Feet In Water

Today came early. Sergio works for the tourism board of this little town and he is putting together hikes. Pictures from a previous walk were posted on Facebook and today he stepped it up a notch. The first hike was around 10k, half on dirt and half on street. This time it was almost entirely dirt, and 11k one way with a bus return. The turnout was four times more than the previous. I woke and ate in that good fresh early morning before the heat. The day-beginning gray is so nice here, but I can’t exactly say why. It’s nice everywhere, really. But here I just really like it.

People massed at a gym and a few shirts went out, people mingled and munched bread. I found those that I knew and talked to a few others. Then we were off in a somewhat formation to the red-brown road lined with sugar cane to take us to the lake. Support cars followed with water and bananas and people set their own pace. I started with a group, but soon got ambitious and had to feed my urge to pass. The sun was in true form, hot as a stove and not much wind, but since it was before noon, it was manageable.

People arrived as their paces allowed and in high spirits. The music went on. The cooks started working on enough pasta for the group of more than 200 hungry folks. I ventured out to the dock, then found some shade. A couple of girls did the classic foreigner in a foreign land experience. I was talking with a fellow teacher and friend Matheos and the girls just hovered in front of us. I said, “Oh, you probably aren’t used to this, but kids think its totally acceptable to just stand around in your space when you are foreign. Their curiosity over-rides all. They won’t say anything, it’s just entertaining.” He said that no, he had not experienced it before, and then laughed pretty hysterically that we could talk about them and they would not understand anything.

The river moved slow, more like a softly-currented lake, and all was calm. A few birds flew across the way by the cows and a couple snags stuck up from the green water. I took off my shoes and lied down under the shade in some soft grass and stared up at the high circling vultures in the blue sky between the leaves of a palm. It was calmly warm, I believe I’ve adjusted some to it. And it was just so damn sweet, with the bit of adrenaline from a good long walk, the leg tingle, and the tunes, the lunch preparations, the chatter, the birds. It all promoted a feeling of richness and well being.

We ate two kinds of pasta, red and white sauce, some salad and some rice. Carb heavy to be sure, but of course hunger is the greatest cook and their were no complaints. After eating I went back out onto the dock since most people were eating it was mostly clear. Just a few kids fishing. I pulled my shoes off and places my feet in the cool water. They reached just barely into the water, but enough. My arms went over the railing and I talked with an older lady who arrived about the spot. We talked about our preferences for quiet and things natural. Slow moving water pretty much enforced its calmness on us, and we just loitered lazily watching nothing but nature going about its business. It was great.

I went back, had some sweetened cold candied pumpkin and then after some chatter investigated the bus situation back to town. It would be about an hour before actually getting on one. In the meantime, I went over to the neighbors and looked at pictures of the giant snake they played with and their camping trip up river. They shared some homemade salami and make conversation. Then we waited in the grass for the driver to eat his lunch. The drive home was smooth and the walk from where the bus dropped was also good. The whole town is quiet for May Day, and the concrete is scorching. There was no wind and hardly any traffic. People were off the streets and it was a borderline kind of eery that fellow horror/zombie movie fans feel a small twinge about. So far nothing apocalyptic happened.

Brazil has been good to me so far and today it was especially good. The people and the scenery, but especially the river. The sugar cane and the sparse trees kept the air fresh when the wind wasn’t pulling it’s weight. A day worth remembering.

Pascoa

Easter came with a calm morning and an invitation out to a farm. Cooking started quick on the meat. I toured the trees: peach, mango, maracuja, tamarind, jabuticaba, persimmon, etc. I petted the nice dogs. I watched the neighbor tickle a large blue macaw, it laid on its back and spread its wings and kicked and grabbed the neighbor’s hand with its feet while giggling. Saw the peacocks and the chickens and the geese. We ate the fresh cooked steak with tomato salad, rice, and mandioca. After, some folks swam in the pool. The Lady of the farm showed me her paintings, which I assure you were not the work of a slouch. We took a drive through the sugar cane and saw some eucalyptus. A crowd of kids and adults piled in the back of the truck, tailgate down. On the way back we stopped at the pond to catch some fish. The friendly macaw followed along to watch. I caught nothing. A piranha has been eating the farm's fish’s tails off. One guy caught one of the piranhas. The sunset was pink above the sugar cane, some low clouds darkened to grey in front of the higher rose colored ones. We loaded the small boat onto the truck and returned to the farm in darkness to eat the leftovers. Little chit chat and then the drive home. All things green. The noise of animals. I tried for the first time a mango with thorns in it. Tasty. Great food. Great people. Happy Easter.

