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Oi! The long silence broken. I’m in Rio de Janeiro and it’s AWESOME! After Ilhabela (where we finally did have one good meal–Italian, and the proprieters who both spoke English came and hung out at our table) we went to Parati, which was incredibly cute and very touristy. The reason I’ve not posted for so many days is that the internet was down–not just at the hotel or the internet cafe, but in the ENTIRE TOWN of Parati. There’s one company that services the whole town, and they were upgrading their system or something, and then the upgrade didn’t work, so they were switching back–we were there for three days, and there was no internet the whole time. Can you imagine if one day Seattle woke up and the internet was down? There’d be a riot.

Anyway. Our hotel in Parati was in the historic city center, the most picturesque and tourist-laden part of the town. No cars are allowed in the center and the whole thing is restored colonial-era buildings, including our airy and rustic hotel. It was lovely though crowded. The first day, we drove out of town in search of a more open beach–the guidebooks were more or less useless on this front, so we just drove south on Highway 101 until we saw a sign for “praia” with an arrow, and we made a harrowing left off the road. We drove down a bumpy dirt road (paved at the steepest parts, as if they had a limited amount of concrete and wanted to make the most of it) for probably 20 minutes and were starting to wonder if we’d really gone into the middle of nowhere (no ocean in sight) when we crossed a rickety bridge and had to slow to a crawl to avoid hitting the milling crowds of tan brazilians. There was a whole populated campground down there, a little cafe where you could order a cold beer, a guy walking up and down the beach (yes, we had come to the beach at last, and it was a gorgeous one) selling ice cream, and little stands every 100 yards selling coco gelados (a cold coconut that they lop the top off of and let you drink all the cold coconut milk from the inside for a little over a US dollar). So much for the secluded beach we were hoping for, but the place is too gorgeous to mind much, and it was certainly less jammed than the beaches in Parati proper, so we settled in and got our worst Brazilian sunburns yet. Imagine a golden stretch of beach; waves big enough to make swimming interesting, not big enough to be threatening; and right up to the edge of the beach, thick, green jungle everywhere you can see–mountains rising out of the water covered with growth. There was a little island too far away to swim to, around the corner of the point. Ice-cold beer for two for the same price as the coco gelado. It was awesome.

So Parati was a success. Poor Sean is still recovering from his red tummy, though I seem to have fared a little better. We ate well and spent one whole day just lounging around the hotel by the pool, recovering from general travel exhaustion (when every interaction you have is with someone whose language you don’t speak, just venturing forth from your room can be hard work), reading, writing postcards…

We checked into our Rio hotel yesterday. What an exciting city! It’s more international than Sao Paulo, which is to say somewhat more recognizable to a tourist, but I like it. We’re staying in Copacabana in a hotel that’s about four blocks away from the beach. We walked down there today; didn’t spend much time there because we were on a mission to get new white things for New Year’s. So now I have a white Brazilian new year’s dress and Sean has these light cotten white pants that I keep trying to convince him he’ll wear more than once, with middling success. Somebody, when we get back to Seattle, tell him he looks good in white.

Today was the best food so far. We had lunch at this little stand-up bar and ordered filet mignon, cheese and pineapple sandwiches. A little worchestershire sauce, a little of this mustardy-looking stuff that’s not really mustard (but TASTY) and the flavor is so good. Tonight we’re going to a place called Porcão where they just bring you barbeque nonstop, without you even ordering–apparently they have like thirty-eight different ways to prepare beef. Sean’s been salivating all day. In fact, we have reservations in half an hour, so I better head back to the hotel–I’ll let you know how the endless barbeque in Rio is in the next post–

Feliz 2006, everybody! Brazil is hot and sexy and fun. My love to all–

Alissa

Yesterday I sat to down and wrote a lovely long blog entry about everything that had happened in the couple days since I`ve posted. Did I type it into Word and then paste it into the blog software? No. Did I at least copy it in case something went wrong when I hit the publish button? What do you think? It was very sad to see the Portuguese “we couldn’t find the page” page and realize that all the words were gone forever. Very sad. Gmail’s autosave feature has completely spoiled me. So I didn’t have the heart, yesterday, to try again, and went out to a samba club instead, which cheered me up a great deal.

