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.