Cruise Control

Today’s PWOD: a galera = the crew. Clique, crew, group, circle, whatever you want to call your group of friends who you kick it with is called a galera in Portuguese.

Hey folks, sorry for the delay in between posts. Not much to report on this end. It’s been pretty “tranquilo” here in Brazil since the last entry. I’ve basically been in cruise control with classes for the past two weeks since getting back from Belo Horizonte. I did get a job on the side teaching English at a private school. By “teaching” I really mean just having conversation classes. And by “conversation classes” I mean just sitting down for an hour and talking to students. So I’m getting paid to talk and network with young professionals. Not a bad deal! Other than that, nothing really new to report. But my oh my has there been some news on the homefront. Investment banks collapsing, financial markets in haywire, the presidential race is heating up, and my Mets are giving me a heart-attack every time I check the box score! I leave the country and all hell breaks loose. I finally had enough and bought the package on MLB.com to watch Mets game live on the internet. My boys need me! So I’ve been catching the past few games and am all revved up for the last weekend of the season. Late last week I was mildly entertained by watching John and Cindy McCain on The View on Youtube. There was a headline on CNN.com about Cindy McCain speaking at some dinner and telling constituents about her appearance on The View. In an insulted, somewhat disgusted way she told the audience that hosts on The View “picked their bones clean.” So I had to see it for myself. Man, I tell ya Rosie O’Donnell and Starr Jones really gave it to them. Iran, Al-Qaeda, and North Korea? A walk in the park! Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg? The new axis of evil!! It’s an election year here too in Brazil. Most major cities are electing mayors including this small town of 18 million people called Sao Paulo.

I’ve been fighting a cold over the past few days from what I believe has been twists and turns in the weather. There’s been some freakish swings in the weather since I arrived. It alternates between 2 weeks warm and 2 weeks cold. Right now we’re in the 2 weeks of cold phase. Of course by cold I mean mid 50s. But actually, the cold here gets amplified, especially at night, because none of the houses have heat and the cement that all the buildings are made of insulates the cold in the apartment. So most of the time it’s actually colder inside the houses than outside. But as folks from the US have been saying that it’s starting to get chilly in the Northeast, that can only mean summer is right around the corner here.

This week has been “hell week” if you want to call it that. The first half of the semester ended yesterday so all of our modules had exams or final projects this week. Tomorrow I am taking off for the Pantanal – as previously described, the wetlands in western Brasil slightly larger than France. Our plan is to fly into Cuiaba and hook up with a local travel group that takes you deep into the swamp for about 4 days of activities – piranha fishing, horseback riding, hikes thru the forest including night treks and animal catching. Similar activities as the Amazon excursion I went on last year but a different landscape. That was rainforest, this is wetlands. We’re in the Pantanal for about 4 days and then going to a national park southwest of Brasilia that is famous for its hotsprings, waterfalls, and underground caves. So it should be a Planet Earth type week. I’ll try to throw up a post while I’m away next week if I can get in front of a computer. I would appreciate all thoughts and prayers for the Mets as they fight for the playoffs. Take care and Godspeed.

Beautiful Horizon and Black Gold

Today’s PWOD: Pixinchar = to bargain. I’m currently planning a trip to the Pantanal for next weekend when my mid-semester break begins. You can’t necessarily go into the middle of the swamp alone so you shop around for various guides and tour companies. They quote you high and you gotta use your savvy bargaining skills to haggle them down or pixinchar

That’s where I was this past weekend: Belo Horizonte (Beautiful Horizon) and Ouro Preto (Black Gold). Both are cities in the state of Minas Gerais north of Sao Paulo. One of my roommates, Samir, is from Belo Horizonte – third largest city in Brasil – and goes home about once a month. So I tagged along with him, met up with his crew of friends, chilled at their local spots, and saw the city in what was an unofficially official guys weekend. Samir boasted for a while that, proportional to their populations, BH is more chalk full of beautiful women than Sao Paulo. The jury is still out, but BH made a strong case. BH is named so because of the, well, “beautiful horizon” that’s stretched out from atop the small mountains overlooking the city. So essentially I have two lasting images of Belo Horizonte:

This:

And this:

Which image is more beautiful, I’ll let you decide.

