Diva moved to Atlanta from Brazil and by a serious of coincidences she began working for my family the day I was born. Diva now lives in Atlanta and operates her own drapery and design business, but she has always been and will always be considered a member of our family (she even taught me how to ride a bike, by taking the training wheels off my bike and forcing my to ride it as I cried and whined like a little baby). When I talked about staying in Brazil for a prolonged period of time she decided to time her visit to her family in Brazil while I was there as well. Later that day Yagel and I played a game of futebol with some neighborhood kids then chilled at the school with Rafa the rest of the night.

September 2^nd

I taught the morning class and left Yagel sleeping because he had been up the previous night till 6AM working on a project for his former job at UVA, as a professor’s assistant. Although we had talked to Carlos and Miere many times that week about leaving for the airport at 2pm, somehow, yet again, it was “Lost in Translation” as Carlos came to pick us up to go to the airport at 12:50 instead. So Yagel and I quickly packed up our stuff, forwent showers at Miere and Carlos’s house, and headed to the airport. We got the airport fairly early for our flight so, we decided to indulge in some MacDonald’s; I had a BigMac, it was delectable. As I mentioned in the first part of the post, domestic air-travel in Brazil does not cater to non-Pork and Cheese speakers. [Same as above: After Yagel and I calmly waited to board our plane at our assigned gate attempting to pay close attention to the intercom announcements (although they were in Pork and Cheese), unbeknownst to us the gate change. When I was about to walk on the gangplank towards the plane as I handed my ticket to the gate attendant, on a whim I decided to ask (in Pork and Cheese) if this was in fact the flight to Porto Alegre. It was not. This flight was traveling to Porto Seguro, which is over a 2-hour flight north from Sao Paulo (and we were going to the southernmost state in Brazil to Rio Grande do Sur). We quickly scurried out of line, and boarded the plane where I was luckily enough to have a window seat on the plane as well as the aisle completely to myself.]

When we arrived in Porto Alegre, Diva was there to meet us, as she had flown in the night before, as well as her nephew, Guilherme. Guilherme (Ge), who knows English very well since he spent a year in Michigan toward an exchange program, then drove Yagel and I back to his place in another town called Novo Hamburgo. When we got to his place, Rosaria, Diva’s sister (Diva has an extremely large family, who are very, very loud but it the good sense of the word), Diva’s niece Stephanie, and Guilherme’s girlfriend all joined us for an extremely loud dinner where mostly Portuguese was spoken as Yagel and I searched the expanses of our mind to keep up and hopefully understand the main subjects. By this point, I am able to understand Portuguese well enough to get around town, buy things, and survive, but for mastering conversational Portuguese I still have a ways to go. I understand the main points of conversations and able to speak the language a lot better than I can understand it in the public forum. After dinner Diva shared some Gaucho Tea or “Cha Mate” as it is called in Portuguese which tastes like a form of green tea but looks more like peat moss in a cup; A Gaucho is the term Brazilians use for anyone from “Rio Grande do Sul” who are influenced by the cowboy, farm and cattle culture.

September 3^rd

The next day the weather was pretty cold and rainy, so Yagel and I stayed inside most of the day. I did get the chance to watch the movie “Home Alone 3” which was on TV; although I think the first two movies were better, the third film is actually a really good flick as well. That night Rosaria made us Lentil Soup, then took the bus to Cenela with Diva where we were going to meet them tomorrow. Guilherme (known as Ge) and Stephanie took as to a bar in Novo Hamburgo that night called “The American Bowling.” Yes, not, The American Bowling Alley, as there was no attempt to use the English language grammatically correctly. This bar made many attempts to copy American culture with pictures of Michael Jordan, Cal Ripken Jr., Elvis, James Dean, etc., but it failed to capture American culture accurately as everything was just a little off with a picture of Roger Clemons (In a Red Sox uni???), a infant sized baseball glove and bat, the signs for the restroom that read Man and Woman, and other various incongruities. We all decided to bowl, in the connecting bowling alley, before the bands started. The bands that night were playing a style of music in Brazil called “University Country” which is pretty hard to explain, but I was told that Brazilian country music has been hardly changed but that the new manifestation is a style that has been called “sertanejo universitário” (here is a taste http://www.sertanejouniversitario.net/blog/). When we started dancing, I was confronted with the Dancing Police as I referred to earlier. [Same as beggining of post: Apparently in Brazil the long arm of the law controls the way and intensity of your dancing skills as my dancing irritated the bouncer. The bouncer came over to me and told me that I was not allowed to dance like that in this particular bar; my reaction was to simply play the ignorant American card and simply dance in the same manner. Luckily, the problem dissolved as more and more people began to pack the bar. One thing to note is that Brazilian women are exceedingly forward of which I was unaware.]

September 4^th

The next day we woke up, and drove to Canela, which is a town in the mountains, to meet up with Diva and the rest of her family. On the drive into Gramado, the town next to Canela, we stopped at multiple points to take pictures of an amazing view of the valley, a train museum, and other numerous points.