A Stroll In Pictures

Noise

People expect South America, really all Latin countries to involve more noise. It's a right assumption in my experience. Even the middle of nowhere has louder birds and bugs, let alone the hustle of motorcycles and cars and trucks and people and music and cars with PA's that drive slowly all over town advertising, or god forbid living within hearing distance of a club or popular bar or place with televisions during an especially pride inducing soccer match.

I tend to vacillate between an appreciation of the cultural differences and a solid annoyance at the disruption. Some days it fills my ears happily, all this noise of life. Other times I put on my headphones and think about the nothing that one hears in the woods of the Olympic mountains. In any case, along with the birds here, there are also dogs. A pack right next door and a pack across the street. One might assume they live to antagonize one another. Or that they are engaged in a futile game of Red Rover. Futile because they live only behind gates. Gates easy enough to see through and be seen through but impossible to exit through. When the next door neighbor dogs bark, no one ever ever ever yells to them to be quiet, no matter the hour. The tiniest sound and they bark for roughly 5-10 minutes. Not to be left out, this usually involves the across-the-street dogs to chime in. Well so I sometimes scratch my head and wonder where the humans are in all this mess. Where are the irate and sleepy neighbors through these debacles? Are they desensitized to it all? Or have they lived with the futility all this time and just don't think about it. That sort of thinking leads me to feel all out of place, a foreigner in a land where people's ears and patience are superior to mine. Then something great happened.

It's 'round eight last night and the dogs are going for it like usual. Then I hear a loud boom which nearly knocked the book right out of my hand. It came with quite a flash too, so I run to the window and see the across-the-street neighbor standing in front of his house lighting M80s and side-arming them under the gate of the next-door-neighbor's house where the dogs are. The second and third little bombs were right on target, sliding under the gate before going off. His daughter was next to him, she might as well have been jumping and clapping since she seemed so happy to watch. After the blasts, the street was silent. The shirtless across-the-street neighbor went back into his house and all in all I felt a little less out of place.

Calculations

It rained last night on the drive back to my town. It was dark and there was silent lightning in the distant North East. The day ended at the school with a small hush of the fans and clang of the gate. A group of the final students waited out on the sidewalk for a ride, or for maybe nothing at all. They are small town kids with the aimless manner of all small town teens. The merits of the local pizza place and the endless nothing else to do were the most popular topics of discussion. One girl told me she only lives in the present. I told her this sounded like the best way to avoid going crazy in a small town and not so much a philosophy. She said maybe.

The roads were pot-holed but straight. The red clay tinted trucks moved slowly and owned the whole lane. Waves of dust flapped across the headlights in the cross winds and the diesel of the trucks burned loudly. Daniela, the owner of the school, drove, and Eidmar, the postman who learns last in the day after doing his route, sat red eyed in the back waiting for Daniela to switch to Portuguese. She had a lot to say: the troubles of finding a new secretary, the students who do not keep studying, the man coming to visit from San Paulo with no one new he can train and of course the stubborn parents. I was listening half way; she was in a monologue anyhow. I was thinking about money. I don’t really know what I will earn, but it surely will not be much. There seems to be more demand for my time than I can supply, which is no bad problem. But even so, while it’s enough here, it’s not enough for much else. Earlier, Daniela was asking me why I will return to the United States. She made her case about the lifestyle, the teaching, the people, and the food. I told her it’s true, that I could, it’s possible to just settle in and reap the easy rewards. But I told her I knew I would not. So as she talked, I was thinking about money.

