Back in the USA

I haven't finished the part about Chapada Diamantina and I also have to regale you with tales of my last week in Brasil, but for now you can see some of my thoughts on returning to the US.


Well, now I’m back in Santa Cruz, where it’s cold and everyone speaks English. I’m glad to be home, but at the same time I’m devastated to not be in Brasil - I loved it, and I was not at all ready to leave. I don’t like feeling so ambivalent, because I’m not used to it - I usually like something or I don’t, and when I’m home for the holidays or summer I’m usually ready to be here because I was getting tired of being in school. However, this year school was in Brasil, which is way better than San Francisco, or at least way newer and way less accessible on a regular basis. That was one of the hardest parts about leaving - I want to go back someday, but I don’t know when and going to Brasil is a lot more work (and more expensive) than going to San Francisco, so I don’t have the guarantee that I’ll be able to return when I want to. I also made a lot of new friends my last weeks there, and the friends I’d made earlier were just starting to get closer, and now that I’ve left the country and I’m bad at keeping in touch, I doubt I’ll stay in contact with many of them for long, which is really sad because I liked them. These last couple of days I’ve been trying to think of all the great things about Santa Cruz to make being out of Brasil easier, and here’s the list I’ve come up with:

Santa Cruz is way more environmentally friendly than Brasil (people don’t use 25 plastic grocery bags for their 25 bottles of water, they use two reusable cloth bags for their organic veggies and drink tap water);
Santa Cruz has New Leaf and Food Bin and other organic/natural/hippie stores, which I definitely missed in Brasil;
Santa Cruz has Mexican food and cheese that has a flavor;
Santa Cruz has the daycare kids and my mom and the rest of my family, all of whom missed me and who I didn’t realize I missed as much as I did until I got back here;
the toilet paper is softer, as are my clothes after they spend some time in the dryer with dryer sheets, and both of these things are unarguably better soft;
I never have any trouble understanding what people are saying here, and they understand me;
and when I’m in Santa Cruz I never have to go to class.

However, there are a lot of things I liked better in Belo Horizonte, for example:

the fruit, like açai, maracujá, and jabuticaba;
the music and night life;
the weather (it’s freezing here, my toes still haven’t thawed completely);
kissing people when I greeted them, even when meeting for the first time;
the price of food, clothing, and capoeira class;
the language;
and the cultural norm of friendliness and openness to new people.

I know I’ll go back to Brasil someday, but that it will realistically be at least a year and a half before I get there, and maybe even more, and that’s a long time to wait. I went to a capoeira class today, which was really different from class in Brasil, but it was still capoeira and I loved it and it was a little piece of Brasil. I miss Belo Horizonte a lot, but I think having capoeira here will help fill the void a little. I was thinking about why capoeira class is different here, and I’ve come up with a couple of big things. First of all, the class has more people here, which means less attention from the teacher, which is fine but it’s different. Also, here everyone does the same thing - in Brasil, Cris would have a couple of students practice one thing, some people just learning, and the rest of the class doing something else. Here it’s odd because there are people like me who are very new to capoeira and people who have been at it for 10 years, all learning the same stuff, most of which I think is more at their level than mine. Another big difference, which I think is really interesting from a cultural perspective, is the focus of the classes. In Brasil, the focus was learning and polishing the basic golpes and esquivas (kicks and dodges), and venturing a little into floreas, which is the general term for the fancy stuff, like flips, handstands, and moves that knock down your opponent. We also spent time learning about the history of capoeira and the last month we devoted to learning the 8 sequences that Mestre Bimba, the creator of capoeira regional, used to teach his students the basics. From what I can tell in the US, however, the focus is much more on floreas - watching my new classmates in the roda at the end of every class, they spend most of the time doing tricks and not much time at all kicking, like I’m used to. I haven’t participated in the end of class roda yet, because I only know two tricks and don’t do them that well. Another roda difference is that in Brasil, two people almost always entered the roda together, with people only occasionally cutting in, while here only the first pair enter together - after that, everyone cuts in. I don’t like this as much because I’ve never cut in before and am not sure how long to wait before trying to enter, and I also don’t love the surprise of who my second partner will be. These differences aren’t necessarily bad, just, well, different, and I’m in general very resistant to change. I’m trying to work on this, but I think it’s a pretty common thing, to be attatched to what’s familiar and wary of what’s new and untried.