But now I’ve left Sao Paulo, and it’s Christmas Eve even though it doesn’t feel like it at all, and I realized this morning as we began our drive toward Ilhabela and left the city behind that for the past four days although I thought I was in Brazil I wasn’t. This place is amazing. It’s GREEN! Greener than any place I’ve ever been! You can’t see the ground anywhere except where it’s been paved or the beach, because the vegetation is so thick everywhere. In Sao Paulo, you’d never know it.

I haven’t the courage to retype everything from the old entry about the last days in Sao Paulo, but when I get back and talk to you please ask me to tell you about the sweaty packed Samba club O Do Bodogoda and the old men playing and the college kids singing along to every word and dancing as one big mass of happy flesh and making out in corners. Also ask me to tell you about my favorite language moment in Villa Paris, the french cafe a few blocks away from Cristiane’s.

This morning we got up and had brunch with Cris and Venesius and they drove us to the car rental place (we did decide to get a car after all, as V. assured us that it would be much easier than trying to bus it).

——–I saved this entry and left for the day. Now I have resumed, and it’s Christmas. Merry Christmas, everybody!——————

Anyway. Leaving the city felt amazing. I had this notion, as we drove through the humid countryside, that the whole place was covered with an enormous mold, and we were bacteria making our way through it–it’s not as groos as it sounds, that thought. It actually made me feel more kindly towards mold. But I digress.

We made it to Ilhabela and checked in to our cozy and pretty hotel (Poussada dos Hibiscos); had a terrible dinner on the beach (on the whole, not impressed with Ilhabela cuisine so far) and explored a bit. Today, woke up around 11 and tried to go to this beach on the other side of the island that you can only get to via a dirt raod. But there are apparently no road maps at all of the island, and we drove around looking for it with this tourist map we had, but no luck–and of course, it’s Christmas, so all the adventure places and so forth are closed, and there aren’t many people around. We gave up and were about to turn around when we saw the sign for the Toca waterfall. Figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a try, so we drove up this other dirt road to a building that had “Toca” and an arrow painted on its side. We went in and paid 5 Reals each for…what? Through the building there was a dispenser leaking foul oil and half a dozen people standing around slathering themselves with it. We were given to understand that this was bug repellent and it would do us well to put some on, so we did, liberally, and walked down the path.

Coolest thing ever! We emerged onto a rock hill, and there’s a long, not-too-steep waterfall tumbling over it. Not super impressive. What was impressive was the succession of kids running at the water and SLIDING DOWN THE WATERFALL–basically, they treated it like a huge stone waterslide. It was totally insane. Some of them did it standing up and surfed all the way down, doing flips off the final rock as they cannonballed into the pool at the bottom; some of them went down on their bellies–I couldn’t stop laughing for amazement. Eventually, they convinced us to try it, and that’s what we spent the afternoon doing–jumping down a waterfall. I did go down on my belly once, and both Sean and I tried to surf down it, but neither one of us were successful. These kids were hot. We hiked upstream to the bigger waterfall, the one worth taking pictures of, and this very nice Brazilian fellow who clearly was in love with the place gave us a tour with his limited English and showed us a low rock outcropping that you could get underneath and watch the water falling all around you–it was perfect. People here are ridiculously nice and the country is ridiculously beautiful. I’m starting to feel like I’m truly on vacation–

It’s a grey day here, and after diving down the waterfall we were both a bit chilly, so no beach lounging for us today. We read books by the pool instead, had another underwhelming dinner, and I am thinking of friends and family who are far away and wishing you all marvelous Christmases. My love ‘cross the ocean! Be well!

Alissa

At 9 o’clock this morning I was stirred from my slumber to the sound of laughing, shouting, excited Brazilian voices. They were in the next room. This is Cristiane’s street theatre group, who planned a Viewpoints performance in the public market this morning. Last night, Cris had invited me to join, and I had enthusiastically agreed. This morning, though, Sean muttered to me, “Let’s sleep through it” and I felt that I had never heard a better suggestion in my life. Cris had said she would leave us a map if we were still sleeping by the time they left; I thought, surely, that I would just close my eyes for another few minutes (maybe a half-hour) and then get up and join them for the second half of their performance. Maybe an hour. They WERE planning it for three hours, after all, and I DID just weather a 30-odd hour plane journey the day before; another 90 minutes of sleep wouldn’t kill me…

