This was my welcome home (and it’s still coming down!). I’m cold and not caught up on sleep yet. More on leaving Brazil later.

I constantly find myself wondering where the time goes, especially since I’ve been meaning to post for over a week now and I’m leaving in 2 days! So this will be my attempt at a “quick” summary of the almost end of my time in Brazil (it’s been busy though):

Weather: Early last Saturday morning I was so cold that I wore jeans and hoodie (my first time wearing pants in months), only to see that it was 20ºC, or 68ºF. Considering the fact that it’s going to be about 20ºF where I am in just a couple days, I just don’t know how I’m going to handle it. And since then there’s been a lot of rain (included a pretty flooded night), although I did manage a final beach day when there was a little bit of sun.

Ilha Grande: We also got lucky and there wasn’t any rain while we were in Ilha Grande, so it was basically just a weekend of eating real meals and relaxing on the beautiful beach there – not exactly a bad way to spend a weekend. The picture is of the island’s dog Luluzinha/Alice who befriended us while we were there.

Flamengo: Last Sunday was the end of the futebol season, and Flamengo won the Brasileirão tournament. And what could that mean other than a party in the streets of Rio? There was a group of us taking a bus back to Copa and it was an crazy ride! Traffic came to a stop in Leblon while people climbed on top of buses, and then we slowly made our way to the intersection where everyone was congregating. It felt kind of like what I imagine being a celebrity must, with a huge crowd of people cheering and grabbing at us through the bus windows as we drove by. I’d never seen so many Flamengo jerseys in my life.

Feijoada: Dora hosted a feijoada for her neighbor’s grandson who just graduated from the Brazilian Naval Academy, which meant a whole lot of Navy boys at my house. After stuffing our faces, instead of doing nothing like one is supposed to after eating feijoada, we went and played some ultimate. Or at least sort of, they were really terrible and wanted to change the rules so there was more violence – but hey, I tried.

Escola de Samba: The closest to Rio Carnaval I’m going to get (for a while at least) was this weekend when I went to an ensaio de samba, which are events the different schools hold to raise money for actual Carnaval. The escola I went to was Salgueiro, where we saw scantily clad girls dance to this song being performed on repeat. I tried to pretend like I know how to samba (I hop around and shuffle my feet a lot), but I had much more fun watching the people who actually know what they’re doing.

Latkes: Happy Hanukkah! Even though my mom has already promised to make me latkes when I get home, last night my friend Stephanie and I went on what turned out to be a very long and slightly more complicated than we had anticipated latke and applesauce making adventure. It turned out very deliciously though (it’s hard to go wrong with those ingredients).

There was also a final Brown-in-Brazil churrascaria dinner, the Manu Chao concert, finishing the worst 2 page paper ever written, and another visit to the roof of my building with my porteiro buddy.  And today I’m going souvenir shopping and to my final capoeira class. As many days as I’ve planned to hike to Cristo, it’s looking like it’s probably not going to happen at this point with the weather and I think I’m ok with that (just another excuse to come back).

I’m having serious trouble wrapping my head around the fact that I’m leaving, and definitely haven’t started packing at all. Considering the lack of time remaining, this will be my last post from Rio, but I have so many other things I was planning to write about so I might keep the blog going a little longer once I’m home. And maybe chronicle some of my reverse culture shock as well (I think it’s gonna be a doozy). So tchau from Brazil!

Today was supposed to be the day of my last surfing class or hiking to Cristo, but then I woke up to the sound of rain – of course, Rio, thanks a lot. So instead of doing any of those exciting things, I thought I’d blog some more (2 days in a row?!).

A while ago I promised several Michelles that I would post my stalker pictures from Niterói of tiny Brazilian bathing suits, so here they are (tiny bottom, tiny top, & sunga/guys’ suit):

It’s a little hard to see, but there’s definite beer drinking in the second and third pictures – gotta love Brazilian beaches. I’m pretty desensitized, so hopefully these don’t look too scandalous to normal Americans. While I would never actually wear a fio dental, seeing other people in them doesn’t seem strange at all anymore – I think it’s going to be weirder back at home where everyone’s entire bunda/butt is completely covered (and I have my biquini that I almost wouldn’t wear out of the house a few months ago). Also, I was having a conversation about bathing suits with Brazilians the other day and they were surprised to hear that it’s not at all typical for guys to wear sungas in the US, which I found very amusing.

