things I miss (and not)

Tuesday I made a list of things I miss. Here they are:

• hot baths for my achy feet and legs
• my bed
• blinds that block the morning sun
• calling people cheaply with minutes for which I've already paid
• my condo
• daylight until 9 pm
• Davis library
• my desk
• family
• friends
• being able to have guests over whenever I want, including crashing with me for the night*
• my guitar
• my gym
• fast, reliable internet
• my MacBook
• my neighbors
• feeling safe(r)
• sharp knives*
• hot, high-pressure showers
• even sidewalks
• yoga

Interesting that I miss comforts, activities and places. While I miss my friends, most of them are gone for the summer so I'd be missing them in NC, too. Same goes for family.

Then I made a list of things I haven't really missed that I might have expected to miss or that other people would miss:

• cooking
• the U.S. presidential election
• NPR
• NetNewsWire
• and the news more generally
• U.S. politics and political culture
• posting to Rulablog
• TV
• misc. websites
• Wii
• World of Warcraft

I find this list more interesting and illuminating than the other one. I'm sure I'd eventually miss cooking, but cooking for one can be tiring and it sure is nice to just have food appear three times a day. I also feel like my cooking is just starting to reach the level where I can really enjoy the process and not just the output.

Most of the other things have to do with information, technology and entertainment in some combination. I'll get caught up on reading my friends blogs via NetNewsWire when I return. I guess this makes me a bad friend, but right now I feel fine being out of the loop even though I'm sure interesting things have been happening in their lives.

When I return I'll go back to playing WoW with my uncle and some friends for a few hours a week, and I'll play the Wii a bit, mostly when friends are over. I haven't bothered with the other sites (goodreads.com, etc.) because it's a huge pain not having the passwords saved on whatever computer I'm using and waiting for slow load times). I'm sure I'll go back to them when I return, but I'll be sure to not get to sucked up. There's so much to life offline.

Enjoying tuning out the news is a subject for another post, perhaps.

I'll also do some more reflecting on if I want to keep doing Rulablog or not.

Apologies for spelling. Spell check doesn't work on this browser. I'll go back and fix it later.

* = Added since the original post.

yay Google Talk!

It has been nice to be able to chat with a few people on Gmail's chat while I've been here. Plenty of my friends aren't on it and I of course don't always end up being online at the same time as some of my friends, but it's nice to catch at leaset a few friends. Of course there are other times back home when chat annoys me and is too distrating. There's a simple solution: log out.

Brazil (Week 4)

Normal routine most of the week. Thursday we went to see Afro-Brazilian dance, which was amazing. There's a small world story there I'll write about sometime. Actually I've had several. Went out for a while that evening, but I headed home relatively early becasue we had to get up the next day.

Friday we had an-all day boat trip around the bay, stopping at two islands for two hours at each one to enjoy nice beaches. I'll eventually upload pictures. The weather was perfect for it.

Saturday morning we made up my graduate seminar, which had to be canceled at the last minute on Wednesday. Took it easy the rest of the day.

Sunday I helped my mom host mom cook lunch. This involved, among other things, putting shrimp in a blender. Family came over for lunch. My friend Katie called to see if I wanted to go to the beach so we did that. I had my first water from a coconut and tried this fruit called açai blended with cashew fruit, frozen with bananas and granola. So good. Then we went back to her apartment and helped her get her computer on the internet. All she needed to do was turn off the wireless card so it would use the ethernet cable. Chatted with her family for a while and then went home.

This week I need to write a couple papers (in Portuguese). I'm going to appreciate having my own computer when I get home.

the joys of language

This blog post is PG-13. Not that I know of any young people reading my blog.

Slang never makes any sense. Three common phrases are legal or optimo ("optimal") where we would use cool (I'm sure there's a distinction--optimo seems to me to be more for when something is really good), and droga as an exclamation where we would say fiddlesticks.

The word for condom is camizinha, litterally "little t-shirt" (I would have gone with "little raincoat" but no one consulted me on the matter). This means that when someone actually needs a little t-shirt (like for a child) s/he needs to say it with the adjective pequeno and not using a diminutive form.

