A Vida É Bela

On October 12, Americans commemorated Columbus stumbling upon Hispaniola, and brasileiros got the day off in honor of Nossa Senhora Aparecida, the country’s patron saint.  Mexico’s Virgen de Guadelupe appeared on a peasant’s cloak; Aparecida’s statue was hauled out of the Rio Paraíba do Sul just north of here in 1717 by fishermen casting for a good catch to gift the governor.

Aparecida may be a national holiday, but in the northern Amazonian city of Belém do Pará, the weekend is all about Nossa Senhora de Nazaré, an icon that arrived courtesy of the Jesuits via Nazareth (Israel) and Nazaré (Portugual).  The Sunday morning procession to her temple in Belém draws two million people from throughout Pará, for many a once-a-year family reunion.

For paraense expats in São José, it was the perfect excuse for a churrasco, the standard animal parts and beer complemented by Amazonian fare with ingredients one of the guys brought back from a recent trip home.  While I’m pretty indifferent to typical Brazilian fare of meat, beans and starch (the salads are awesome), I can’t help slurping up the unique flavors in pato no tucupi (duck meat stewed in manioc juice), tacacá (shrimp stewed in tucupi and manioc gum), maniçoba (“feijoada paraense“), and açaí (not the syrupy beach smoothies, but the raw purply berry pulp with crunch from tapioca pellets).  Everything except açaí includes tongue-tingling jambu leaves.

Tacacá is yummy.

From a previous festa paraense – stir-fried capivara meat – farm-raised in Pará and hunted in the wetlands of Venezuela.

Festas paraenses always involve dancing.  I like this.

There is at a minimum brega, a peppy blend of regional rhythms with a touch of Caribbean calypso.  Brega literally means “tacky” or “cheesy,” and it is indeed rather obnoxious – unless you’re dancing.  The basic step is like salsa, except without the pause on 4, so keeping up with the off-accent 1-2-3 4-5-6 is quite engrossing.  The best clips I could find of authentic couples dancing brega was this documentary (parts one and two) – feel free to skip through the lengthy scenes of the producer mixing Gnarls Barkley in his bedroom.

Then there was a roda de carimbó.

..and a lesson to prep us for the samba remix of Ave Maria..

..but we all ended up just rocking out.

So over skype last weekend, my mother says to me, “Oh did you hear?  The Olympics are going to be in Brazil in 2016.”

Even if I didn’t stream NPR and the BBC nonstop, it would have been impossible to not notice.  Here in Brazil, it’s kind of a really big deal.

Last Friday my carioca officemate blasted the announcment live on Globo Esporte.  Throughout my building there was shrieking and jumping and running about.

Intense national and carioca pride aside, the Olympics coming to Brazil is historic, a symbol of global inclusion and the rising prominence of emerging economies.  President Lula emphasized in his presentation in Copenhagen that Rio 2016 will be the first South American Olympics, and that Brazil is the only of the world’s ten largest economies that hasn’t hosted the Games.

The selection wasn’t without criticism.  NPR’s Scott Simon gave a rundown of concerns about Rio, including horrendous traffic, the required relocation of favelas, and public safety, commenting that “street crime is perhaps the worst in the world.”

While I can attest to the traffic – streets are narrow and major chunks of the city are linked only by tunnels – I take exception to the safety comment.  While one should definitely take precautions on the streets of Rio (for example, I avoid waving my camera around or wearing jewelry made of anything fancier than coconut wood), I have visited a dozen times, including during Carnaval, with absolutely no problems.  I’m inclined to believe that Mr. Simon, a native Chicagoan, is just a bit bitter.  :)

Rio’s narrow and spectacularly scenic streets

Granted, drug-related gun violence does have an unfortunate tendency to occasionally spill over into the wealthy Zona Sul, where tourists like to hang out and where many of the Olympic events will be held.  No worries, some Brazilian friends deadpanned over Friday beers, the city can just pay the druglords to keep the peace like they did during the 2007 Pan American Games, noted for the utter lack of violence.  Seriously though, the super-pragmatist in me doesn’t see much difference in principle with some of the extreme measures taken before the 2008 Games in Beijing, including shutting down traffic for a month to clear the air and employing cloud seeders to divert moisture away from the city.