I woke up again when I heard the same chattering voices burst through the door again. They must have forgotten something. Surely I didn’t sleep through their entire guerilla charade. I poked my uncombed head out the door, in my pajamas, to be greeted by the friendly stares of ten or so brazilian strangers. Groggy from sleep, I located Cristiane. “Did I sleep through the whole thing?” I mumbled with diction that, were I not a native English speaker, I probably couldn’t have understood myself. She laughed at me and said yes, and I said how did it go, and she said that it definitely had some good moments but on the whole needed some work, and I suddenly realized that she and I were having a conversation in English and I looked rather un-put-together and nine people who probably couldn’t understand a word we said were patiently and quietly spectating. I said something about making myself presentable and closed the door and promptly went back to bed next to Sean and fell asleep again. I woke up after they had all gone, at something criminal like 12:30 in the afternoon (but I defend myself! It was something equally criminal like 4:30 am in me own time!) and Cristiane ran off to have lunch with a friend and Sean and I dressed and went charging out for food.

We found a burger place and this time it was much easier to get the waitstaff to understand what we were ordering because they had thoughtfully provided us with a menu. Of course, the menu was in portuguese and it was uncertain exactly what we were ordering to ourselves, but “hamburguer” was pretty easy to decipher and I picked one of the burgers on the list and pointed at it. It turned out to have lots of cheese on it, which is what I was hoping for. Sean ordered a “Limonata Suiçe” with both of us thought must mean “sweetened lemonade” but turned out to mean “natural lemon juice”. Lemon juice and water and nothing else. Good and fresh, but a little hard on the stomach.

We raced back to the apartment after lunch because we were a few minutes late for our rendevous with Cris and her lovely new boyfriend, Venesius. Venesius has a car and they took us on a mini driving tour of Sao Paulo, which was fun because he made a wrong turn right off and we saw things they wouldn’t have thought to show us (we passed this amazing graveyard full of mausoleums that looked like mansions in their own right–I swear to you, a miniature little city for the very wealthy dead.) Venesius is an energetic man with a permanent grin and a shock of greying hair and strong opinions about everything. He’s a film director, and has the air of a man who is very satisfied with his lot in life. Totally charming, not lacking in that mischevious glint in the eye that keeps a good man from being boring. He took us to two museums, one of which had an exhibition of the work of an Argentine painter who did stuff in the 20’s that looks like it came out of the sixties. I’m too uneducated about art to describe it better, but it was all a little mythological (there was even his own set of made-up tarot cards; I looked for a reproduction of them in the gift shop for you, mom, but it didn’t exist, which is too bad. You would have liked them; one of the major arcana cards had Ganesh on them, and others were astrological signs) and then there was a whole series that looked as if they were scenes from a play, cubey things with blocky human characters and very stylized light coming down over all the scenes; stuff that’s fun to look at for a while. The second museum (which admission we got free after paying the R$5 admission charge at the first museum, about two bucks) was full of paintings by famous artists like Chagall etc.etc. but we were mostly worn out by looking at paintings by then and we went and had a beer and a quiche in the museum cafe. Both buildings were lovely; the first was old brick (once a torture hall/dungeoun, I’m told, before the modern touches were added–once you know about the suffering, a place can start to seem creepy) and the other was a brand new building with lovely high ceilings and slender columns going all the way up, and shiny wood floors and obsequious display cases.

Oi, there’s so much more to tell, and this entry’s already a novel. Sean’s in bed and I long to join him. But quickly: after the hotel bar Venesius insisted that we go to the bar near Cris’s (the one that I had embarrassed myself in yesterday trying to order a beer) and drink Caphorieñas (totally misspelled, like all the portuguese words in this blog are destined to be) and so we obliged. This is a Brazilian drink that’s made out of their sugar-cane liquor; they mix it with limes and sugar and serve it to you in a tall cold glass and it is very strong and it makes you feel silly right away. But the highlight of that event was that Venesius got a call while we were there and came back to the table very excited; it seems that he had won a major grant for the documentary he was planning! So we were all in a celebratory mood.

