Something That Happened Today

Just briefly before I get to more Amazon-Stuff:

I am trying to find a gym to join here.

Except, when I decided to walk into one gym today to ask about memberships I realised that I didn't know the appropriate way to say in Portuguese, 'So..I'm thinking about getting a gym membership.. What sort of plans do you have?' Does one cadastrar-se in an academia here? Do I ask to conhecer the gym? How do I say 'membership', again?

Brain freeze. Uh...eu quero...academia, I say. Como? says the blonde Brazilian gym-girl, 'pardon?'.
Eu quero...uma academia, I repeat.

Which sounds in English, I imagine, like 'Me...want...gym!'

Gym-girl

Cave-woman Shiva

AMAZON PART 1: Manaus and the Genesis III...

So we are safe and sound back in São Paulo. Guillaume and I arrived back here last night, Christmas Eve, after 17 days in the Amazon, smugly cheering on the fact that we had not gotten malaria. Hehehe. Well, we were cheering ourselves on in the plane until we heard one of our fellow passengers loudly recounting how someone he knew nearly died from malaria just as he returned from Manaus. Then we were like:

Shocked Guillaume and Shiva

But it's okay, if we don't have any problems within 2 weeks, we are in the clear. Anyway, I think it is all my preemptive de-jinxing which saved us, i.e. my mad obsession with the prospect of us getting sick 'worried' the threat off. This is my raciocínio, anyway. Moving on from my slight OCD...

Why did we go to the Amazon? The professor of Tupi (an extinct indigenous language of coastal Brazil) was lancing a didactic grammar of Nheengatu (a contact language between Portuguese and ancient Tupi which is still used today orally in small parts of the Amazon). We don't study those languages, but were allowed to tag along for the trip up to Manaus and São Gabriel da Cachoeira. There was a mix of students and non-students of the language. Each of us helped get a portion of the books up there in our luggage. 

When we arrived, we spent one night in the capital city of Amazonas, Manaus. A relatively large city, it sits on the banks of the Rio Amazonas and the Rio Negro. The first day there, it was a religious holiday (All - Saints, perhaps?) and so the city was on holiday. We were shocked by the 'New-Delhi-ness' of the city: street vendors as far as the eye can see, the never-ending smell of various bodily wastes, wheelbarrows full of strange fruits and vegetables for sale on every street corner, uncomfortably close bodies jammed together on the sidewalk, and those types of bikes with huge baskets to carry goods in weaving through the very randomly organised traffic.

Those bikes with huge baskets that, I imagine, one might see frequently in New Delhi. Okay, the bikes in Manaus weren't quite so full, I may be exaggerating. 

Another thing that you notice about Manaus while you are wading through the rubbish on the streets is the ridiculously high number of evangelical churches. I can't refrain myself from saying it: opportunistic evangelical church! Sorry, sorry, I said it. 

Also remarkable about Manaus (and as it turns out, São Gabriel, too; maybe it is the whole Amazon, who knows?) is the extremely ravaged-looking dogs which roam the streets. I have never seen so many three-legged dogs in my life. Sure, in Brazil it is normal to see stray dogs all around, but every single one of the dogs in the Amazon look like they have just given birth to 10 pups and then walked through a bushfire on the way to the sidewalk to rummage through the rubbish. All of the female dogs up there have swollen tits. They stop and take naps in the middle of the road. They don't care about anything, they have already taken on all of natures challenges it seems, what's a car, what's a car to them...

So anyway (!), the next day, before taking a boat to São Gabriel da Cachoeira, we had a boat tour of the Rio Negro, were we saw some little settlements on the river, had an 'amazonian' lunch (amazing salads they have there - we later found out that the secret ingredient was ... chicory), patted an anaconda and an alligator (held up nonchalantly by an eight-year-old indian boy in his floating river-house), saw the 'Meeting of the Waters', and had a swim in the Amazon. The Meeting of the Waters or Encontro das Aguas is where the Rio Solimões meets with the Rio Negro. The water of the Rio Negro is basically black in colour while the Rio Solimões has a more muddy hue, and when they join together, the waters do not mix immediately, so this is what you see:

Encontro das Aguas, Manaus, AM. It's hard to get a good photo from within the boat but viewed from a plane it is delicious. (Did I just use 'delicious' to describe something positively in English? I think I am becoming Brazilian.)