Portuguese has nasalized vowels that don't exsist in English. As in most languages there are words that sound nearly identical to non-native speakers but are actually quite different. Consider, for example, the nasalized pão, bread vs. non-nasal pau, wood. As in English, the word is slang for male anatomy. Pão de queijo is a traditional cheese bread. I'm sure every day foreigners go into stores and mean to ask a man if they carry cheese bread:

"Você tem pão de queijo?"

but actually ask:

"Você tem pau de queijo?"

Of course he'll know what the person is asking and not say anything, but it's got to either annoy or amuse him depending on his personality and the mood he's in that day.

God only knows how many innappropriate things I've said without realizing it. It just comes with the territory of learning a new language.

Che Guevara's Blog

The most serious weekly magazine for politics in Brazil is called Carta Capital. I've heard it described as being like the UK's Economist but leaning left. Each week they have a fake blog for a famous person. They're pretty hilarious. Here are three of the most recent ones:

Che Guevara (legal means cool)

Marx

Mother Teresa (gotta love the comment spam...)

date stamps; albums

How much do the date stamps on my photos bug people? They bug me some, but it's also nice to be sure not to lose the date, though that's also encoded in the file, I believe. My camera always defaults to that when I change the batteries. Now I feel like I want all the Brazil pics to be consistant.

I'm dumping all my pics into the Brazil 2008 album. Over time I'll sort them into albms by location and delete the really bad ones.

distributing Going Away in Brazil

It being my music. I brought a bunch of copies of Going Away with me and I've been giving them to some of the people I meet here, both gringos and Brazilians. It seems weird to say "hey, want to buy my album" to people I just met. It didn't cost much to make the copies and this helps get the music out there. I'll be more hard-nosed about charging for them when I start gigging back in NC. Some people have been very excited by the CD and others less so. I'm just happy to share it with some of the new friends I've made.

Pics from the first three weeks

The nagging got me to do it. My picassa page has the pics up. I haven't sorted them, added captions, linked to maps, or even rotated them, but there they are. Enjoy! I may put a couple in blog posts, but then again I may not.

Katie (my ex-girlfriend and current friend) has a post from when she was back in the U.S. after almost a year abroad listing the "Weirdest things so far." Many of the things that will be strange for me are on her list.

*Drinking fountains, with water you can drink out of

We can drink out of the ones at school but not elsewhere.

*You can drink the tap water

Yep. I've had a little bit, but it probably contributed to my mild digestive difficulties.

*Dollars are bills, not coins.

Yep. Single coins here as well. I read that if the U.S. managed to get us to adopt them we'd save a lot of money because the coins last much longer.

*Free refills

I guess. We don't have them but I hadn't really noticed. Today at Pizza Hut I noticed not being able to get free drinkable water.

*Cars that stay in their lanes

Hell yep.

*Cars that stop for pedestrians

H few do. We give them a thumbs up. Brazilians are all about giving each other the thumbs up. It rubs off.

*Driving for the first time in a year

Will probably be long enough to be a bit weird.

*Grocery stores

We have those.

*Even small children speak English

Yep.

*No one cares about football, of the soccer variety

Yep. Unless I run into a few grad students I know in History (and one in Comp Lit).

Though of course I'll have been gone for a much shorter period.

Brazil: Week 3

Quickly, here's what I did last week.

Monday we watched a video about candomble rituals. Then we went to one. It was a long drive and then the ritual was very long. We left about 11 pm. It consists of a lot of dancing as they channel Orixás. I was very tired, but it was a good cultural experience. If you want a sense of what the dancing is like there are videos on YouTube.

Tuesday my annual report for the Truman was due so I finished that and worked on my outline for my sociolinguistics seminar.

Wednesday we had the seminar then I went to a soccer game with my host mom and host cousin. It was a long trip there by bus. The game was Vitoria (the home team) vs. São Paulo. We left when Vitoria was down 0-3. They scored a goal near the end. It was interesting to see my mild mannered, intellectual cousin become very passionate about the game as we sat there with around 35,000 of our closest friends.

