Today I left Rio, my new found love. I awoke this morning to a beautiful
morning, and adorned myself in the last clean pairs of shorts and T-shirt I
had, my travel clothes for the day, and walked to the corner to get a
to-go coffee. Then I sauntered down the block to Ipanema beach for one last hang out
with the sea. At 7:30 on a Saturday morning, the beach was already bustling
with people jogging, playing some sort of weird paddle ball over volleyball
nets, and many many beach volleyball courts being set up for what appeared to
be a regular Saturday beach volleyball extravaganza.
I sat down close to the water and drank it, and my coffee, in:
I then promptly spilled coffee all over my last clean pair of shorts and
T-shirt and the desperation to find a lavendaria (laundry place) sunk in. I
also now looked like a total slob sitting on this beautiful beach with
beautiful people in fancy running clothes and sporty, stylish beach volleyball
attires. I walked along the shore for a bit and tried to rub out some of the
rapidly staining coffee spills with sea water and to hopefully cover up the
stains with wet spots so I could at least make it home with people just
thinking the ocean splashed me. I'm ridiculous.
After my airbnb checkout where my host said to me, "I will open
the door for you to leave. In Brazil we have a tradition where if the host
opens the door for you it means you will come back and visit again" (and
he helped me correctly pronounce "Aeroporto Internacional"), I hopped
in a taxi and headed for the airport using my correct pronunciation... or it
might have been closer to Spanish, not sure. Yes, it seems like this would be
easy to pronounce, like many Portuguese words on-paper, yet the words are
rarely pronounced how you think they are going to be pronounced. My perception
of the language so far is that there appears to be no rhyme or reason to the
pronunciations of letters and letter combos and it makes no sense to me. I just
end up guessing, a lot....then the Brazilians just start speaking Spanish to
me.
En route to the airport, catching my last glimpse of Jesus acting all
superior looking down from up there on Corcovado mountain, I was reminded of
the inequities that exist. I left Ipanema, one of the more touristy, upscale
neighbourhoods of Rio, and took the freeway to the airport which is lined on
both sides with high walls. Behind these walls are favelas. I'm sure there is
some justification for these walls by the city as a safety measure, but I
presume that it also works in the City's favour to block from sight Rio's
poverty as people from all over the world head into the City to tourist around
in places like Ipanema and Copacabana.
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A favela viewed from Ipanema beach: even Ipanema cannot keep the favelas down! :-)
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The drive to the airport reminded me that, yes, while this city has a
beautiful vibe and, in many places, is absolutely as developed as North
American cities (with the added degradation of building exteriors that
inevitably come from tropical weather..boohoo), it is still a city in
transition, a "City under Construction".
I arrived at the airport fairly early and set up camp at a table,
pulling my laptop out with the grand intention of FINALLY doing some work. But
nope! I ended up talking with the man sitting at the table next me, an
independent mining engineering consultant from North Vancouver who frequents
Brazil multiple times a year. Of course I was stoked to be having a full
conversation with someone and he was kind of interesting… apparently more
interesting than the work I had intended to do.
A couple beers later I made it to my departure gate and discovered a
gaggle of Canadians headed to the same conference as myself. One person was
even a professor from my alma mater, the U of A School of Public Health, who attended
some of my lunch time yoga classes I taught there during my short stint as a yoga
instructor. Basically this gaggle of Canadians, who were mostly all middle-aged
lady-professors from universities across Canada, was like a big group entirely consisting of my mother….all innocent, sweet, and a bit clueless about how
boarding the airplane was working. SO more conversations!! Yay….?
Then on the plane, the Curitibano man behind me had just come from
living in Montreal for three months and spoke excellent English and the man
beside me was Quebecois who also spoke English. Yay? More conversations?
We landed in Curitiba, the Europe of Brazil, as the sun was setting over
the beautiful cattle country that Parana is. I finally arrived at my airbnb
after an OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive taxi ride (93,00 Reis!!...but actually when I
did the math it was like 34$...but it felt stressfully expensive at the time). Daiana, my beautiful airbnb host, checked me
in. And she spoke excellent English (and French and Spanish and probably
Flemish because she had lived in Belgium for awhile). She is a
videographer and journalist and, until recently, was doing TV reporting here in
the State of Parana. Her and some friends have now established a co-working/entrepreneurial
space in an old house where people with diverse occupations, working for themselves and she is now doing freelance journalism work. She appears to be
about my age, very stylish and very “cultured” with her condo book shelves
containing the works of Allende, Saramago, Bukowski, Nabokov, etc. Anyways, she
is lovely. And her condo is lovely:
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| Airbnb condo in Sao Francisco, Curitiba |
Famished, attired in dirty laundry clothes, I went around the corner for
some dinner at a charming Syrian restaurant owned by a young man and his uncle
who immigrated to Brazil one and a half years ago, before the immigration “crisis”
really ramped up in Europe. I asked him how they chose to come to Brazil at
that time and how they didn’t end up in that desperate flood of Syrian refugees and he said, “people couldn’t
see what was going to happen, I’m a writer, and I love to read, and I could see
where it was going, so I left”. He talked with me relatively extensively,
telling me he missed speaking English and we laughed about the eccentricities
of Portuguese. So, more conversation (and amazing Syrian food leftovers):
After dinner, I was so tired and was tempted to just go back to my
apartment and get a good night sleep, but Daiana, my host, had invited me to
join her and her friends at the jazz club around the corner. Because of the
short time I will have in Curitiba, most of which will be monopolised by
conference stuff, I pushed through my fatigue and headed over to the club. Wow.
WAAAYYY MORE CONVERSATIONS!! All of her friends spoke English incredibly well,
two of them were English teachers, two of them had just returned from living in
Ottawa for a year of university, and the other two were “Sao Paulo” refugees to
Curitiba—getting a way from what is apparently the madness of Sao Paulo to live
a better quality of life. **By the way, Curitiba has been recognised as the
best city to live in in Brazil with it’s forward thinking sustainability
initiatives and highly educated, urbane, multicultural, relatively wealthy 3.6
million inhabitants***
Here we had excellent, fun MORE CONVERSATION, and I was able to get so
many of my questions about Brazil answered! I also learned that Portuguese
pronunciations differ across the regions of Brazil and so it actually doesn’t
really matter how I pronounce anything!! FREEEEE---DOOOMM!
After all of this informative conversation over Caparinhas and
jazz, I walked home and went to bed with a sore throat from all the goddamn
convos. Be careful what you wish for, Adrienne!
And tomorrow, this:
Where something like 1000 people from all over the world will be congregated and at which, I am certain, there will be more talking...
So this travelling "alone" thing isn't a real thing, really, is it?
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