That evening we got on our (evangelical) boat, Genesis III, to begin our three-day-long trip to São Gabriel. São Gabriel da Cachoeira is a small town of 40,000 and is the county with the highest percentage of indigenous population in Brazil. The port where we left from in Manaus was located right next to a small favela, which I found interesting because this one was a bit different to the ones that you see in São Paulo:

Favela on sticks: Manaus, AM.

Location of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, AM, Brazil, very close to the borders of Colombia and Venezuela. Yes I stole someone else's screenshot; I don't know how to do that myself, hah.

In the boat our sleeping arrangement was....in any possible spot you could hang your hammock. I'll put up my own photos later, but now, to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:

Hammock arrangement on Amazon riverboat. High possibility of being smothered by your neighbour's buttocks while trying to sleep.

That was, well, interesting. Three days really gives you the chance to discover the versatility of your hammock as an all-in-one bed, chair, and blanket. And it seems that the indigenous Brazilians use their hammocks for more than just boat-travel. From what I saw in  São Gabriel, it is quite commonly used as one's regular bed up there. In the Amazon, the stores sell hammocks like they sell imported Chinese clothes (i.e., with excellent frequency). 

On the boat, there were three levels. I think there were about 80 people crammed into that space, as well as whatever 'luggage' they may have desired (suitcases, crates of beer, motorcycles, puppies, inflatable kiddy pools...). Getting back to your space (i.e. your hammock) required an odd dance to weave oneself through, under, and over the other hammocks. It was not uncommon to feel a little head crawling underneath your hammock at unexpected moments, or, if you were lucky like me, to be kicked by the two-year-old indian baby in the neighbouring hammock in the middle of each night. Oh yes, the hammocks were that close.

Our escape was the third level, the deck, where we could enjoy the river. Noticeable about the Rio Negro is that it is full of huge rocks, which made the texture of the water change regularly. The scenery was beautiful. I think I may finally 'get' why people go on cruises...

The three days we spent in close co-habitation with indigenous Brazilians lead us to a slightly disturbing discovery, however: indian women seem to be expressly against shaving their legs. As in, 99% of them have probably never picked up a razor in their life. As in, BUSH. That's okay, though, I guess. OMFG

When we arrived we spent the first night in the hotel 'Deus me deu' ('God gave me' - surprise, surprise in the evangelical Amazon) and the rest of the time in the town diocese, as the priests there are sympathetic of local language work and knew our professor. The first day, I was feeling ill in my stomach, probably from something I ate on the boat. The professor commanded me to have some acerola juice at the local snack bar. (The typical Brazilian practice of prescribing juice to cure any ailment!) It worked, and I found my favourite new Brazilian fruit. 

Acerola. Tastes kind of like a cherry but awesomer. 

So, it's 2AM at the moment (perfect calling-Australia-with-the-thirteen-hours-times-difference-time now), so I'm finishing up for now, for tonight anyway. In my next post, I will talk about São Gabriel itself. My impressions of the Amazon are not done with, though! Bye bye..

The 'Other' Side of Healthcare

Yesterday I finally went to do some blood tests that I needed to do. After my various public hospital experiences, I decided to go private this time. The difference between the atmosphere, well...
First of all, the laboratory was located in Itaim Bibi, a very rich neighbourhood of São Paulo. Just by looking at the building you can smell the scent of rich people. (I know, I know, we are just bitter poor people, right? Ha ha ha..) 

As opposed to in the public hospital Clinicas:

And from the inside:

They even had those look-at-us-our-clients-are-so-posh-and-international-that-they-require-clocks-showing-different-time-zones-in-large-cosmopolitan-cities clocks:

Except, I happened to know that the clocks were wrong, because the time in Sydney was 1.30PM then. Anyway.