Thursday we went to the airport to register with the police, as required by our visas if we stay longer than 30 days. More on that later, but it went very smoothly.

Friday we headed to the island paradise of Morro de São Paulo, returning Sunday. It was great to just relax and take it easy. Friday I struck up a conversation with two women playing frescobol on the beach, Viviane and Sandra. They were from São Paulo where Viviane does marketing for Calvin Klein and Sandra manages fashion models. We grabbed some food that afternoon and they invited me to meet them at a party at a club that evening. We met up the next day at the beach and that evening for a great, inexpensive traditional Brazilian dinner. It was nice to get so much conversation practice. I also spent time with people in my department hanging out on the beach. The breakfasts at our pousada (inn) was amazing. I really need to write more about food.

things that haven't worked in the past 24 hours

• Sanjay trying to Skype out to my cell phone last night--didn't even show up as a missed call.
• The hot water halfway through my shower.
• The internet connection this morning and at various other times today--slow and couldn't load Google Chat.
• Firefox on another computer--crashed. I screamed "I hate Windows." Actually those weren't my exact words, but my mom reads this blog.
• Various keys on this keyboard.
• The sound on this keyboard even with headphones plugged in.
• The USB port on this computer.

A reminder of all the things I often take for granted. Anyhow, writing a simple outline in Portuguese has been harder than it should be.

photos coming soon, I think

Wednesday when I got to my program director's apartment for seminar my friend Mike who lives with him is going to use his laptop to transfer pics from my camera's card to my usb drive. So Thursday or Friday I should be able to put up some pics.

Laundry Service

And I don't mean the album where Shakira made the (in my opinion) terrible error of starting to sing in English...

I packed light to come here. Just one checked back, a medium sized roller bag. I have a satchel for taking two bags back. So I took a little over a week's worth of clothes, figuring laundry one a week. The key problem is that laundry takes a while. It has to hang dry in a humid country. Also my host mom saves it for the maid's weekly visit so it can be ironed. Today I snuck a pair of boxer shorts out of the to-be-ironed pile because I was out of clean ones. I think I'll buy a few more articles of clothing to help me get through laundry cycles.

specific questions please

People keep asking me `How is Brazil?´That´s overwhelming and I don´t know where to begin. But if you ask more specific questions in the comment section of this post I´ll try to address them in future posts. Fair enough?

Portuguese spam

Got a spam message in Portuguese today. How do the bastards know I´m in Brazil? Spooky.

Brazil: Week 2

Mostly routine stuff, with classes in the morning and activities many afternoons. Monday was a history lecture. Two hours in Portuguese. I followed it okay, partially because I already knew some of the material. The students who are new to the language were frustrated, though, especially a couple of the African-American students. One of them is actually a professional public speaker who lectuers on Black history, so he really would have liked to be able to directly understand her. She was very energetic.

The next day was two hours in Portuguese about Candomble, an Afro-Brazilian religion. I´ll be attending a ritual tomorrow evening.

Wednesday was my first sociolinguistics seminar. It is just me, the other graduate student in our program on FLAS funding and the program director. We read part of book chapters about the differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese. It should be interesting. Totally outside my background. The article I read for this week is on the use of English in advertising. I had dinner at another hostmom´s house because mine had to go get medical tests. That conversation deserves another post.

Thursday was an afternoon off. I took a nap and worked on my annual report for the Truman Scholarship. That evening we went as a group to see Handcock and go out to eat at a nice restaurant.

Friday we went to Cachoeira. Saw the house where Caetano Veloso grew up (he lives in Salvador now--we actually saw that house on our way out of town.). We visited an open air market, a cigar factory, the Sisterhood of the Good Death (a sisterhood formed by freed slaves), and many historic buildings including one where the Brazilian independence movement is said to have gotten its start. On our way there we met with some people from the MST. That is also worthy of another post.