Thus far I am much more at ease. There is some levity to these little towns that might feel grating in the wrong perspective, or grow boring, but for me I hit it just right. It’s the right tempo for me now, and I can feel at peace. Compared with the ulcerous feeling I maintained in Korea, or the treadmill of America, a person feels fine just surviving the heat and lingering in a conversation and dripping some fruit juice down one’s chin. But, and this is what I was thinking about while staring out into the fields, how do you calculate that? I mean, clearly I took a hit in pay to come here, and one might take the difference and measure that against the costs to arrive, look at the overall discrepancy and then use that as some means to ground the value of living here. But the calculation just feels too slippery. So, how can you really account for the value of a way of life? I knew the gist of my lifestyle here already, but if one really had to make a more blind decision about the value of living a certain way, a better way, and measure it against the difference in dollars, how can one possibly attack that with a sort of logic? At what cost is it worth to live how we want to live? Not just to say in one’s dreams or by a campfire, how it all should be, but actually to weigh and measure the abstract differences in a practical way. If you frame the discussion just right it starts to answer itself. In the right light it seems like nothing could be more important, once we land on what we want. Outside of that clarity though, which is when most of the small decisions that add up to a lifestyle are made, there are lots of reasons to digress. If you are lucky enough to choose, what do you put in that deciding column: lightness in the shoulders, patience, a settled stomach? Is that really logical? Still, I think it’s not incompatible with a logical decision, just that I don’t know how to measure it. But, I guess it’s impossible not to think about--when it’s late and she is still talking while the clouds flash quietly--exactly how long I could keep using this road. 

BBQ

Saturday is for BBQ here in Brasil. Michele came to pick me up and off we went to the little farm outside of town where we got to chill out and listen to some tunes and play with kittens and eat steak. The fields around the house are filled with sugar cane. The animals eat the fruit that falls from the trees. In all it's just a little slice of paradise. The steak is marinated in giant chunks of salt and then cooked over the coals and sliced. Damn fine meat, I must say. Another highlight was the jar of pickled peppers! I was lucky enough to get to take the jar home as a gift, along with some fresh lettuce from the garden. Next time I reckon I will try and make off with some avocados from the MASSIVE tree. A generous host, fine chatter, and tasty food. That along with 11 kittens to watch for entertainment made for a great Saturday. Thanks to all!

Facebook Album:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.810908815594.1073741825.52301808&type=1&l=df058bc433

How Does It Feel

Yesterday I had a morning meeting at the school, Wizard, which is here in Novo Horizonte. The meeting happily consisted of about an hour of chit chat followed by about ten minutes of discussion of teaching. They will use me as a pronunciation guru and also to instruct about writing composition and speeches. Cristina told me that in Brasil there is pretty much zero instruction, even in Portuguese, about how to write an essay (i.e. thesis, body, conclusion, etc). I told her that I could happily begin to teach these things, and said that I should just start my own academy for Composition here in Brasil, she agreed and added that a woman was opening one in the town very soon. I told her maybe I could find a way to make it a graduate school research project and get a ticket back to Brasil later. In hindsight, I reckon I oughta find out where this woman’s academy is and pay her a visit.

Sonia’s daughter Jacqueline and her boys Ricardo and Igor picked me up in the afternoon to give me some pointers on grocery shopping here in Brasil. I was mostly in need of learning how to buy some of the produce we don’t get in the US and aid in navigating the meat department. Included here in the photos are: the sweet avocado they have here, a persimmon, a fig, a mango, some fresh cheese (queijofreco) and also one of my favorites, what are called paçocas (puh-sock-uhs). Paçocas are peanut candy! Since the peanut butter here is 9 parts sugar to 1 part peanuts, this is the closest thing. Good peanut candy is totally endemic to the culture, and good peanut butter is totally absent.

For late dinner, there was a Churrasco (shoe-hoss-ko). There was fine tasty meat and sausage and lots of lively Portuguese. In Brasil when they BBQ, they cook over coals and put the meat on spits and on different levels of racks. As the meat on the outside gets cooked, they slice it off into small pieces that people just pick at with their hands. Meat and beer and cigarettes, nothing more. At one point in the night I left with a man whose name I cannot remember, but everyone calls him the Japanese He is Japanese. This was an occasion to notice the racism here, since there was a lot of eye narrowing and sushi jokes thrown around. We did a few passes around the town and I got him to blast “Like a Rolling Stone” while cruising. He had a curious habit of flashing his headlights on girls that he liked, and they really didn’t seem to mind all that much. Or maybe they were just diggin on Dylan. Alas, made it home by two. Nothing like drunk passengering in small town Brasil, keeping my eyes on the stray dogs and one-way streets.