And now for some other Rio/Brazil-related blogs. First there’s Rio etc, which I look at more often than in deserves since it’s mostly just trying to be the Sartorialist with worse pictures of less stylish people. But then every now and then there’s something that resonates, like this – it seriously looks like that with futebols flying everywhere as far as you can see. Or the matte guy at the beach. Or the really typical-looking students at PUC. Or the Xina stand outside PUC with that sells enormous salgados. So anyway, that’s a little look inside my Rio bubble.

Then if you look at Roda Magazine, you’ll find part of my post from yesterday! I don’t know if that counts as being published or what, but I thought it was cool.

Finally, quick life update: two exams down, a paper and a design project to go. I went to see a Brazilian movie in theaters (aka without subtitles) as my rainy day activity today, which I understood but still missed things in. We made an amazing salad for dinner (I’ve been vegetable-deprived recently) and now love raw beets. Brown-in-Brazil is taking us to Ilha Grande early tomorrow morning, where it hopefully won’t rain all weekend. And then just a week and a half left in Rio! That’s enough time to be ready to leave, right??

This past Sunday was my capoeira group’s batizado, which is where everyone gets a cordão (cord – think karate belts) and was a big event. But before I get too ahead of myself, let me back up and try to explain what exactly capoeira is.

So capoeira is a mix of dance and martial arts that was created by Afro-Brazilians in the days of slavery. While the history isn’t especially well-recorded, and there are many theories about its origins. It was also illegal in Brazil until the 1930s, which says a lot about the general attitude towards all things Afro-Brazilian back in the day (it’s much more celebrated now, not that that means Brazil is a racial democracy or anything – but that’s an issue for another day). So when capoeira is done (or jogado, em português) there are two people in the middle of a roda (cirlce) while everyone else stands around the circle clapping and singing. Music is also essential in capoeira; there are always people playing berimbaus, drums, and pandeiros (tambourines).

[Side note: It’s weird to talk about capoeira in English – there just aren’t translations for the names of most of the moves, and other things that sound normal in Portuguese (“jogei com o mestre”) just sound strange in English (“I played with the master”).]

But if a picture is worth a thousand words, a vídeo must be about a million, so here’s a couple of the guys from my class at the batizado.

Fica bonito, né? I should probably mention that the class I go to is for all levels, cause these guys are actually good, and I’m really terrible. But really though – at the batizado, I fell for what must be the oldest trick in the book (“look over there!”) and the mestre literally picked me up and carried me out the roda. Not a shining moment, but I have no more shame. And luckily there aren’t very strict standards for the first level, so I still got my cordão.

Capoeira class also manages to bring together the unfortunate combination of my general awkwardness, my uncomforableness doing things I’m bad at, and my inability to have normal conversations in Portuguese. Meaning I’m mostly just quietly trying really hard to do things that I’m not capable of, although I’ve improved at the whole communicating thing recently. (Also, it’s really unfortunate that Portuguese doesn’t have a word for awkward, since it would describe so many of my interactions in this country so well.)

And yet, I keep going back – I don’t have any illusions of becoming amazing at it, but I still manage to have fun and the community there is really great. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t relieved to be going back to playing ultimate soon, but I’m also glad to have tried something new while in Brazil and maybe I’ll even try to keep it up back at Brown. So this ended up being less about the batizado than I originally intended, but this is about all I have to say about capoeira for now.

So much to say, so little time! I’ll try to be brief and chronological, starting with walking around the Lagoa.

The Lagoa is basically just a big lake in Zona Sul (the part of Rio I live and go to school in), and a while ago I was riding past it on the bus and it occurred to me that I had never actually been there on foot. So of course I decided I wanted to walk around the entire thing, and I finally did last week with my friends Kathy and Stephanie. It was a good walk and a relatively not-hot day, although it got stormy before we made it back to PUC – and along with the ominous clouds came a ladrão (thief), and Kathy’s camera was stolen.

While I haven’t been robbed of anything of significant value, the incident just reminded me how much crime is a presence here in Rio. I’ve still accumulated my own little list of incidents: someone stealing my açaí, a kid on the street who told me he had a knife and to give him money, my camera almost being taken from my pocket at the Olympics announcement; really, I’ve just been lucky. And just the fact that I don’t leave the house without thinking about what I’m taking with me and whether it’s necessary and worth potentially losing shows how much being here has affected my whole mindset. And yet, there are only so many precautions you can take, and sometimes it just doesn’t make a difference – getting robbed late at night alone in Copa would be one thing, but it’s not what you expect in the evening in a group near the Lagoa.