This weekend I took it easy, slept a lot, read for pleasure and studied (both for classes here and my methods comp). Ok. So that´s the quick and dirty summary of what I have been up to. I would love to hear from you. By the way, receiving calls on my cell is free and you can call cheap with Skype or phone cards, so I would love to hear from you.

short posts, too

A friend on the program who is a writer is sending out weekly emails to her friends back home. She read my post summarizing the first week and said it was a little sparse. She´s right. Summarizing all we did left little room for description. So, my plan is to try to summarize each week very briefly and then--as the mood strikes me--do short posts reflecting on particular aspects of my experience here.

day trip to Cachoeira

Tomorrow we´re going here. The Wikipedia page has links to sites with photos. I don´t think I´m going to bother putting any of mine up until I get home, but I promise I will take some.

Brazil: Week 1

It´s been a week since I left. I´ll try and do a post for each week.

Trip here was long but no major problems (unlike the people in my program with canceled flights). Got in mid day to the hotel. Met the other students on the program as the trickled in. Spent the first night in the hotel. Monday was orientation.

Went home with my host mom. Her name is Rute, a variant of Ruth. Brazilian Portuguese pronounces r´s like our h´s and t´s before e´s as ch. I´ll let you all piece that together for yourselves. In any case she tells me I don´t eat enough and need to sit up straight, so she´s filling the bill.

The routine is class 9-12 every morning and then cultural activities a couple afternoons a week. Another graduate student and I are taking a three hour seminar on sociolinguistics Wednesday afternoons. We have several weekend trips planned.

Salvador is the oldest city in Brazil. It is the heart of the sugar area of Brazil. The figures I´ve heard put the African descended population at 75% to 85%. There is a very strong African influence in the culture. The city feel in some ways similar to other places I´ve been in Latin America, but different in ways. The entire vibe is just calm and friendly.

Tuesday we had our placement tests and then went on a tour of the old city. I forgot my camera. I´m not very good about taking pictures. If something is famous there are better pics online, right? Other people in the program will send some and I´ll try to be better about it. So I´ll have some from some things I did.

Wednesday, the 2nd of July is Bahian Independence day (celebrating when they actually drove the Portuguese out, as opposed to the national day which is when they declared it). My host mom put me in touch with her nephew. He studies law and sociology. I met him to go watch a parade in the older part of the city. There were people from various political parties (not one but two communist parties, greens, workers´party), unions, candidates, and activists from the urban wing of the MST (landless movement) and others seeking justice for workers killed in an industrial accident. I thought about how much this contrasted with the parades that would be in Eagle River and Manteca in a couple days...

Friday we had back-to-back cultural events. Dance class (including Samba) followed by capoeira at a local school. The first dance/chant they did was very powerful. It´s hard to describe but it really put me in a focused place and made me think about the resiliance of the human spirit. They had these sticks that the banged together that came from cane cutting. So much hardship in the history of the African peoples and people in general but somehow we refuse to give up. And that´s beautiful.

After demonstrating they had us participate. The guy told me to just do what he did after he did it. So we´d both crouch and he´d kick above my head and then I´d kick above his. A woman in our program actually practices it back in the U.S. and wans to do it here. So that left me tired and since I´m an old man in the group I didn´t go dancing (others did).

Saturday we headed to Praia Forte, the oldest Portuguese building in the Americas. I actually took some pictures. We went with the UCLA group which is 30 something (ours is 11), so I met some cool people, and have a couple new small wold stories (naturally). After seeing the building we had lunch at the house of the Brazilian woman coordinating our program. We spent the night in the town of Praia Forte and all went out dancing last night. Good times. The live music (Samba and other stuff) was great. Today we had a great breakfast and hung out on the beach. Also went to see a museum about the restoration of sea turtles. And now I need to get my stuff at the inn, catch the bus home and then do some homework this evening.

Sorry this is sloppy, but at least I posted.

(note: my computer at home has spell check as I type via the google toolbar. This doesn´t so probably has some errors. I´ll fix them when I get back or later.)