A little walk...

Hi friends!

First of all, here are some photo links for those of you who are not my facebook friends:

http://usfca.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2043745&l=22500&id=7103173

and

http://usfca.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2044094&l=69430&id=7103173

and these are the Thanksgiving pictures:

http://usfca.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2044095&l=dd36e&id=7103173

Thanksgiving went really well, there was a fun group of celebrants and we made turkey hand drawings and went around and said what we were thankful for and ate a lot. Afterwards we were maybe going to go to a forró but that didn't happen because everyone was incapacitated by the traditional Thanksgiving Food Coma and no one was in the mood to get jiggy with it.

All last week we didn't have capoeira because our teacher was in Salvador for a big capoeira event, and that worked out really well because I spent a lot of time looking for Thanksgiving ingredients and cooking. However, by Saturday I was feeling rather sedentary and like I'd gone a week without working out and had had Thanksgiving besides, so I decided to go for a little walk around Lake Pampulha, which is probably 6 or 8 blocks from my house.

It's a big Belo Horizonte landmark and I hadn't been yet, so I figured I should explore it a little before I left, and seeing how as I lived so close I didn't really have a good excuse for not going. So, I put on my sneakers and set out for what I thought would be probably about an hour of walking. Well, turns out the lake is a little bigger than I thought. I walked for quite a while, and then decided to try running to make it go faster, and then got tired of running, so I walked some more, and then got bored of walking and ran some more... About 2 hours into it, I happened upon a fruit stand and bought myself half a pineapple to munch on, which made me feel better (did I mention that I left the house about 11:45, having only eaten a light yogurt for breakfast?). However, the sugar high from the pineapple wore off after not too long and I started getting really done with walking and running. The thing is, I didn't know how big around the lake was and I didn't want to turn back because I hoped that I'd already gone around more than half of it and that it would be quicker to just keep going. So on I trudged.

Every hundred meters all around the lake there is a little post that tells you how many meters you've gone. The place I started was 5.200 meters, which maybe should have given me a clue that this was kind of a large lake... but anyway, I started noticing that the reverse sides of the posts were approaching 0 (there are different numbers on each side, so that no matter which direction around the lake you are walking, the meters count up). This was sort of exciting - in only 600 meters, something was going to happen! When I reached the post that should have said 0 on the other side, it was at a giant sign that said "O," which I'm assuming is for "origin" and this post informed me that all the way around the lake is 18.300 meters, also known as just over 18 km or about 11 miles. Yeah. Had I known this before starting, I would not have tried to walk all the way around, but I guess ignorance is bliss/really sore legs. This also meant that there were only 5.200 meters left until I could leave the stinkin lake and start walking back to my house. Those last 5 km were hard, but at least I had something to look forward to. I finally got home just before 4pm. First, I took off my shoes and took a little rest in front of my fan. Then, I ate a whole bunch, and then I showered and took a nap. Now it's Monday and my legs still hurt, but at least I have seen all that Lake Pampulha has to offer, which is more than a lot of Brazilians can say!

Saturday night was my Portuguese professor Henrique's birthday party, so we all went out to a club and danced and made merry. I got home Sunday morning about 4:30, slept until noon, and then got to work on my papers.

In the approximately 3 weeks I have left in beautiful Brasil, I have three papers to write and a test to take. One of the papers is partially done, one of them is a group project and my group is really smart so that's good, but the other one I'm doing by myself and I just figured out that I'm sort of behind on the reading for that class, so I've been rushing to read and write as much and as quickly as I can. I'll get it all done, I always do, but it's just sort of stressful right now. Oh, and did I mention that two of the papers and the test are due/happening within two days of each other? I'm going to work really hard this week, so that hopefully all I'm doing the night before everything is due is proofreading. That would be nice...