Today I went to do some photocopying at the Xerox (that's pronounced 'sheroks' here in Brazil, by the way). I wanted to copy four whole books. The guy looked at them and said, I can only get that done for Friday (today being Wednesday). I did my Desperation-Face. OK, maybe I can have two of them ready for tomorrow. Desperation-Face. I said to my friend next to me, Oh.... não vou estar em São Paulo a partir de amanhã (I won't be in São Paulo from tomorrow onwards.) ..hum... Xerox-man gave in, OK, you can come back at 7PM. 


So, my friends: this was an illustration of the fact that service people generally stretch time to get things done as much as they can get away with things are 'flexible' here. But that's cool, I got lucky today.


On the way home, I greeted João, my security-guard friend from USP, who asks me the same questions every time I see him. O Shiva, você estuda na letras? Vai ficar até quando? Na Austrália o povo fala inglês? Wa, tooh, tree.. Shiva é um nome de deusa, já sabia disso? (Hey Shiva, you study in the letters department? For how long are you staying in Brazil? In Australia they speak English? One, two, three.. Shiva is a name of a goddess, did you know that already?) Every time. He's nice though, I like him. 


When I came home, I said goodbye to one of my housemates who was going home for the summer. This one I didn't really know that well - my only memory of him is one conversation on the way to class at the beginning of semester, trying to explain the difference between generativism and functionalism in linguistics - needless to say, my technical Portuguese failed miserably in this context and he will probably forever only remember me saying clearly that 'Chomsky fills me with rage', but not know why. Maybe next year, when he comes back...


We are travelling to the Amazon tomorrow and will come back on the 24th of December. Unlikely that I will be heard from too much during that time. BUT: if you don't hear from me after that, you can start to worry. Fique a vontade! to worry, as I am a hypochondriac and fairly-totally-like100% sure that I will get malaria there and die. I am just a little bit traumatised with brazilian hospitals. So........... wish me luck.

Five Things You Will Find In Any Brazilian Snack Bar

Monday night, 11.30PM. I am currently watching one of the grand successes of brazilian TV, Miss BumBum (Miss Best-Butt).....Bemvindo ao Brasil. TV here is extraordinary.

Moving on: yesterday Guillaume and I woke up early to go on an excursion to an indian reservation with the Tupi (an indigenous brazilian language) class from uni. We arrived at 10AM in the place where the teacher had told us to meet. There we saw no one, except for the (I suspect) evangelical bus driver for the faculty. We stayed there for about 40 minutes, mostly listening to the bus driver recount various details of his personal life (after a while in Brazil, you find this completely normal) and then he decided to leave as nobody, not even the teacher, had shown up. We decided to walk to the metro and do something else in the city centre instead, and as we were walking, saw the group of people going on the excursion, in a completely different place. The teacher decided, after this complete organisational fail  mishap, to go to a different reservation instead. As Guillaume had already been there, we decided to just go to the city instead.


There we did some chores to organise for our trip to the Amazon and had lunch. 'What do you want to eat?', asked Guillaume. Arroz e feijão e omelette! (rice, beans and omelette), I cried, 'It's been like one day since I've eaten arroz e feijão!' So, we went to a lanchonete (snack bar). 


It appears that in Brazil there exists only one store for every single snack bar in the country to buy their materials and signs. You can be sure to find the same facilities and menu in every single one. Some examples of thing you will see, without a doubt, in whatever snack bar you enter in Brazil:

Menu board offering a variety of mysterious 'X' burgers. 

Glass box filled with the same lollies, through which the designated 'money-taker' peers through a small hole to take your money and give you change.

A wide range of extremely potent drinks, cachaça being a vital member of this collection.

A Skol (or possible Brahma too) fridge filled with beer. 

A collection of salgados (savoury baked goods, and always the same one at that).

This, and the knowledge that you can have a massive and tasty meal for about $7AUD. Um, Awesome. The 'X'-burger thing however (first picture) was problematic for a few months. Every time I entered one of these places I would wonder to myself, what on earth is an X-burger?! There appeared to be variations of these mysterious burgers - egg, salad, chicken.. And I did think it was weird that every single restaurant used the same word.. until one day it was revealed: X in portuguese is pronounced 'shiss'. This is a way of abbreviating the English word cheese, because in portuguese they use the English word too - cheeseburger. I was floored. In my English brain, it was not a 'shissburger' but an 'exburger'. That only took three months.