It was good to get out of Sao Paulo and see another city. As are many things compared to Sao Paulo, BH operates on a much smaller scale and you can feel the difference by being in a smaller place. The city has more of an urban plan to it than Sao Paulo, less traffic, and more greenery. Friday afternoon was tourist day. We had lunch in his apartment with some friends and then Samir took me to the city’s municipal market and a couple of parks and plazas in the hills that overlook the city. Friday night we hit the clubs followed soon after by an early starting samba street fest Saturday afternoon.

Sunday was a healthy respite from city trekking and partying. I took a daytrip by myself to the small city of Ouro Preto. I love the accommodating nature of Brazilians and how generous they are in opening their homes and services. On this trip so far I’ve been helped out a ton by Gleidi and her family and Samir and his friends. But on the same note, it was great to get out on my own and get that sense of independent travel again, albeit for just a day.

A little history lesson on Ouro Preto then I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking. According to the history books (i.e. my Let’s Go budget travel book) Ouro Preto was where the Portuguese first discovered gold in Brasil, which in a large way altered the history of the country. The Portuguese carved out trails from the mountains near Ouro Preto down to the ports in the southeast where the gold was shipped off to Portugal. By striking gold, economic activity shifted away from sugar production in the northeast and gave the southeast – and cities such as Rio de Janeiro – a new role in business and commerce. Today, Ouro Preto is a really beautiful and charming colonial mining town tucked in the mountains of Minas Gerais. It has hilly, cobble-stoned streets, thin roads, and at least a dozen 400 year old churches whose names I can’t remember each with simple faded facades, but lavishly and ornately decorated insides. Reminded me a lot of Toledo, Spain and many of the town in Andalucia in southern Spain. It was like a small town Iguacu Falls. By that I mean it was a photographer’s paradise. I took a million pictures my first few hours there before realizing that they all look the same, all are beautiful, but none do a justice to the antiquity of the town so I just stopped taking photos. I took an eight hour midnight bus back to Sao Paulo Sunday night and for the second time in 3 weekends came back with bloodshot eyes and rolled into my finance class on Monday morning. It’s the double life that I live here in Brasil. Weekends of partying or travel followed by the week’s grind of classes.

OK, enough talk, here is Ouro Preto in pictures.

Enigma

Today’s PWOD: a saideira = the last round. You’re sitting at a bar chilling with your friends, engaging in conversation about everything and nothing and it’s about that time to ask for the bill and head home. The group reaches the consensus of one more round before taking off. So you nod your heads in agreement and order a saideira.

Random thoughts on a lazy Tuesday evening: It’s pretty obvious thru my interactions with Brazilians here that I am very puzzling to them. They can’t quite seem to get me. I’m an Asian looking guy from the US with a Spanish name living in Brazil who speaks decent Portuguese. The more I think about it, it kind of confuses me too. I’m sure most of you are aware by now of my “double-identity”: in some circles I go by Naki, in others Manuel. Anyone who has received an email from me in the past four years will have noticed this by my long name on the sender line, but a closing signature of Naki. As a very informal rule, I go by Naki with friends and family, and Manuel in professional circles. Of course the two circles sometimes overlap in which case there is all sorts of mixed up crazy confusion. That mixed up crazy confusion persists here in Brasil. I go by Manuel at school to match official records but Naki amongst some circles of friends.