Enjoy the photos, and I'll see you later!

Loooooong time no see!

Hi everybody!

so, i haven't finished writing about chapada diamantina, and i haven't even started buenos aires, but, surprise surprise, end of the semester in brazil is just as hectic as end of the semester in the us, so i've come to terms with the fact that i will not have time to write about those amazing experiences until i am back in the us, where the homework and papers and tests can't find me. until then, i figured it would be nice to drop in here every now and then to let you know what i'm up to.

first of all: happy thanksgiving everybody! none of you lucky ducks have work or school today so you can spend the whole day prepping your amazing thanksgiving feasts - i, on the other hand, started prepping my amazing thanksgiving feast on monday because there's no way one person who has class and homework can do everything in just one day. i cut up bread in tiny pieces and set them out to get stale for stuffing, which i'm going to start cooking when i finish writing this, and they are nice and hard so i'm happy about that. now i will relate the saga of the pumpkin pie.

so, as some of you may know, pumpkin pie is my favorite thanksgiving food of all time. it really makes the holiday for me and i love it with all my heart. naturally, when i was planning my brazilian thanksgiving extravaganza, a pumpkin pie was an integral part of that. i started researching recipes online in october, and found one i liked at http://www.pumpkinpatchesandmore.org/pumpkinpie.php with detailed instructions and lots of pictures. they don't have jack-o-lantern pumpkins in brazil, but they do have cooking pumpkins, and my family had one they said i could use, so the hard part was already done for me. or so i thought. turns out no one uses allspice here (or thyme or celery seeds, which i need for my stuffing). supermarket doesn't have them, my host mom doesn't have them - but without them, thanksgiving doesn't taste right. luckily, claudia (my host mom, for those of you who've forgotten) had the bright idea of checking at the mercado central, they have everything there. luckily, she was right, and i found all my spices without a problem. honestly, anything you think you could want in belo horizonte - beer, a fancy dress, a haircut, an entire dead pig, thyme, a puppy - it's all at the mercado central.

ok - pumpkin? check. spices? check. other ingredients? check. oh wait. what's evaporated milk? didn't see that on the bottom of the list... claudia swore up one side and down the other that it must be condensed milk, but i was still skeptical. in brazil, the condensed milk aisle of the supermarket resembles, in variety and size, the canned soup aisle in the us. and they don't have canned soup here. moral of the story - brazilians eat condensed milk like there's no tomorrow, so claudia's certainty that that's what the recipe called for was founded, but in the end, erroneous. i did some more internet research, and found out that evaporated milk is, just like it sounds, milk without 60% of the water, unsweetened. in the us, you can buy it in a can, but in brazil? oh no. that would be much too easy. so i kept reading online and found out that you can make your own evaporated milk, by heating it on the stovetop on really low heat so it doesn't boil and coagulate. ok, that's not so hard. or so i thought. but i'll get back to that in a minute.

wednesdays i have class until 1 or so, and then i usually have lunch with an assorted bunch of foreigners. however, yesterday i deemed it prudent to skip lunch, which usually extends into the mid-afternoon, in order to go home and make my pie, which, let me tell you, was a really good idea. i got home, ate a quick lunch, and got to work on my pumpkin pie. i prepped the pumpkin and stuck it in the microwave for 15 minutes, and then started to evaporate the milk. should you ever find yourself making a pumpkin pie in brazil and evaporating your own milk, here's a tip for you: hire an unsuspecting neighborhood child to be your milk evaporator, because it involves stirring simmering milk for hours and hours. it took me quite a while to figure out that i could not just let the milk sit there by itself - oh no, if you want it to steam you have to stir it. constantly.

