Two Sides Of Brasil

I decided to do an English picnic for my older students on our last day, as my friend Graham was making a timely entry onto the stage for the last act in my Brasilian novela and had agreed to bring the food over. My students aren't the most reliable bunch and I knew some wouldn't turn up, so I was bound to have leftovers. I made more than I needed, though, as I'd had a thought.

Only four students did actually turn up, of which one immediately went off to hospital. Yes, ha ha, but no, this had nothing to do with my picnic... They were a little tongue-tied due to the presence of a large blond stranger in their midst, but I'd printed a few questions about their future as a conversation subject. One of the boys claimed he wanted to marry and have children, so I asked if he'd share the housework. He shook his head and I asked the girls if they’d make their future husbands help. They laughed and said, no, they'd have a maid. Thus spake middle-class Brazil.

They gamely tried all the food, but naturally there was a large amount left over. This suited me fine, though, as I was planning to take it into the nearby favela and do a second little festinha for the kids there. Having said our goodbyes, Graham and I grabbed the bags and some extra food, stuffed all our valuables into various sweaty hiding-places, and set off.

He knew about my plan and was up for coming along, but I did have a moment's misgiving about dragging him along on a whim of mine to a potentially nasty and dangerous experience. I raised the subject with him, but he has a fairly similar attitude to me on these things and was well aware of the potential dangers, so we carried on anyway.

Actually walking into the favela, though, I was mainly nervous about the gesture being taken the wrong way, despite knowing from experience that food offered to poor people here will be accepted without question. Even so, I didn't bother with the slightly unnerving little cluster of young men at the entrance, but continued down the dirt lane to where some children were playing. I called them over and explained that I was an English teacher, I'd had a little party for my students but had too much food and did they want some. 'We want', they said, with that irresistible Portuguese syntax.

Feeling like a total weirdo (as indeed I probably looked), I found a convenient concrete space and started unwrapping the plates. They stood watching, rather bemused, but luckily Graham thought to start offering packets of crisps round in the meantime, which were eagerly accepted. The Bakewell tarts went fairly quickly, but we really had to encourage them at first; I was surprised by how diffident they were, even when there was quite a little crowd. When there were new arrivals, we always had to actually pick up a plate and offering it to them, or they'd have just stood and watched. It was only a bit later, going home on the bus, that the contrast with my nine-year-old, middle-class pupils occurred to me. They would have shoved me and each other out of the way to get to the food.

I'd have loved to photograph them, but didn't want to do a big poverty-tourism thing; however, when they’d finished eating and we were about to go, I asked if I could take a photo and they agreed happily, calling out 'Photo!' to the ones who were drifiting away, who came back too.

I promised to bring them prints of this one (below), and as we walked away, we passed the group of young men again. One of them was still eating a sandwich. 'Obrigado', he called. ''Nada', I said, and we went to get the bus.

The Enchanted Archipelago

I think anyone, and especially anyone who's ever read My Family And Other Animals, will understand what I mean when I say that there's a ring of enchantment and exploration and Eden in the word 'archipelago'. It makes me think of tiny palm-fringed islands, separated from bigger, birdsong-loud but still untouched shores, by secret channels and water so clear you can see the white sand lying full fathoms five.

As such a paradise really does exist near here, and as Dan was over for my birthday, we decided to splash out a bit and go to Fernando de Noronha, an archipelago an hour's flight out into the ocean which is 'visited by thousands of dolphins every morning', acording to a guidebook I read much later. It's renowned for its diving and marine life, and for a natural beauty sustained at least partly by a daily 'eco-tax' for all visiting tourists.

It's not easy to get to, and I had to swallow my traveller's snobbishness and buy a four-day package, which put us in a silly mood from the start by turning out to include a whole set of bright-yellow-and-white travel gear; weekend bags, passport wallets and so on. I'd like to show you the photo of us posing proudly by the plane with them, but I look hideous in it, so you'll have to be content with this one of the soap provided at the pousada, which pleased us mightily.



But it wasn't all sniggering over childish innuendoes. In our four days, we snorkelled, went on a boat trip, dived and, er, drank, and here are the results.

Diving down into the strange, silent world of underwater, you're constantly looking around, fascinated but wary of what might appear out of the murky gloom at the limits of your vision. Things aren't always obvious at first, but oh, what a thrill when you catch sight of something like this:



...and see it gliding and skimming over invisible swells and currents with effortless grace...





