9.1.2000

Hello September...

I just had a wonderful thought:

I don't have to pay rent today!
posted by The Mo of Space and Death 12:30 (her time) @

I've been spared!

Man oh man, what a plan. Okay here's the digs. I'm planning a trip to São Paulo this week-end as I'm in desperate need of fun. We (another Expat and I) were planning a trip to the beach, but it's kind of cool all of a sudden this week. We've had some rain too. So off to Embu, this artisan bohemian village to hear some music and see some sights and hang loose. My boss switched the days around, as we can't observe people who aren't working the holiday, so I get my birthday off after all... and go to Macaé Tuesday to Wednesday. Now, since I was planning on taking the van back Monday morning death early, I've just arranged to fly out of São Paulo on Monday night and stay over in Rio!

Finally I get to see the imfamous city. Hope my hotel is on the beach. I know that the company often books on the (Copa!) Copacobana, so it should be an interesting night.... I mean, if I meet a man who wears a diamond, y'all may never see me again. I'll be drinking myself half-blind once I've lost my mind and all, yo.

So I'm looking towards a good week.

Woo!
posted by The Mo of Space and Death 14:57 (her time) @

Another quote:

"Of course it is sounding, more and more, like you have cool stuff of your own to experience down there. I didn't have that impression from your website."

Thank you Mr. Creighton. I wasn't much aware of this.

Goes like this. Those of you I handed the addy of this website to, you're the people that keep me afloat. Generally you let me bitch to my heart's content or alternatively tell me to get over myself and get on with life. So here, the place I set up so that you'd all have a window into my life down her in sunny Brazil - I rant about stuff to the people who understand me best. I can tell the people that I manage to talk to down here about all the good things about Brazil - in fact it's half the answer to the most asked question - "What do you think of Brazil so far?" I can't really go on about the bank, or bitch about the birthday blues.

The fact is there's a lot that's good a bout Brazil. Mostly, they're not rampant in riotous *fun* which makes them less referential to talk about. There's the trees, which captivate my imagination. I could stare at them for hours... palms so tall they hold the sky up, Fig trees (which I've seen before in their infinite joyful glory (Thank you Josh and Laura). But not in such abundance, gnarled and twisted with great umbrellas of leaves that shelter pale Canadian skin from the sun. They're all over the place, dozens in one park just down the street from my house.

Trees with long pods of seeds, trees with spiky white blossoms that you know must be soft but look like they might hurt you to touch. Trees that looks like giant jades and trees that look like they might be a variety of Craig's nubbly trees that Nic and Tyler and I stumbled upon a court of in SanFran... but these ones are draped with a viney moss that turns the whole thing into superlong organic shag carpet trees. Bright Brazilian flowers droop down from trees that look like they should have nothing to do with such things, and huge white fragrant flowers that belong to no world I know. There's the owl (owls, actually, which I discovered today) that I call with a brain-giggle must be a burrow owl that watches me from a mound of earth in an empty field on the way to the walk at work.

God. The earth. Not brown, nor dusty but *lavishly rich* RED earth from which all things grow. Earth that stains your skin as you touch it earth. Earth that emanates such fertility that you finally understand why coffee is the way it is. There's the cities themselves which are not altogether fun... Campinas is kinda boring, São Paulo was scary as hell... but they're *facinating*. Alan's fourth year "Politics of the City" course made sense to me at school, but now that sense is crystalline, and I could see why there are people who only study the culture of architecture.

The cement and graffiti of São Paulo, the mazes of winding uneven streets, the make-ups of stores... most of the city looked deserted to me for the first while I was there. Made more scary by the fact that it looked like all the stores were shut down like some dilapidated warehouse district. It took me some time to realize that that's not it at all. I was leaving for work to early in the morning and coming home too tired at night to realize that the merchants of Brazil (not the highest classes merchants, but the standard drugstores and film depots and butchers and stuff sales) curled out later in the morning. The whole city is a colony of snails that curl out of their shells every day and curl back in protective every night. How? There are no store windows. There's no window-shopping nor often isn't any outward store signs. There are giant metal garage doors sprawled outwardly with graffiti that unfurl into camouflage at night. My warehouse district could be a thriving throughway of stores without even knowing it.

