On Saturday morning I packed the last of my crap into my gigantic pack and headed to the Frontier to have one last burrito before leaving. Then my folks and I headed to the Albuquerque Sunport where I flew first to Dallas. I was seated right in the middle of approximately twenty boy scouts from North Carolina who had been at the Philmont Boy Scout camp in New Mexico. They were fully uniformed, heavily accented, and listening to Luke Bryan. One of them was wearing camo Crocs. It was a blessedly short flight.
I met my godparents in the Dallas airport before they boarded their flight to Rio de Janeiro, then it was nine hours to Sao Paolo, made easier by an incredibly friendly seat neighbor, surprisingly good airplane food, and free movies. I landed in Sao Paolo at 8 AM local time, went through customs within minutes, grabbed my embarrassingly large backpack, and exited the terminal to find Mario (Kai’s mother’s uncle) waiting for me with a sign that said “NORA.”
The drive from the airport to Mario’s apartment in Sao Paolo wasn’t very long. He remarked that since it was a Sunday morning, the traffic that usually plagues Sao Paolo’s highways was luckily absent. It seemed like everywhere I looked was either construction or graffitied buildings. Mario is in his sixties, a retired man who used to work in advertising. His English is excellent, and in conversation he told me a witty French phrase that I, of course, can’t remember now. Mario told me that his apartment isn’t in a very good neighborhood, but it didn’t look that bad to me. His apartment was small but nice. We ate some papaya and honey and milk for breakfast and I ate the chocolate croissant that my mom had gotten me at the Albuquerque Farmer’s Market the morning prior. Then the fact that I hadn’t been able to sleep very much through the overnight flight set in and I crashed hard.
Four hours later, Mario woke me up to go over to his son Mauricio’s house and have dinner. Mauricio, his wife Silvia, and their two sons, Martin and Fernando, live in a nicer neighborhood of Sao Paolo, in a house, not an apartment building. The boys are young, in the six to eight range, and full of energy. They don’t speak much English, but with my Spanish helping me to understand some Portuguese, we can sort of communicate. Mauricio speaks English, but not as well as his father. I think Silvia speaks some English too, but she speaks to me in almost exclusively Portuguese, which I appreciate, even though I mostly blindly nod along to it. He is a lawyer and she is a dentist. We went out to dinner at a German restaurant called Bier & Bier, which was weird for my first day in Brazil, but I was starving so I wasn’t complaining. Back at the we watched Costa Rica beat Greece in penalties, and then Mario went home and the rest of us walked over to the padaria, which means bakery in Portuguese. However, in Brazil, the padaria is much more than just a bakery. They have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and it’s basically a mini supermarket. At 8pm it was packed with people both dining and buying food. We bought bread and meat and cheese and a strawberry tart. I noticed that Lucky Strikes were available for purchase, and in packaging that looked straight out of the ’50s. Back at the house we ate mini meat and cheese sandwiches and some strawberry tart. I gathered that this post-dinner snack was a common thing, which explained what had seemed to be a rather light dinner that we’d had earlier. We watched some different Brazilian TV channels before turning in. Mauricio and Silvia are wonderful hosts.
My Portuguese is practically nonexistent. I can say thank you (obrigada, very important) and goodbye and that everything is good and that I don’t speak Portuguese (the essentials, I guess). I know a bunch of other random words (man, woman, boy, girl, congratulations, newspaper, bread, strawberry) but they’re not of much use. I can understand a lot of Portuguese when it’s written down. Signs and subtitles and such aren’t bad, give or take some words, because of my Spanish abilities, but hearing it spoken is a whole different thing. Sometimes I pick up a lot, but most of the time I pick up just a few words or nothing at all. Speaking it is further complicated by my Spanish, because some words are practically identical, just with an “i” added to the Portuguese word (that happens a lot), but others have no relation whatsoever.
From the very little of it that I have seen so far, Sao Paolo reminds me of a much bigger, grittier version of San Francisco. Like how San Francisco might be represented in a pessimistic, post-economic downturn, futuristic sci-fi thriller. It’s very hilly and full of haphazard drivers avoiding pedestrians. It’s full of many tall concrete apartment buildings, but then there are also areas like the one that Mauricio’s house is in, which is nicer and full of houses. The houses remind me of San Francisco houses too. Not the classic postcard painted ladies, but those of the rougher, real-people neighborhoods. They all have garages at their base and the house’s first floor is above the garage, and they all have big gates or fences in front of them, because, I suppose, it is Sao Paolo after all.
I have no clue what I might do tomorrow. Paula and Sofia arrive on Tuesday, and soon after the three of us will head out to the chácara (pronounced shah-karah, meaning farm or country house) in Aracoiaba da Serra, a few hours outside of Sao Paolo.
Keep it Crunchy 