Later Cris & I & Sean went to dinner at Cris’s friend Mari’s house, another amazing person who has just returned two days ago from six months in Sri Lanka, a photographer. She cooked us this extraordinary vegetarian dinner that I’m too impatient to describe. We were planning on going out and listening to music afterward, but we all found ourselves so tired that we headed home instead. Our cab driver had the worrisome habit of cruising down the exact middle of a two-way street, but fortunately the ride was short, and though I was exhausted then I’m wide awake now, though it’s nearly 3:30 in the morning here. But since I would like to rise before noon tomorrow, I’m ending this madness now.

Love from Sao Paulo!
-Alissa

Sao Paulo is a trickier city than, say, Rome, to get about in without knowing the language. Between me & Sean, we have English, my French, and Sean’s Spanish (which latter is the most help here, more for making ourselves understood than for understanding). At any rate, we arrived at the Sao Paulo airport woefully unprepared to say anything sensible like “I don’t speak Portuguese” or “Do you speak English?” I must have spent too much time in my phrasebook studying the “Social–drugs” section:

“I don’t take drugs.
I take …occasionally.
Do you want to have a smoke?
Do you have a light?
I’m high.”

Which is a section that never ceases to make me giggle in its dry, academic way. But this is doubtless why we spent a long time in a line that turned out to go to GATE 2, not baggage claim 2. The voice on the end of the line explaining to me why my phone card wasn’t working was infurioratingly indecipherable (it turned out that all I needed to do was wait for the click before I started dialing). The taxi stand ladies spoke English, but our driver didn’t, which is why we had no idea we were in for a 2-hour cab ride to Cristiane’s when we clambered in (I’d have gone pee first…!). Nevertheless, so far it seems that the Brazilians in Sao Paulo are more than patient enough and willing to wend their way through my shy pantomime until they figure out how they can help me, for which I am eternally grateful.

So after a cab ride through some poverty-stricken cinderblock shanty towns and some nicer neighborhoods (distinguished by the fact that the graffiti was only on the abandoned buildings, instead of all of them) and some rather corporate-america looking strip malls and then a kind of cool, crazy, hilly district full of sidewalk bars packed with happy-looking Brazilians drinking beer, we found Cristiane’s apartment building and rode the elevator to the ninth floor, where we discovered that Cristiane has possibly the best view in Sao Paulo. Apparently she scored it through a clown connection. Out Cristiane’s window is a panarama from the skyscrapers to the parks to the shantytowns of Sao Paulo, and drifting up to her window are sounds of traffic, cheering at the football game, fireworks, and loud music emanating from the clown theatre next door. It’s awesome. She took us to lunch at a vegetarian buffet and then left us to our own devices to wander the neighborhood. We went into a trendy-looking clothing store (I didn’t bring any shorts! Silly me) and hit language barriers again, as all the very nice clerks said mysterious things to us as we entered. We managed via shrugs and smiles and so forth to get them to understand that Portuguese is Greek to us, and they bawled for someone named Regina to come down the spiral staircase and help us. This was all very embarrassing as we really just wanted to browse, but Regina turned out to be an awesome Brazilian woman who works on some of the one-of-a-kind hip shorts the store sold, and she stocked my dressing room with things she considered and pulled from the rack without consulting me more than giving some discerning glances at my waistline to make sure she was getting the right size. If I ever experessed interest in an article, suddenly the same item in twenty different colors would materialize in my dressing room. She chatted with Sean about Brazil while I tried on nearly the whole store, and I did emerge with a new pair of shorts (NOT one of the R$350 custom pairs) and a shirt that makes me feel very tomboy-brazilian. In general, I recommend against shopping while sleep-deprived; it tends to remove any inhibitions about pulling out the wallet…

It was getting too hot to walk around up and down hills on the sidewalk, so we went to a bar that Cris had shown us on our walk earlier that’s near her building. There were no servers in sight, so I braved the walk to the counter, where people seemed to be cooking and paying no attention to me. Regina had taught me one phrase: “Nao falo portoguese.” I don’t understand Portuguese. So I said this to the cook, who grunted and shrugged as if to express his sympathy for my ignorance, but I still hadn’t gotten any closer to getting a cold Brasilian beer. “Beer!” I said to him. He said something in Portuguese that–surprise!–escaped my comprehension. “Nao falo Portuguese. Beer!” I tried again. I made a drinking motion. One of the other employees of the establishment came over helpfully and said something else indecipherable. “Parlez-vous Francais?” I asked hopefully, but it was no go with either of them. It’s just as well, because I don’t know the word for beer in French either. Sean, who had designated me chief orderer, was sitting at our table chuckling, so there was no hope of taking advantage of his Spanish.