When we finally got to Canela, we stopped by the Diva’s sister’s house then decided to go back into Gramado to do some more sightseeing. Gramado has a very European feel as most of the Architecture is very Germanic; Gramado also is a very popular destination for other Brazilians with many hotels. Yagel, Ge, and I walked around Gramado for a while blowing into bone horns similar to those used in the Ricola commercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dDFIHfTFqg), being very cold, trying on amazing hats that looked like Uncle Eddy’s hat in “National Lampoons Christmas Vacation” made out of sheep wool, so basically being silly tourists. We decided to stop for Hot Chocolate, as well, near the center of town where Gramado holds a famous film festival. This hot chocolate can not simply be described as your run of the mill hot chocolate but it was the best hot chocolate that I have ever tasted in my life as they used homemade marshmallows where the thickness of the marshmallow could balance a spoon standing straight up.

After sightseeing we went to watch the futebol team “Gremio” who was playing a team from Rio, called Botafogo. Gremio changed their coach a few weeks earlier by recruiting the best player that had ever played for Gremio called “Gauchou.” Since then has slowly turning the team around from 18 out of 20 on the group table to 10th, as seen in Gremio’s comeback against Botofogo to tie the game at 2-2. That night we all went to dinner at an all you can eat Pizzeria for Diva’s birthday, which was the day before. Pizzerias in Brazil work in the same fashion a Brazilian steakhouse, Churrascaria, bringing around hundreds of kinds of pizza to your table, but in Brazil they also have many types of desert pizza as well such as chocolate, bananas with ice cream, etc. This particular place had a haunted house theme with pumpkin lanterns and such, so they came to the table with witch hats for all of us to put on and a desert pizza for Diva’s birthday.

September 5^th

The next day Diva’s family prepared a home made Chuascaria for lunch before Ge, Yagel and I went to a national park 30 minutes away to hike and to see an amazing waterfall. The Park, “Parque do Caracol,” was breathtaking especially the massive waterfall. The park had built a metal stairway of 730 Steps down to the observation area for the waterfall, the entire walk down all I could keep thinking was that these are just the type of incidents you hear about on the news if this thing falls. Although we all made it fine to the observation area, the other section of the stairway closest to the waterfall (basically under it) was broken in many places by flood damage to which proved my fears were in fact real. The refreshing part of it was that in the U.S. that type of stairway would not easily exist because if the government put a permanent structure their and someone got hurt then they were liable.

When we got back to Rosaria’s house, Diva and Rosaria were not home; their car was nowhere to be found. Diva’s brother who was driving Yagel to the airport in Porto Alegre, since he was leaving before me to return to Sao Paulo, told us that they had gotten so worried and worked up about us that they decided to get in their car to find us that we hadn’t gotten back for the park (although we got home at 6:30 when we said we would). For some obscure reason, they had thought we had fallen in the waterfall; so as we found out later they went to the police calling for a massive search party for American men that had fallen in the waterfall. The police simply laughed in their faces, and told them to call the house or Ge’s cell phone. When they called I answered the phone and told Diva that we were perfectly fine, and to hurry home, so Yagel could say goodbye before he left for the airport. When they got back Diva and Rosaria were shaking so bad out of fright that they couldn’t stay still. For some reason, they neglected to call Ge’s cellphone which he had on him the entire time and instead decided the best decision was to drive around town looking for us then go to the police station if they didn’t find us immediately.

September 6^th-8^th

After Yagel left Canela, I decided to recover from my perpetual cold that I have mustered through in Brazil and simply catch up on some sleep and reading. I finished reading “Mountains Beyond Mountains” by Tracy Kidder which is the of Paul Farmer who as the subtitle reads “the quest of Dr. Paul Farmer: a man who would cure the world.” If you haven’t read this book I highly suggest it (even one of my good friends Lansing Lee called me the day I was leaving for Brazil and demanded that I take it to Brazil. He said, if I didn’t have it he would deliver to me immediately, luckily my uncle, aunt and cousin Hans, Lori, and Sarah (who is a currently a 1^st year at UVA) had given the book to me previously). Lansing thank you for once again suggesting the book as it was marvelous, and I encourage all who are looking for a good read to pick it up. I also re-read “The Screwtape Letters” C.S. Lewis which was amazing as well. It was so refreshing to read C.S. Lewis again, and realize a fact of life that many people are tricked into forgetting about how hard and difficult life is. The world sells us this image of the easy life, but the reality of it although there are many triumphs we have to constantly deal with failure. Every moment we are in the constant need of God’s grace as it must be paramount in our lives as the world is against us but is GOD IS FOR US.

During these few days the frustration of Brazil’s inconvenient truth (that everything is so much less convenient here) grew almost too much for me to bear. The frustration with Brazil did subside, but it certainly reared its nasty head. One of the days, Rosaria and Diva took me on a drive to see another beautiful park that surrounds a massive lake which seemed to bring a calming sense over me by experiencing the majesty of God’s creation, even though the continuous jostling on Cobblestone streets in a car without any real shocks or suspension did not do wonders for my back.

Until next time Toodaloo.