my microwaved pumpkin was great, then i pureed it and that was also great, then i put in the spices and the sugar and it tasted just right, and then i stirred the milk some more. after about half an hour of stirring milk, i remembered i had class, so i did a quick cleanup, threw everything in the fridge, and hiked off to ufmg. i got home at 9:15, ate a quick dinner, and started evaporating milk again. when it was finally ready (about 10pm), i started mixing the milk into my pumpkin and spice goo. i mixed and mixed, but it started getting really soupy, so i didn't add all the milk, which i think was a good idea. i poured the pumpkin liquid into my lovely homemade crust (which i rolling pinned inside a large ziploc baggie, how smart am i?) and stuck it all in the oven.

oh yeah, and did i mention i inadvertently almost exploded the maid? yeah. oops. i didn't realize that the oven, like the stovetop, was a gas thing with a flame, so i thought i was preheating it when in fact i was just releasing gas into the oven. i asked zelia, the maid, to help me turn the oven on because i noticed it wasn't getting hot, and she opened it up and pushed the fire button. luckily, no one was hurt and we both have our eyebrows still, but a nice large fireball came shooting out of the oven at us, and now i know how it works and won't make that mistake again.

so, i left my pie slosh to cook for the hour that was suggested in the recipe, but when i went to check on it, it was pudding consistency, not pie consistency. at this point it was 11:15 and i had to go to bed, so i called my mother, who suggested turning the oven off but leaving the pie in there to hopefully evaporate some more of the liquid in the warmth overnight, and that's what i did. i went down to my room, and as i was getting changed for bed, realized i didn't have any more clean underwear. zelia washes all of our clothes except the underwear, which is each family member's responsibility, and i tend to leave mine to the last minute to wash, which is what happened this time. i didn't want to wear dirty underwear or go without, so, at 11:45 last night, i had a little laundry party. by the time everything was clean and hung up on the line to dry it was 12:40, and i decided that my class at 7:30 was not something that i really had to be at. plus, i still wouldn't have any underwear. so, i texted marlieke and asked her to get my paper for me, if the teacher gave it back, and i went to bed.

i woke up this morning about 9:30, refreshed from my night of sleep, and tentatively and with fear in my heart crept upstairs to see my pie soup. i opened up the oven, and, much to my surprise, i was greeted by a real live, firm, normal-looking, pumpkin pie! the only explanation i can think of is that my pie was visited by the thanksgiving fairy while i was sleeping, but i'm not going to overanalyze - the point is, my pie is perfect and now i have to go make the stuffing.

happy thanksgiving everyone!

Chapada photos

Here are the links, folks! I have ton more pictures that aren´t on facebook if you want to see them when I get back to the US, but this is all you get for now :)

http://usfca.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2040974&l=6a938&id=7103173

http://usfca.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2040979&l=8bc09&id=7103173

http://usfca.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2040984&l=0c31a&id=7103173

http://usfca.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2040990&l=729f5&id=7103173

i promise i´ll finish writing about all this soon, but i have a test wednesday that i should probably study for, and friday i go to buenos aires, so we´ll see...

The Happiest Place on Earth (and no, it´s not Disneyland)

Well, here I am in the internet cafe in the bus station of Feira de Santana again. Since I still have two hours until my bus to BH gets here, I figured I´d blog.

First of all, I almost missed the bus from BH to F de S last Friday because Carolina wrote me a note Friday morning saying she´d give me a ride to the bus station. Fine. I went to capoeira, packed my bags, and waited for her to show up. About 5:30, Claudia and Zé came home, and Bia came home shortly after. At 6:15, Claudia asked me what time my bus was leaving, and I told her 7. She called Carolina, who was at UFMG, and who, as it turns out, was convinced that my bus left at 8. She hurried home, grabbed a bag of clothes (she was going to a party in the center but didn´t have time to shower and change because of my bus) and we rushed out to sit in traffic for 20 minutes. When we got close to the bus station, she parked illegally kind of in an intersection and we ran the rest of the way to my bus. We had plenty of time, as it turns out - I arrived at the bus at 6:55 but we didn´t leave until 7:15 because someone on the bus appeared to be moving to Salvador or something - they had a ton of stuff and it took awhile to get it all in the underbelly of the bus.