But on to happier things: Thanksgiving! Or as they translate it in Portuguese, o Dia de Ação de Graça. Not that they have such a thing in Brazil, so this Thanksgiving was a little strange; making it feel like a holiday when the rest of the city is completely oblivious to it and you still have to go to school is kind of challenging. Not to mention that I typically don’t associate Thanksgiving with 30º weather. All in all, the dinner was a huge success though.

We ate delicious food (lots of it, not to mention dessert) and colored hand turkeys and said what we were thankful for and everything. My contribution was açaí sauce (a Brazilian take on cranberry sauce, although some of that was supplied from the States) with raisins, blackberries, and cinnamon; it’s great on ice cream, if I do say so myself. And this was my turkey (it won most festive):

This weekend was busy with getting Manu Chao tickets (!), making friends with Brazilian ultimate players, going to the Museu do Índio, cooking dinner, a night by the beach, a few minutes of the Disney parade in Copa, a Flamengo game on TV, and Capoeira. Much more about Capoeira later, but now it’s time for me to go to bed: tomorrow’s the day it’ll actually be time for me to start studying.

While my plans for next semester aren’t exactly finalized, my current flight home leaves one month from today (!). More than 4 months have already flown by, and it’s not really going to be possible to fit in everything I still want to do and see in this city/country. But feeling like my time is limited has been a big motivator to go out and do things, so here’s some of what I’ve been up to the past couple weeks:

Niterói: I finally took the ferry across the bay to Niterói, although it wasn’t the most exciting place in the world, just a smaller and quieter version of Rio as far as I could tell. The highlight was definitely the Museu de Arte Contemporânea designed by Oscar Niemeyer, which is basically a flying saucer:

It was one of the record-breaking hot days, but we still managed to do lots of walking around the beaches and the city. We also stumbled upon the campus of UFF, the Universidade Federal Fluminense, where I almost studied abroad. It had a nice view of Rio, but I’m glad I ended up on the other side of the bay.

Teatro: I can’t resist anything that only costs 1 real (pronounced: hey-ow’; plural: reais; currently = $0.58) and last weekend that included a play, Além do Arco-Íris (or Over the Rainbow). It wasn’t hard to get the gist of things, even if I didn’t always know what was funny when the rest of the audience started laughing. The play itself was an almost-one-woman show, although (*spoiler alert*) at the end you find out that the almost-only character is actually dead – it was a little hard not to laugh at that point.

Feijoada: My friend Kathy’s birthday was last week, and that could only mean one thing: vegan food! We went out for feijoada, one of Brazil’s main pratos típicos; it’s bean stew (with fake meat in our case) served with rice, collard greens, farofa/cassava flour, an orange, a caipirinha, etc. It’s eaten on Saturdays, and afterwards everyone is supposed to be so stuffed that they just lie around for the rest of the day, although I still managed to find room for the vegan brownies we had made for dessert.

Feira de São Cristóvão: I spent Saturday night at the Feira Nordestina, which I probably would have enjoyed more if my stomach wasn’t having issues from all the food earlier that day. It definitely captured the northeastern vibe, even if it wasn’t as cheap. I have some new forró skills from a dance class last week, but didn’t really try them out; the American songs (like “Halo”) with Portuguese lyrics were really amusing though. My favorite part was probably that there were a couple of old guys singing an improvised song to the same tune that a couple of old guys sang to Louisa and me in Olinda on our trip. Then on the bus ride back we took a little detour to the end of the line, where the bus driver saw us and asked “Alguém pegou o ônibus na direção errada?”, or “Did someone get the bus in the wrong direction?” The answer was obviously yes, but then he took us back to Copa so it all worked out fine.

Praia: Goes without saying, but look how crowded it was (even late in the day)!

Sidenote: Futebol is being banned from the beaches during the day starting in a couple of weeks because of the huge summer crowds. Brazilians seem pretty attached to futebol though, so it should be interesting to see how enforcing that rule goes.

The other good thing about not having much more time here is that I’m also appreciating the little things a lot more, like drinking água de coco by the beach or running into my porteiro at the bar around the corner or getting cheese ice cream after a movie. Basically, I’m already seriously dreading the inevitable reverse culture shock that’s headed my way.

If you haven’t heard, we had a little blackout here last night. And by here, I don’t mean my neighborhood, city, state; I mean all of southern Brazil (plus Paraguay and Argentina). It didn’t seem like a big deal to me when the lights first started flickering, but then we were plunged into darkness. That was the moment I was really glad I brought my headlamp, and we had lots of candles and booklights too (Dora also took a candle to our porteiro, who had apparently been sitting in the dark, which didn’t make me feel especially safe).