By this time, there were about six servers and cooks of the place standing around me, laughingly trying to figure out what it was I wanted. Finally one of them got an idea and went over to some of the patrons in the bar–they were speaking English among each other, and they also spoke portuguese, so one of them came over and deciphered my request. “Çervesa!” he cried to the milling crowd of Brazilian servers, and they roared with amusement and brought a grande to my table with Sean. I was so happy to have ordered it that it tasted as good as if I had brewed it myself.

Afterwards, it was back to Cris’s. She was out at work, and Sean and I lay down on the bed in exhaustion. I just meant to close my eyes for a minute…now it’s nighttime and raining. Cool humid air is drifting in through the amazing open window, the clown show is over. For a while, there was the sound of many people cheering and a few fireworks went off–who knows why? A few windows in view are hung with blinking Christmas lights. Sean is finishing reading the novel he started in the airport. We ate some of Cris’s leftovers for dinner and I am happy and looking forward to tomorrow. Cris is taking us out to a live performance her street group is doing in the open market, and then to downtown to see some museums, and then in the evening to some live samba music. Life is good and I’m in Brazil at last!

Now back to bed. Be well, all!

Have you ever been riding in the car with the radio on but not turned up too loud, and you hear a funny sound, like a tuneful electric buzz or a broken hum coming through the speakers underneath the music, and then in the next moment your cell phone rings? I’ve noticed that a lot. And just now, as I finally started to drift off into blessed airplane-sleep, I had a fantasy for a moment that I could faintly hear that sound without the aid of the radio’s amplification. That somehow we were flying through streams of data being sent up to satellites and I was picking it up with my suddenly radar-sensitive ears.

I don~t know what I actually heard. I’m sure there are far more signals bouncing around on the ground than 10,000 meters in the air. But it did wake me back up. Damn.

Home already seems like a place that I visited, once, maybe years ago.

This trip is going to be fun if it isn’t horrible. Sean declared my new Portuguese phrasebook depressing after he opened it at random to the “Emergency” section and saw the following text:

“Help! I’ve been…
…robbed
…attacked
…kidnapped
…raped

Please call the police!

Stop, thief! (because, surely, the thing you’ll do first when someone is running away with your purse is reach for your trusty phrasebook…)

I’m ill.

Please call a doctor.

Call an ambulance!

I’m lost…”

…and so on. But it’s all right. Earlier in the flight, I accidentally dropped my phrasebook between my seat and the wall of the plane, and as the people behind me speak no English and have no idea what I’m asking them about, there it shall remain until at least the end of the flight. And so peace of mind has been restored. I’mall the way through tired and into wired…I’ll sleep long and deep on that first Brazilian night.

I just peeked out the window–pulled up the shade just a crack–and I could see the dark outline of the plane’s wing against the fog, which must mean it’s starting to get light out. We’re flying into morning. I’ve been tossing & turning for the last few hours. All around me are deep, even breaths and darkness, but I can’t quiet my brain. I envy those who’ve mastered the trick of sleeping sitting up. I alternate between hot & sweaty under the airplane blanket and frigid wherever it doesn’t cover me. I can just barely hear the noise from somebody’s airplane headphones turned up loud in the row in front of me–the volume has to be full blast to compensate for the roar of the jet and the crappy headphone quality. My right butt-cheek is asleep and I’m going to be a wreck my first day in Sao Paulo.
We left Sunday night, and we’ll arrive Tuesday morning. It’s true that we’re losing eight hours by traveling east, but that’s still a pretty gnarly night and day and night again of traveling, even with the catnaps. Adam, now would be a good time for me to subscribe to your crazy sleep experiment–