Now, to skip forward to Saturday night in F de S after my blog post about it - after the internet cafe closed, the bus station started to get a little sketchy. Almost all of the normal-looking people got on busses, and the bus station emptied out except for me and a handful of people who looked really ill and like they hadn´t showered in a couple of years and like they were not waiting to travel, but rather hunkering down for the night. There´s a restaurant/snack bar thing sort of attached to the main waiting area, and there were a couple of people in there and two employees and TV, so I decided that looked like a safer and healthier place to wait for my bus. While I was in there, I got to talking to three men, two of them named José and the other one named João. One of the José´s was really old and looked vaguely Italian, the other one was probably in his early thirties, and João was maybe 50. João started the conversation, and when he found out I was American, he almost had a heart attack. He gushed on and on about what a great country the US was, and how he was so excited to meet me and that I was the first American he´d met, and I was so lucky to come from such a great country, and wasn´t it wonderful how we´d saved the day in both of the world wars... It was really awkward, because I don´t share his opinion and I was trying to tell him that the US wasn´t all it´s cracked up to be and that war isn´t everything and that Brazil is pretty great too, but he´d have none of it. The young José started talking about how he didn´t agree with the US involvement in Iraq, and I tried to agree with him, but João was really mad that we were criticizing his favorite country so we shut up. Also, he was kind of drowning us out with his pro-American banter. I ate some fried dough balls with fish inside, which were better than they sound, and then I said goodbye to my buddies and got on my bus. If you ever find yourself in the bus station in F de S at midnight, I would highly suggest staking out a spot in the restaurant, it felt a lot safer than the general waiting area.

My bus ride to Lençóis was uneventful, I think I slept most of the way there, and when I arrived at 5AM I was greeted by Arnaldo, one of the town´s many tour guides. He brought me to Pousada da Rita and promised to come back that afternoon to tell me all about the great places he could take me. Rita, the pousada owner, told me that there was one other person staying there and that he was having breakfast at 9, and how did that sound to me? I said it was fine, and went to sleep for a couple of hours. After waking up and showering, I went to eat breakfast and met my pousada-mate, whose name I don´t remember. What I do remember is that he was Italian and he had a fever and went back to sleep after he ate. When I finished eating Arnaldo came back and tried to get me to go on a three-day trek with him. I considered it, but then decided that sleeping in a cave and bathing in a river and pooping in a hole and carrying all the food I was going to eat for three days didn´t sound that great. He told me that he had a group of people going on a short hike to some waterfalls nearby later that afternoon, so I agreed to do that with him. I took a walk around town, had some açai, and then headed back to the pousada.

Arnaldo showed up at 2 but I wasn´t quite ready to go. I asked him who else was coming with us, and he said there were some Germans but they were moving in to their pousada, and that he´d come back for me in 20 minutes. He came back, and we started off through town. I asked him about the Germans again, and he said they were in town getting their things in order. I assumed that we´d be going by their pousada to pick them up, but pretty soon we left town and started walking on a little trail and I deduced that the Germans were not coming. If I´d known it would be just the two of us I don´t think I would have gone, but I didn´t know and I didn´t want to make a fuss, so off we went into the wild green yonder.

The hike was nice, we visited Rio do Serrano, Cachoeirinha, Salão de Areias, and Cachoeira da Primavera (in Portuguese, cachoeira is waterfall, in case you were wondering). There were other people out on the trails, but it was still a little odd, just the two of us.