Our cell phones stopped getting service once the power went out, which left us without any means of communication with the outside world (strange feeling). So for a little while the most credible information we had were Dora’s conspiracy theories about how someone was trying to sabotage Rio so it wouldn’t get the Olympics after all. But then Jessica got the cell phone radio working so we at least had some idea of the real situation and just out big the blackout was. It turns out that the all the generators at the enormous Itaipu hydroelectric dam shut down, for reasons that are still somewhat unclear but not the cause of bitter Chicagoans or anything like that.

There wasn’t much to do in the apartment with no light or electricity. Thinking of all the places it would have been worst to be when the power went out was fun though: in an elevator, on the metrô, at a futebol game, on a plane, in traffic, etc. And we experimented with pitanga flavored cachaça drinks. And then after a few hours the power came back on! It looked a little something like this:

It was amazing efficiency for Brazil if you ask me. And life was back to normal (except for the fact that the water hasn’t come back on yet). The whole adventure definitely wasn’t the way I had planned to spend my Tuesday night, but that’s what you get sometimes.

More later on Niterói and tiny bathing suits.

A week ago it was one of those cloudy days where it just never stops raining (the kind that reminds me way too much of Providence), which is how it’s been on and off since July. But every day since then it’s been HOT. Summer decided to arrive all at once, and I wasn’t at all prepared for it. Before I would have said that 30ºC – or 86ºF for all you non-metric people – was hot, but now I expect that in the morning while it’s still heating up or in the evening when it’s cooled down. In fact, the highest temperature of 2009 was a couple days ago (meaning that it was hotter than their entire last summer): 40º, which is 104ºF (!).

I seriously wasn’t built for this kind of weather. Yesterday standing in the shade, I was literally dripping sweat. I have no energy. And forget about drinking enough water to stay hydrated. I haven’t found any especially effective solutions, but my cold showers per day have increased infinitely. I’m wearing as few clothes as possible (although my host mom has just stopped wearing shirts around the apartment, which I take some issue with). I also plan to start spending a whole lot more time in computer labs, movie theaters, shoppings, grocery stores – basically anywhere with AC. I think I’ll survive, but we’ll see.

One upside is that I don’t feel alone and wimpy as the foreigner complaining about the heat: the Brazilians (including everyone from surf instructors to random old ladies at the post office) think it’s hot too. And they comment on it at least as much as I do. Their solution seems to be going to the beach; I might have thought I’d seen crowded beaches in the past few months, but this weekend I don’t think any more people could have fit on the beach if they wanted.

Even though all the weather forecasts in Brazil have been ridiculously misleading in the past, they seem to mostly agree that we’ll have some cooler days and rain this week. I have to say that I’m looking forward to some clouds (although not the humidity so much). So that’s all for now, more updates on things other than the weather later.

To wrap up the trip: we made it back to Recife, where we were welcomed and fed by our CouchSurfing host Carolina’s family. We spent that evening with her and some friends in the Cidade Antiga, where we listened to samba and watched clowns be funny (part of the Circus Festival).

The next day we went and wandered around in Olinda, a town near Recife that’s full of old churches and brightly painted buildings. We’re also lighthouse-finding experts now, although the one in Olinda was more serious about not letting anyone in than the one in Porto de Pedras. That night we went to dinner with Carolina and her friends/relatives at a sushi rodízio, which was amazingly delicious, and then just hung out by her building’s pool trying to understand all the Portuguese conversations (made even more difficult by the northeastern accents) and contributing our own thoughts every once in a while too.

Saturday was our last day, and we ended up visiting a castle near Recife. I hadn’t thought much (or ever) about the Dutch colonial influence in Brazil before, although after visiting an entire museum about it I did. There were also just cool castle-y things there, like armor and swords. Then we went back to the Cidade Antiga (again) for a more circus festivities, this time learning to juggle and watching crazy performers. After dinner at a “comida típica” restaurant we turned in early, although not until after watching Pirates of the Caribbean dubbed in Portuguese with Carolina and her family. Our trip home was surprisingly smooth (the flight left on time and everything), and we even got back to a nice sunny Rio and had a day to rest before starting class again.

Now on to other eventful things from this weekend:

Frisbee: I finally found ultimate in Rio! It turns out that there’s pick-up just a few blocks from my house on the beach in Copa every Friday night, so I went this week and it was really great to play for the first time since June. It was the least organized ultimate imaginable and I was almost the only person who knew how to throw a flick, but everyone was really welcoming (also very religious it seemed) and it just made me really happy.