Skeptics aside, there is absolutely no doubt that Rio is just plain gorgeous, sandwiched between steep rainforest-clad volcanic rock faces and ample white sand beaches.  Here’s the official Candidate City video (in Portuguese, sorry) showing digitally how it’s all going to fit.

The venues will be situated to take full advantage of Rio’s existing facilities and carta postais.  Imagine, if you will: opening cereremonies and futebol in the legendary Maracanã(recently renovated in preparation for the 2010 FIFA World Cup Final); Pão de Açucar and rowing on the Lagoa in the shadow of the Cristo Redentor; beach volleyball on Copacabana; and the marathon finish in the Sambodromo.

View from the Cristo Redentor of the Lagoa and Copacabana Beach

The patriotically-painted Maracanã Stadium

I just might have to stick around to see it all come together!

Overheard on the bus, inner SE Portland, from one skateboard-lugging teenage boy to another:

“So if you wear skinny pants, a small shirt and have hair that covers your eyes, you can get a ton of girls.  You don’t even have to do anything!  I was in the mall yesterday and I couldn’t sit down for five minutes without a girl coming up and talking to me.”

Gotta love those Portland boys!

From São José, SP to Portland, OR in 27 hours, woot! Via SFO and the haze layer from the southern California wildfires. Even so, I miss my CA crew and was tempted to escape on BART, but instead dashed to snag standby on an earlier flight to Portland, land of free airport wi-fi and clean(er) air. As bathroom karma for having spent my first two flights repeatedly scrambling over (1) the proud grandmother of a São Paulo truffle shop owner and (2) a Canadian capoeirist chick (yes, window seats are always worth it), I’m last-room aisle right across from the loo. Despite my best caffeination efforts, passed out last night 6:30pm PDT and woke up (as confirmed by the spiffy day/night map screen) shortly before São Paulo sunrise.

A couple of weeks ago I was background listening to an NPR Science Friday show about the impending fall burst of swine flu in the US, when a phrase jerked me to attention.

“…head of the Division of epidemiology at UC Berkeley…You’re down there in São Paulo, Brazil, where it’s wintertime, right?”  

After the initial H1N1 media freakout in April, I had relegated the topic to the category of “things less hazardous than the stress induced by worrying about them.”  While I did note face masks on the occasional São José shopper and every single employee in the Lima airport (which made it nearly impossible for my visual brain to decipher their Spanish), the reports of thousands of cases in Buenos Aires and a few elsewhere in the state, and the explosion in the scented hand sanitizer market, it was pretty easy to say, “it can’t happen to me.”

Then my roommate, who is often sniffling with one thing or another, got the flu.  But her high fever subsided by the time she left on a Friday to visit her parents in São Paulo, so I was surprised to get an e-mail from her Monday morning saying she was being monitored for possible swine flu.

Commence about 36 hours of compulsive hand-washing and creepy crawly sensations.  By that point, with the help of a super-rational officemate (WASH YOUR HANDS, she says), I knew I should be way more concerned about catching the roomie’s (most definitely non-swinish) flu.  [Side rant: I find it totally irresponsible that the news media reports swine flu deaths without the corresponding figures for standard flu/pneumonia: over 60,000 per year in the US alone.]

And indeed, her test came back showing just an annoying case of bronchitis.  Still a good reminder to follow Momma Obama’s advice to WASH YOUR HANDS, and to break the habit of eating in front of the computer (a bad idea for all sorts of reasons).  It also makes the Brazilian mania to avoid food-finger contact at all costs (knife and fork for pizza, and sheaves of napkins for finger foods) seem a little less OCD.

I caught a ride with some more advanced students from the belly dance studio to see them perform Saturday night in an Egyptian restaurant in São Paulo.  The place was far from luxurious, furnished with white plastic tables and chairs and spray-painted murals of sidewinding Pharaohs and pyramids.  The bailarinas performed mostly solo pieces to popular Egyptian tunes – the owner’s twenty-something daughter sang along in Arabic – but there was also a shephardess twirling a staff, a frowning tribal duo, and my favorite, a wild-eyed gypsy chick wrapped in a (small) live cobra.

Said cobra seemed chill configured as various accessories – a headband/crown, necklace, belt – props are just another level of belly dance’s multi-tasking essence.  The garçon, who spent most of the evening walking in front of the dancers and making faces, finally stayed at a respectful distance.