After lunch I grabbed some leggings from a clothing store on Avenida Paulista. This is a good opportunity for a word on stores in Brazil, or even, on commerce in general in this country. I have maintained since the beginning of my stay here that there are so many unnecessary jobs here! Any store you go into will be swarming with employees, deeply disproportionate to the number of customers. And still, at that, it takes longer than in any store in Australia or Germany or Canada or USA or anywhere else I have ever been. For my leggings excursion, I was saved too much hassle: I went to the counter where the shopkeeper was totally free, she pointed to one of the other employees, who came walking over nonchalantly to take my leggings to another part of the store to put them in a bag and write on a piece of paper what I was buying and the price, I waited there for the paper to take it back to the unoccupied shopkeeper at the cash register, she gave me my change and stamped the piece of paper as pago (paid), and then I walked back to the other lady, showed her that it was god-damned pago, and she gave me the bag with the leggings. 

Shoe shopping? Don't even get me started. There will be all of the above barriers, plus a few extra: one person greets you and sees what you need, one person grabs the shoes, a different person put the shoes in a box, you line up to pay for the shoes, they give you a receipt, then you have to line up again to get the bag with the shoes. It is unthinkable for a shopkeeper to do more than one of the above tasks, otherwise the whole system will be destroyed, and things might actually become efficient. Hah. 

This variety of 'teamwork' is rampant in Brazil. Again, something you get used to..

Miss BumBum has finished for this evening and so have I. Until tomorrow!

Why You Shouldn't Walk Barefoot in Brazil

I never wear shoes indoors at home. Very rarely do I wear socks. But recently, I've decided to change that habit during the duration of my stay here. It's hard, but I'm trying.


Not too long ago Rafael said to me, você ta andando descalça de novo?! (you are walking around  barefoot AGAIN?!), as he usually does every day of the week. 'Do a Google search on bicho de pé', he recommended, 'and turn the Safe Search off'.


So I did. As it turns out, there are two types of bicho de pé, : the delicious, and the not-so-delicious kind:

Delicious bicho de pé

Not-so-delicious bicho de pé

After this, I realised why everyone had been screaming at me for walking around descalça for the past few months. Even the maid yelled at me the other day! But her reasoning was slightly different: 'your body is hot and the floor is cold! You'll slip! It's especially bad for young girls like you!' ....That was what I understood anyway. I'm not sure if I agree with her logic. 

So anyway, this is why you should not walk barefoot in your brazilian home.

(One) Trip to The Hospital

Disclaimer: I don't mean to start off complaining. I think the health system here is very good in that you can get absolutely free services, even as a foreigner. But sometimes it's hard to understand how it works... These just happen to be the most recent occurrences here.


So, Guillaume has had a painful rash on his neck and has been trying to see a dermatologist. He went to the University Hospital and the secretary said that the dermatologist comes só no sábado até uma hora (only on Saturdays up to 1PM). OK, that's chill. We went back on saturday and when we asked about the possibility of seeing the dermatologist she laughed, saying that there are only 23 spots available and they were gone already just after the dermatologist arrived at 7 AM. OK... 


A few days later, we had to go to the Medicina do Viajante (Travel Doctor) to organise for our trip to Amazonas, so we decided to go to the public hospital Clinicas just afterwards. We spent the whole day in the hospital for five minutinhos with a dermatologist. (I have come to understand that when Brazilians tell you you will need to wait '[X] minutinhos' or in 'little minutes', it is more likely a sign that you will be waiting a long time, i.e. in 'big minutes' -- BUT! In this case, they really were 'minutinhos'.) 