A typical conversation with a Brazilian when I meet them (90% of the time it happens all the time):

Brazilian: “Where are you from?”
Me: “The USA”
Brazilian: What’s your name?”
Me: “Manuel.”
Brazilian: “Manuel?”
Me: “Yes, Manuel.”
Brazilian: “That’s a really Portuguese name.”
Me: “Actually it’s of Spanish origin.”
Brazilian: “No, it’s Portuguese.”
Me: “OK, it’s Portuguese....but also Spanish.”
Brazilian: “Why ‘Manuel’?”
Me: “That was my grandfather’s name.”
Brazilian: “Was he from Portugal?”
Me: “No. Sorry, let me explain. My family is from the Philippines. The Philippines was colonized by Spain, so a lot of Filipinos have Spanish sounding names.”
Brazilian: “Aaahh OK that makes sense” (saying that as he/she points to the eyes meaning they now understand why an Asian guy with slanty eyes has a Hispanic name)

As often as that conversation unfolds, their facial reactions and expressions of confusion add the most life to it. Believe it or not, I can pass for Brazilian as easily as any soccer player for the national team, to be quite honest. That’s cuz Brazil (especially the southeastern states such as Sao Paulo) has a huge immigrant population of Japanese-origin. So in a way, I blend. They simply think that I’m a Japanese-Brazilian. But, the confusion kicks in the second I open my mouth and they hear the funny-accented, non-native Portuguese coming out of it. Then, we get into the above conversation. It’s a decent ice-breaker and at the very least, guarantees that I have an initial talking point with a Brazilian stranger. It helped me out this weekend when my roomies and I went to a kick-ass samba club. Contrary to the typical raging Sao Paulo nightlife, this club opened at 4pm and closed at 10:30pm. Then from there we kicked it down a level and chilled in Vila Madalena – historically a student dominated neighborhood of Sao Paulo, but now home to a growing yuppie and hippie population. It was sort of a reverse night going from wild and crazy to mellow and relaxed. Friday night was spent at another live music bar with some friends. It was a typical weekend in Sao Paulo – live music and dancing amidst good company followed by a nice leisurely Sunday of people watching and gawking at the skills of the pick-up soccer players in Ibirapuera park. One thing I’m trying to have by the end of my trip is a huge collection of photos of the graffiti art in Sao Paulo. There’s A LOT. I see it as art rather than vandalism.I’m starting to make a lot of sense of Sao Paulo’s layout. What was once never-ending sprawl and geographically intimidating city is now coming into clearer focus. On most of the mornings when I don’t have class I like to walk around and venture to new streets to understand how the neighborhoods connect. Naturally, the city being so big, there are parts that aren’t suitable (safety and infrastructure-wise) for walking around. But the nice neighborhoods and main tourist points that once seemed only reachable by taxi are becoming easily navigable on foot indicating a better understanding of the city.

The past two weekends in Sao Paulo will be quickly followed by consecutive weekends out of town, traveling. Next weekend I am going with my roommate to his hometown of Belo Horizonte It's the capital of Minas Gerais (the state north of Sao Paulo) and the third largest city in Brasil. Minas is historically famous for being the source of a lot of natural resources that the Portuguese extracted from Brasil which was the main reason for the growth of many of its cities. Supposedly (according to my roommate) Minas has the most bars per square kilometer of any city in Brasil and the most beautiful women in the country. We’ll put both of those to the test next weekend. Sunday of next weekend the plan is to go to Ouro Preto, probably Minas Gerais’s most famous colonial mining town and currently a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The following weekend I plan on going to Londrina, the city where I lived last year, to visit some friends. And the weekend after that starts the mid-semester break from classes. My friend LeeAnn and a couple other people are planning a big excursion to the Pantanal – Brasil’s equivalent of the Everglades wetlands, about the size of France in Western Brasil. The Pantanal is featured in the BBC’s Planet Earth episode “Fresh Water” in case you’ve seen it. It’s a pretty exciting trek across the width of Brasil which I’m really relishing.

So the travel radar is blinking like crazy, but in the meantime, there’s no shortage of good times in Sao Paulo.