When we got back, I showered again, to get the waterfall microbes off of me, and then walked around in search of dinner. I ended up eating at this Arabic/Italian/Greek restaurant. I had something that the English version of the menu called "Pizza with Cronchy Dow," which I didn´t understand, and the Portuguese version of the menu called it a pizza with a casquinha, which is, as far as I know, a little peel (like on fruit) or a cone (like with ice cream inside). So, I really had no idea what I was in for, but I chose it because it had Gorgonzola cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, and I miss cheese with flavor. Minas cheese is very mild, and I was ready for a little spice in my life. It turned out to be pieces of pita pocket that had been toasted a little and a plate of toppings, which included the promised Gorgonzola and sun-dried tomatoes as well as olives, tomato paste stuff, and lettuce. It was really delicious, and a bargain at only U$5.

After dinner I went to the bank, which thankfully took my card, and on my way back to Pousada da Rita, a table set up next to bank caught my eye. Hanging from the awning on the table were several brightly colored paper lanterns, shaped like stars, which were lit from within. It was so pretty I couldn´t resist going over to look at them closer, and I ended up buying one for myself. The guy who was selling them, Diego, was born in Brazil but grew up in Argentina, so his Portuguese was liberally peppered with Spanish, but that´s ok because Argentine Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese are pretty much the same thing. He was really nice and I talked to him for quite awhile.

Well, now it´s time to go get my things and get on the bus for another 23 hour ride of fun back to BH, but when I get a chance I´ll pick up where I left off.

first couple of days in chapada da diamantina

the internet cafe is closing in 15 minutes so i can´t write much, but i just wanted to let you all know that i got here ok and that i love it and that i´ve met some people and i´m having a really fun time.

i´m really sunburned and my legs kind of hurt from hiking for like 6 hours today, but our hike today was really fun, we went to cachoeira da fumaça and another waterfall, and yesterday i walked to a couple of waterfalls with a guide.

tomorrow i´m going on another tour and we´re going to see a whole bunch of stuff, including a cave with water where you can snorkel with a flashlight, which i´m really excited about.

the food here is good and i met some nice people on my journey today, had dinner with one couple from rio and after-dinner juice with a dutch woman who´s going to email me pictures she took today when i was swimming in a waterfall.

sorry if this is really choppy, i´m skyping my mom as i write this so i´m not concentrating fully on anything, i have some really funny stories i´ll share later when i have more time.

23 hours on a bus is a really long time - and not done yet!

hi everybody.
well, here i am in lovely feira de santana, bahia. the bus ride here, which i was told would be between 15 and 20 hours turned out to be 23. the first 17 were fine, but the last 6 hours were really tough, and now i have to wait here in the bus station until 12:50 to catch another 5-6 hour bus to lençois, where i plan to find a pousada, take a shower, and maybe nap a little. i´m really really tired, so i´m hoping to sleep like a baby who sleeps really well... like ayla? was it her who could take a productive nap in the middle of the living room? i don´t remember. anyway, i hope to sleep on the bus.

i arrived here at 5:30pm, so by the time i´d bought my bus tickets to lençois and dropped off my stuff in the guarda-volumes, it was dark. i tried taking a little walk around town, but the busy part ended pretty quickly and i stuck out like a sore thumb, being the only white person in the vicinity, so i climbed back to the bus station, where i´ve been ever since. i watched a little tv, read a little, and then decided to take advantage of the internet while it was still open (it closes at 11, so i´ll have to find something else to do for almost two hours after that). i considered getting a room and staying here for the night, but i really want to get to the park, and i´m going to have to leave there friday night because they don´t have a bus saturday morning, so i´ll be spending a good part of saturday here in lovely feira de santana, and didn´t want to stay here longer than i had to.

i downloaded skype, but the microphone here doesn´t work, so i called my grandma twice but she couldn´t hear me. then i tried texting my mother´s cell phone from skype, but she can´t respond so i don´t know if that worked or not.

i´m really tired. i think i´ll go try to find some food or something to keep me awake. for four and a half more hours. lovely.

this park better be good. i think it will be, i´m just a little sleep deprived right now.

goodnight and enjoy sleeping in your comfy beds!