The architecture itself, which I gather is largely influenced by the Portuguese Renaissance is large and gothically ornate - especially the government buildings. Huge and scrolled and marked with milestones, you can see in the buildings the strange miasma that occurs when a country has been strung on the wash-line between aristocracy and military regime. There is no really is no counterpart in Toronto for these buildings. Old City Hall may be a much more curliqued ornate old-world building but it has a genteel-ized air to it. These buildings are impending, heavy, and authoritarian, although all this may just be my cultural bias - which I'm re-examining every single day.

The houses - rich and poor - are all built with the same building blocks, even though they look nothing alike. That rich red clay I was talking about lets you know in no uncertain terms where terra cotta comes from, and the bricks of every house are made with them. They live inside the soil of their nation. That's important, so I'll repeat it. They live inside the soil of their nation. I don't think Canadians do, at least not on the same level. Every house is built with these bricks, very few have anything like a basement foundation. The poor's houses - common poor and those unlucky enough to find themselves deep within the favelas but lucky enough to find themselves with walls at all have bare terracotta walls made of single layers of the thin brick and concrete mortar.. Often, they have no roof or less than four walls, and rarely are there glass windows. Shutters sometimes, but mostly just pieces of cloth.

Middle class (which as far as I can see is an entirely different kind of population in Brazil then as we know it in Canada) and Upper Classes smear the walls of their houses with concrete, cover up the terracotta as if the soil might stain them. Now I will say that that may be an unfair statement, but that's what it feels like from raw untranslated observation. Here in the south of Brazil there's not all that much rain, and no real "rainy season" and as a result roofs are made for the protection of sun and personal property and privacy. Even the most expensive restaurants here often leak in an extended hard rain, and no one seems to think the less of the restaurants for it.

And there are people everywhere selling stuff. Need a mint in the car? Chances are at the next light you stop at there'll be a kid coming up to your window to sell you some for 50 centavos. Bathmats, coat racks, windshield wipers and hammocks in the myriad of things sold at the great drive through that is the city. Thank god I don't drive. It's fascinating to watch as a cultural observer, but I'm sure it would drive a foreigner to frustrated fury. Volkswagen bugs everywhere, 6 lined up at a red light one after another yesterday on my way to the Pao do Açucar (Sugar Bread - the chain of often 24-hour groceries) quite by coincidence. They're as plentiful as K Cars in Canada in 1988. Eight people on my block owned either a Dodge Aries or a Plymouth Reliant (though I don't know why I bothered to say both as they were the same damnable car).

Cultural taste is a fabulous thing too... Brazilians are crazy for strawberry flavored everything, which is hysterical to me - land of exotic fruit as this is to my Canadian mentality. They're really big on Goiaba too. And man-o-man Diet Coke -- or Coke Light (pronounced Coka Litch) as it's called here -- head that I am, there's a pop here that I could almost give it over for. Guaraná - the best one made by a company called Antarctica. It's made from the seed of a Guaraná fruit and has much caffeine, but is fruity flavoured and light. I'll have to scour the Brazilian groceries in Toronto for it when I get home. Imagine -- A world where Mos don't drink Diet Coke.

I swear to you all, that I'll try to forego my Cassandraish tendencies every so often and let you know the strange and wonderful things I'm learning. If I don't seem jubilant, it's because I'm not having a lot of *fun*. I work a lot and I'm kinda lonely and language is still an issue. But I'm thinking all the time, and learning all the time, and challenging what I thought I knew about both myself and the world that I live in.

More later.
posted by The Mo of Space and Death 17:16 (her time) @

A quote from the email I just received...

"Moyra and I will be in Macaé, Wednesday, Sept. 6th . The purpose of this visit is to (snipped, as it really doesn't matter)... Also, Moyra will stay Thursday to analyse your special group and she will provide you some recommandations for repair complaints & repeats."

Weep... just... weep. So much for birthdays.

And holidays for that matter.
posted by The Mo of Space and Death 14:52 (her time) @

Mo is in:

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Weather in:

São Paulo
Campinas
Rio de Janiero
Macaé
Manaus
Guarujá

Mail me, Dammit!
Expatria Archives

What I'm reading:
Nothing. Too busy.

Never finished:

Recently finished:

Desperately seeking:

Listening to:
Gary Brown: Dain St Live

See:

Campinas
São Paulo