The Cowboy Way

Today’s PWOD: Sangue bom = good people. Literally it means “good blood” but it’s a common expression to describe real good, nice, cool people. If you meet a cool person, a hospitable family, or an awesome professor then you can classify them as sangue bom.

Thanks to everyone for the birthday shout outs. It was real thoughtful of you to remember and send along your wishes. It’s already Wednesday and I am still trying to post the recap of the past weekend before the next one creeps up. Apologies for the delay between posts. Hopefully it’ll be the longest delay between entries of the trip. In addition to the apologies, more thanks go out to all who have expressed support and a liking for the blog. It means a lot. You have lent me your shoulders to stand on as I reach for the stars. Dahahaha, it does mean a lot but I’m not trying to get that corny on ya’ll!!

OK, so this past weekend I went to a little tiny town 5 hours north of São Paulo called Barretos. Why go there you ask? Because each year it is the host city to Brazil’s largest rodeo festival. Yes, rodeo. Bulls jumping around trying to shake cowboys off their backs, double and triple lassoing competitions to round up poor innocent baby cattle, leather boots, cowboys hats, and country music (in Portuguese). Up until this past weekend the closest I’ve come to a rodeo is a toss-up between (1) a Burger King rodeo burger – really nothing more than a burger with a soggy onion ring on the patty which I lived off of for the last third of my trip in Spain (because I was running out of funds and they only cost 1 euro, roughly equivalent to one dollar at the time) and (2) a crazy party called Stomp held each year at the American Legion in DC hosted by the Idaho congressional and senatorial offices. But from what I’ve seen on TV, this festival is about as legit as you can get for any rodeo. It’s just like the ones I see in Texas or the wild west USA only everyone was speaking Portuguese. Literally, you could have picked up any rodeo in the US west and dropped it in the middle of Brazil and it would be the same thing. I guess cowboy culture is cowboy culture no matter where you are.

In addition to the today’s PWOD, there’s a little grammar lesson. In Portuguese any word that begins with an “R” and any word that has two “Rs” in a row, the R is pronounced like the letter “H” in English. So Rio de Janeiro in Portuguese is really pronounced “H”io de Janeiro. Ronaldinho the soccer player is “H”onaldinho. Car in Portuguese is carro and is pronounced ca“h”o. Etcetera, etcetera. So when I say in Portuguese that I went to a rodeo in Barretos (fui a um rodeio em Barretos), it is pronounced a “h”odeio em Ba“h”ettos. Get it? If not, nevermind.

So on Friday night we caught the midnight bus up there and arrived around 5am Saturday. My roommate Eduardo’s girlfriend lives in Barretos and we spent the weekend at her parents place. Real great, warm, friendly people (sangue bom) who typify the accommodating spirit of Brazilians. They opened their house to us and wined and dined us with delicious bbq, traditional feijoada (stewed pork and beans), and a cinammon based cachaça which was the best I have ever tasted called canelinha. Saturday afternoon we cruised around the rodeo grounds and hit up the city which comes to life for these two weeks each year with flooded street parties and festivities. I bought my very first cowboy hat and shamelessy sported it around town. Saturday night we went to the rodeo. Only come night it was less a rodeo and more of a party that didn’t end until well past sunrise. The ring was opened up to the public and became a dancefloor for live music concerts and jamming out to Brazilian country. The entire complex was a huge fairgrounds with the rodeo stadium surrounded by dozens of tents with food, live music, games, and uumm….beer. Basically it was an open air party for tens of thousands of people.

Sunday was a day of rest and recovery chilling out by the pool, feasting on more bbq and cachaça. We again caught the midnight bus back to São Paulo and I got in a little past 5 am on Monday morning leaving me just enough time to catch a quick nap and finish up some finance homework for my class later that morning. I was cutting it down to the wire but that’s what being in Brasil, traveling, and hanging with the native roommates is all about right?!?!