Can I endure the mental pain to be incurred by recounting the process of seeing a doctor in the Brazilian Public System at Hospital das Clinicas in São Paulo? Let's try:


You walk past the sign 'AMBULATORIOS' (Walk-ins) into a kind-of-outdoor-but-undercover waiting area, where you line up to get your senha (piece of paper with a number). You wait in the plastic seats (for about an hour only, if you are lucky) for your number to appear on a screen, so that you may go into a room for someone to see what your problem is and to get another little piece of paper (after, of course, waiting half an hour in the little room) and then you walk to another part of the hospital where, in our case, the dermatology section is (meanwhile, confused by the earlier nurse's statement that "não se preocupe, vai ser atendido hoje!" [don't worry, you will get to see a doctor today!] - What does she mean? Is there ever any doubt of not being attended to on the same day that you enter the clinic? Hoje? There are still eleven hours left in this day..). There, you wait in another long line to get your little paper 'checked' (this is questionable: Guillaume was marked as 'SEXO: F' on his paper) and another senha, to have the privilege of sitting (again, if you are lucky) with fifty other people out in a long line in the corridor. You wait there for three, four hours, and just as you are falling into your 1000th 30-second-nap for the day, a lady calls out your name to announce the good news: you have permission to leave the corridor and go into the fila da parede (line at the wall) in another room. Then you play musical chairs for one more hour until you reach the end of the  fila da parede and can see the doctor. Meanwhile, you die. "How To Kill One Day In Brazil". It is now dinnertime.


However, I must admit - I did owe Guillaume - and quite specifically, at that - a day at the hospital. More on that in another blog, hah.


OK, that was one of my few visits to public hospitals here in Brazil. 


After that visit I came home exhausted and perturbed: I realised that I had never seen any sign in Brazil ever indicating a general practice. Does everyone here just go to the hospital every single time they have a small ailment? I have seen plenty of signs for dentist offices but never for doctors. Despite my friends protests, I have concluded that general practitioners in Brazil must work in secret, dark, hidden places, or do not even exist; and I will not believe otherwise unless I actually see a doctor's office here (I'm not hopeful about the chances of this).


That evening I also figured out something which has been puzzling me for some time since I arrived: the lack of (normally) integral parts on public toilets here. It is not uncommon to see the flush button on the toilet a simple screw. Did they not finish building it?, you think to yourself the first one, two, three, four times... but you never end up inquiring about this, because, generally, trips to the toilet are not memorable conversational material; it remains a mystery. Next: Where are the toilet seats? This appears even more vital to the toilet than the flush button! Normally, I use the squat-method myself, so no problems, but there come times when this is not a viable option, i.e. perhaps when you are IN THE HOSPITAL and too weak to hold up your own body weight...
Rafael said: Oh, é por causa de vandalismo! It's because of vandalism! 
Like it was so obvious....

A Long-Awaited Entry

Dear Friends,
 I've finally decided to make a blog - it's a bit late though (after four months here already). The thing is, when I got here I thought, oh, this craziness is going to settle down after a little while, what would you have to write about after a few months? I was wrong. Four months on and I am still laughing at myself everyday and noticing odd things about Brazil...


I love Brazil, and I knew that I wanted to stay here longer than I had originally planned, just after a couple days of being here (not during the first hour here though; that was rather traumatic). If you are reading this, you are probably a friend of mine and you've probably already accompanied some of my joys/traumas over here through my Facebook statuses.... You probably already know that I fell in love with Portuguese about a year ago and have been learning it since then, and that I somehow convinced my home university to let me go to USP for credit (when they have never sent anyone to Brazil, ever). A Brazilian friend, Rafael, who I met in Germany on exchange helped me a lot in organising this trip. I arrived here at the end of July 2011, intending to stay until after the carnival 2012. Things have changed though!


I have essentially (as of a couple days, *score*)completed a B.A. in linguistics and French studies, which should be conferred in January 2012 and I will be applying for masters programs in linguistics shortly. (I'm totally not going to say anything about that though because I don't want to jinx myself!! Brazilian laugh: haushauashauahushaauahauahshsuahaushaus, lol) Yes, everyone thinks I am super weird for studying French, everywhere but in France (I also studied in Germany in 2010)...... I have no response to that; I empathise with their confusion!


I met someone wonderful here, I will probably mention him in future blogs :)


Oops. I almost forgot to explain why I named my blog as I did : Brigadeiro (brazilian desert made from condensed milk and usually chocolate) has been my obsession here since Day # 1. Below is a picture of me and a (rather large) example of it:

Me and Iza: Birthday Brigadeiro and Preparation for the Aftermath