My main fear would be that I’d emerge from the airport and be immediately lost, but my friend assured me if I just got my bags and headed outside, she would find me. And indeed she did, at 7AM no less. From there, we booked it to the bus station to pick up our other friend, who was arriving via bus from her hometown, sixteen hours away. So basically I had a shorter trip from the U.S. to South America than my friend had traveling across the wide expanse of Brazil. Did you know Brazil is actually bigger than the contiguous United States, so asking what Brazil is like is similar to asking “What’s America like?” There’s the coastal bits, the middle barren parts, and of course the rainforests, which were nowhere near where I went.
Rio was hosting the Olympics at this exact same time, but I avoided that of course. All the images of Brazil that flutter over to us — the beaches, the favelas, Carnival — were nowhere to be found. Instead I was in Sao Paolo for a week, which is considered the New York of Brazil. (Although I found it, at first pass, more like San Francisco.) During that time, I didn’t venture out much at night, because it’s dangerous, but did get to spend the week crashing at my friend’s new apartment watching Stranger Things and Gilmore Girls, before relocating to a beautiful AirBnB-ed loft apartment that overlooked the city.
And then a week in, I took the sixteen hour bus ride myself from Sao Paolo to Ponta Pora, which is way on the other side of the country, on the border of Paraguay and Brazil. My friend’s family lives on the Paraguay side, running an import/export business, and I spent the rest of my time there.For the most part, Ponta Pora is a city that exists solely to import stuff from the Paraguay side to the Brazil side. Also, it’s the drug delivery center for Paraguay, so it’s also quite dangerous, with drug related killings happening quite often. I was assured “normal” people were never harmed though, during these incidents. One wild thing about Brazil/Paraguay is that the news outlets have no compunction against publishing the goriest photos of crime scenes and killings. It’s quite a shock to see the grisly images splashed on the front pages.
I spent most of my days hanging out, talking with D’s family, watching their daily life unfold, and getting to see a side of small town Brazil that most people wouldn’t experience. The entire town is only twenty thousand people, but in actuality it wasn’t that small, despite what D had advertised before. I had thought no movie theater would mean it's tiny, but really it's just like say, a Rancho Bernardo, minus the neighboring communities.
It was interesting to be immersed in a culture that I understood very little about, and to be in an environment where I understood nothing. From how banks worked, to all the armed guards at every place of business, to how people thought about various things (especially their views on race and ethnicity). It felt like the first few months in Taiwan, where everything was interesting simply by it being new and different.
Overall I found myself adapting to the rhythm of each day, and it coincided nicely with the kind of quiet I was looking for. And I turned from a late-night person into a semi-normal time person. I haven't really lived with another family for so long, not since my time in England, and D's family's strict mealtimes and schedules was a change for me. But like I said, I adapted pretty easily. I think.
And I found it very interesting to learn more about the families who moved from Taiwan to Brazil, seeking a better future and finding it in creation of their own businesses. Nowadays when we overthink every decision to go from even one coast to the other, it's hard to fathom how parents of our generation just picked up and left their home country, without any language, any prior conception of their destination, and often with no money in their pocket. Immigrants are so brave.
While originally I wasn't sure how long I'd be down there, I ended up coming back to the U.S. after about six weeks. And on the day before I left, I turned thirty-eight. And thus I turned into an adult. But more on that later. Here’s more about my trip down south, from the other blog. And with that, "boa noite!"
