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