On the first flight, which we boarded at 11:15 pm in Seattle, there were two wired and delirious kids in the row behind us, clearly relishing the rare opportunity to be awake so far past their bedtime. The older one had ridden a plane before, and so graciously allowed her younger brother the window seat. On takeoff, she knowingly remarked, “In a minute you’re going to see lots of tiny lights,” and so my night-time view of Seattle from above was accompanied by the delighted chanting of the entranced four-year-old by the window: “Tiny lights, tiny lights, tiny lights!” he squealed. As the reading lights above flickered just before we reached altitude, his sister remarked in a jaded voice, “Oh, I hate it when airplanes do that.” We were then treated to a mercifully brief rendition of a Christmas pop song that was clearly dear to the hearts of both children, but equally clearly not to that of their mother. The poor fellow next to me, who had the luck to score the window seat and the misfortune to be seated directly in front of the blissful 4-year-old, kept jerking alarmingly. I thought he must be having oddly intense sleep-convulsions until I heard the girl behind me explaining to her brother that it’s not nice to kick the seat in front of you.
We’ve just embarked on the final leg of our four- (!)flight trip. That’s one more than they told me about when I bought the tickets, and Sean has gone from mild annoyance at the prospect of two layovers to helplessly amused at the wringer of three. Why, oh, why, was it necessary to send us, in order, to Chicago, Newark, AND Dulles before Sao Paulo? I saw a direct flight from O’Hare to Sao Paulo while we were there. I also saw an arrival from Seattle in Dulles, which landed a neat and pleasant hour beofre boarding began for the flight we’re on now.
But I try not to think of such things. It only makes me more convinced that airport employees get their thrills by watching bewildered and hopeless passengers stumble bleary-eyed from service counter to service counter, trying uselessly to shorten the torture, oblivious to the snickers of bored and sadistic men and women in uniform.
There’s a lovely people-mover in the Chcago airport, though. If I had been a very little younger I would have wanted to step off and ride back through the tunnel that sports oddly soothing rainbow neon tubes twisting over the walkway, lighting up sequentially, and rain-forest music. It’ not like we didn’t have the time to.
That tunnel reminded me of a similar tunnel that I saw in the Frankfurt airport, traveling with my parents when I was sixteen. That tunnel was nothing short of magic. We were making a connection there either very late or very early, and the place was more or less empty. We stepped together into the passage between concourses, and boarded the people-mover in a tunnel that we couldn’t see the end of. Astonishingly for an airport of that size, there was not another soul in sight, and, exhausted by long travel, we rode the conveyer belt in silence.
Just at the point when you could no longer see the entrance to the tunnel when you looked back over your shoulder, the white walls began, very gradually and subtly, to turn colors that changed and shifted as you watched. An eerie, sustained tone that perhaps we’d been subconsciously hearing for a long time was perceptible finally, accompanied by disembodied birdsong. It gave me a funny feeling in my stomach then–I felt as if I was being carried into some frightening but exciting unknown, a place where the rules were different and from which it was possible that I might never return. I was terribly disappointed when the mover deposited us into rows of familiarly uncomfortable-looking chairs. Pretty much every airport since then has been a letdown. But–if you must kill a few hours in such an in-between sort of place as an airport, O’Hare and Frankfurt are pretty good choices.

Has anyone else been re-reading the Chronicles of Narnia since the movie came out? Last week I revisited The Magician’s Nephew, and it strikes me that an airport is very much like the Wood Between the Worlds.

After more hours of traveling than anyone should ever have to endure at one stretch, we finally arrived at our friend Cristiane’s house this morning, went out for lunch, shopping, marveled at the corner of the massive city that is Sao Paulo, stopped for a cold beer in the hot sun, stumbled back to Cris’s apartment and crashed into her bed while she went to work. After four hours of nap I’m ready to face the computer, if not the crazy streets of Sao Paulo again.

I did some longhand journaling on the plane, which I transcribe in the following entries for your reading pleasure. Blogging is fun! Thanks, everybody, for your addresses!

Hello! I’ve just finished packing and showering and taking out the trash and writing down phone numbers and doing all the things that you need to do before you leave the house for three and a half weeks. I intend to update this blog whenever I find myself with internet access on the road in Brazil. We’ll see…this may be the only post on the site until I return, or I may get a chance to jot something down daily.

Anyone who emails me their snail-dress gets a postcard. That’s the rule. Happy holidays, everybody!