Gostei!  But no immediate plans to add this to my repetoire, the cat wouldn’t be too happy.

In initial introductions, I usually say I’m from California. It’s simpler – the state is well known around the world, thanks to Hollywood and Schwarzenegger – and not entirely untrue, as I lived there off and on from ages 17 to 24 and it was a formative place that still feels like my center of gravity. The introduction usually leads to a conversation about what Califórnia is really like, beyond the “O.C.” Commercial references are everywhere, from a juice bar in the mall to the “Califórnia” pizza combo – peaches, prunes, figs, and the decidedly non-native pineapple, piled on top of Brazilian-style blankets of ham and mozzerella.

I’m getting better at sitting still.  During my first visit to Manaus last November for a conference I crammed in a river boat tour, theater show, walks in the port district and zona industrial, a visit to a forest research station, and one of my odder travel experiences, a day at the beach 1500km from the ocean.  

On this trip, I pretty much sat at the hotel for six days.  Part of this was necessity.  I was there to talk with researchers during the BARCA experiment, and had to wait for their free moments between flights and fixing broken equipment.  But the other part was that I decided to try to appreciate where I was – who knows the next time I’ll have an office with a view (and pool) like this..

..or a room with a view like this.. 

The view reminded me of a high school English teacher who took us on a nature walk on a hill overlooking Portland and pointed out that despite the million or so people living in the valley below, mostly you just saw trees!

It was also a unique chance to hang out with the researchers I’ll be working with remotely for the next couple years.  The experiment team is about 1/3 Brazilian, 1/3 American and 1/3 German, and while the internet does enable some amazing long-distance collaboration, there really is nothing like face time (even better with beer).  Despite the stereotype of the mad scientist alone in the lab in the wee hours, no one can really go it alone (at least where planes and supercomputers are involved).

We sampled the distinct local cuisine, including tacacá, a stew of shrimp, chicory, garlic, jambu (an Amazonian leaf that numbs your tongue) and manioc goo, served in a coconut shell (picture from 2005 in Brasília because it was the best shot I had of the goop).

And amazing fresh-water fish – my favorite was costela de tambaquí, ribs from a 3-ft long river fish.

I did sneak out of the hotel now and again for walks past rows of chique beach condos, and to buy too many bananas at the little markets at the dock at the end of the road, where boats depart to more isolated beaches and villages further down the river.

Despite all the news of flooding and torrential rains, storms were fairly isolated (we did have to make a research excursion to the pool Friday night to watch the lightning across the river).  Still, neither torrential downpours nor the submerged beach stopped kids from tubing in the Rio Negro, or their parents from sitting in their swimsuits and downing fried seafood and cold beer.

One of Brazil’s finer culinary creations, I’d have to say, is pizza for dessert.  Not with cookie crust, mind you (that’s cheating), but the standard thin crunchy crust coated with chocolate, white chocolate, chocolate with sprinkles, bananas and doce de leite, bananas and chocolate..you get the idea.  The best part is that in combination with another Brazilian innovation, the all-you-can eat, delivered-to-your-table rodízio, you can try them all.

After a couple weeks of immune system recovery from São Paulo’s Virada Cultural, we were ready for the lower-key local version.  Still funded by taxpayer dollars, the Virada Cultural Paulista brings ridiculously famous groups to sixteen cities in the interior of São Paulo.  Since there was a gap between 3 and 10 am Sunday, it wasn’t technically a virada, so we dubbed it the “Viradinha.”

Still fantastic – first up was Clube do Balanço with samba-rock.  This is one of my absolute favorite styles of music.  It’s funky, and incredibly danceable.  Parts one and two of a documentary about the group explain samba-rock’s origins (think 1950s Brazilian teenagers listening to American rock LP’s in their basements and dancing like, well, Brazilians), and include lots of great shots of couples dancing in São Paulo clubs.  Sometimes I really miss the megacidade.

Following a trapeze show intermission, Moraes Moreiro, who while rocking the aging hippie look, was still as virtuosistic on guitar and vocals as in the 1970s with the Novos Baianos.  Around 1am he switched to peppy frevo, to which one doesn’t really dance as much as jump frenetically up and down.  Unfortunately I was too exhausted for hopping, but in short order I was home and asleep, perhaps violating the virada spirit but a lovely evening nonetheless.