Halloween: Not such a big deal here in Brazil, but we gringos managed to celebrate anyway. First we had a Halloween themed potluck, and then some intercambistas threw a party that ended up being a whole lot of ridiculously dressed gringos in the street, which is always a great location. I took one of Dora’s surgical masks, drew a pig nose on it, and was swine flu.

São Cristóvão: I went on an adventure to a new neighborhood of Rio this weekend, which was full of the unexpected difficulties, confusion, and things randomly working out that always seem to happen in Brazil. Basically, we didn’t make it to our ultimate destination, but we found a cool park and snuck into the zoo and I’ll definitely be going back  (hopefully with a picnic next time).

Pride Parade: Rio’s Pride Parade was on Sunday in Copa, and while it literally rained on the parade it was still fun times (it would have been the perfect day to own a rainbow umbrella!). There were trio elétricos (which are huge trucks blaring music), what is apparently the longest rainbow flag in South America, and lots of crazy and fabulous people. I also learned that even at gay pride events, Brazilian men will still lunge at your face (sigh).

Today is a holiday (these Brazilians love their holidays), so I’m just trying to catch up on life and emails and laundry. (Side note: speaking of holidays, all the stores here are already full of Christmas decorations! I guess they are lacking the usual Thanksgiving landmark, but still, thinking about Christmas in October?? Too much for me.) Anyway, off to attempt productivity/go to the beach.

So to pick up where I left off, on Monday it was time to set off in search of the perfect beach. We had a vague idea of our destination: a town called Maragogi just over the border in Alagoas. So we jumped on a bus headed in that direction. However, when it was time to jump off the bus, we were a little (or a lot) confused. The short version is that after more than enough walking with all of our stuff in sun and heat, we ended up in another town, São José da Grande Coroa, and stayed at the first pousada we saw. Which happened to have previously been a shopping center, so instead of an outside wall our room had one of those metal things to pull down over closed store windows. I don’t know how helpful of a description that is, but just trust me, it was weird. They don’t exactly get tourists many (or any) tourists there, so we got to see what normal people do – go to the beach and have Children’s Day festivals complete with amazing hot dogs, apparently, and that was what we did too.

Then the next day we went looking for Maragogi again, and were much more successful the second time. We found a nice place to stay (with pillows, towels, breakfast, and Internet – chique chique) and then went to check out the passeios às piscinas naturais. Various people tried to rip us off, but our Portuguese skillz and jeitinho helped us negotiate a good price and we made friends with the kid who sold us the tickets. Luckily we showed up not on Brazilian time because the boat amazingly left when it was supposed to. Then after listening to a prayer and long spiel to convince us to buy unnecessary things, we got to go SNORKELING. It was amazing, there were all kinds of fish and corals and eels and starfish and sea urchins. Now I want to learn how to scuba dive! And there was free coffee when we got back to land, which is always a highlight in my book.

After our amazing breakfast buffet the next morning, we decided we would try to find the peixe-boi/manatees a few towns away. It sounded simple enough to us, but little did we know… We made one town south, and that was where transportation got pretty sketchy. So instead of paying for mototaxis, we decided to walk along the beach the 10km to the next town – it’s all just training for the Appalachian Trail, after all (minus the mountains). I don’t feel like I can adequately explain just how beautiful it was, but I took a whole lot of pictures the random things we saw along the way so go look at them! We finally found the little ferry to Porto de Pedras that people had kept mentioning when they tried to give us directions, and we kept going to the farol/lighthouse. Some lockpicking skills would have come in handy since we couldn’t actually get inside it. There was also an “historic tree” nearby that emperor Pedro II had stopped to rest under several hundred years ago – if you want me to come sit in your yard so you can put a plaque up when I’m famous, just let me know.

We also turned into regulars at a “regional food” restaurant in Maragogi. After the guy in charge rattled off the options and saw our blank stares in response, he seemed to come to the conclusion that we didn’t know what we were doing (not far from the truth) and proceeded to make all decisions for us, meaning that dinner the first night was just steak and manioc (not my favorite, although it’s grown on me). At least the next day we got a saladinha as well. One of best things about Maragogi is the many cheap ice cream shops there (with flavors like coconut with strawberries and banana with cinnamon too), and I think my new life goal is to go back there and open my own.

When it was time to say goodbye to Maragogi we took the bus back to Recife (never as simple as it sounds) and then went to find our CouchSurfing host’s apartment. And I’ll end with that for now, while I go off and dream of perfect beaches…