Turtles are far easier to spot, but still wonderful to see actually there in the sea, in their home rather than two-dimensionally on a flickering square in your living room…



Especially when they start going all Saturday Night Fever on you…



However, island life isn't all living it up int the sea and on the beach; it has its dangers too. Apart from the old staple, going snorkelling and forgetting your sunscreen:



…there's the siren call of caipirinhas, which can make you decide that pretending to be the French soldiers out of Monty Python is a good idea:



…get you speared by an angry swordfish:



…or even turned into a singing mermaid. The guide books don't warn you about this.



Such hazards aside, however, it was fantastic. I never thought turning thirtysoddingtwo could be so much fun.

Rude Food

My cooking head reattached itself recently, after a lengthy absence, and inspired me to buy a book of Brazilian recipes. It was surprisingly hard just finding a kind of 'overview' book – they all seemed to be either A Hundred And One Ways To Use Condensed Milk (and believe me, that book could run to several volumes in this goddamned place. You think you're getting lemon meringue pie and it turns out to be full of sticky, nasty… but anyway.), or books by foreign celebrity chefs – Jamie Oliver is very popular in Brazil, for some reason. Maybe fat tongues are a sign of virility here.

I did eventually find a good 'un, though, and I thought I'd start with feijoada, as it's the national dish and didn't look all that hard. It's a kind of tasty stew with black beans and various bits of pig, served with rice. The recipe called for a daunting array of different cuts of pork and sausage, but the supermarkets here sell packets of assorted meat for feijoada, so all was cool. These packets come vaccuum-packed so that you can't see all the contents, so I was expecting a few surprises, perhaps a trotter or a few unidentifiable bits of pig. However, the last thing I expected was – well, I *think* it was – a tail. It gave me a dreadful turn when I shook out the packet into a bowl, I can tell you. However, I soldiered on, and by the time I had all the ingredients chopped and cooking and Dan happened to phone, it had amused me enough to get my camera out:



I was already getting the giggles when I started trying to describe it to him. Stirring the pot all the while, it seemed to take on a life of its own… every time I calmed down a bit, it would poke itself above the surface to say hello…



After this, it all got a bit Carry On: no sooner did I poke the tail firmly down again, than other things began to surface that, in my heightened state of amusement, looked extremely questionable and honestly, I had tears in my eyes by the end of it.





However, the feijoada turned out fine, although a bit salty because I hadn't had time to soak some of the meat properly. The weird thing is that everyone who’s seen the pictures has asked me if I ate the tail. Er… no. For some reason, readers, I found myself a little reluctant to excavate a negligible amount of meat from this repulsive-looking orifice at the back.



So there you go. A delicious and tasty meal; almost literally, a silk purse from a sow's ear. And if you're VERY lucky, when I get home, I might just cook it for you too.


Still to come: Trip to a Tropical Paradise! Extreme sunburn! And me as a mermaid!

World's Worst Blogger

Oh dear, where has all the time gone!? I can't believe it's only three weeks until I get back. Naturally, it feels as if I've just got used to my life as an honorary brasileira, and now I'm coming home. And the closer it gets, the more the huge gravitational pull of friends, family &c on the other side of the Atlantic is being countered by the tugging at my heartstrings of all the things I love about this country.

Living here; cycling to work and to the beach; driving round the city with the girls; shouting at and laughing with my pupils; feeling happy in the sunshine; trying to think of entertaining ways to teach grammar; drinking and dancing and eating barbecued meat – it’s been mostly wonderful and sometimes a massive headache, but I was always busy doing it and haven’t kept this blog up as I intended. So this is a little bit about what my life is like here. And a gratuitous photo of Recife beach (during a big public event, hence crowds):




Teaching..

Term at junior school ended last Wednesday and I said goodbye to my little kids. They stayed true to form till the end: this yelling maelstrom was the result of me mentioning that I wanted to take a photo of them:



...and was abruptly ended by the tears of the little boy at front right, who's just been elbowed in the face.

Naturally, when I had a photo with just the girls, all was sweetness and light...



...and the only tears were for the farewells. I'll miss them, but I suspect I'll mainly be remembered as the teacher that often had to ask them for the word I needed in order to tell them off properly – seriously. They used to love correcting me when I got it all wrong, although sometimes I stumped even them – ha!

One occasion in particular stands out – trying to get them all to sit down, I began with my customary Ham-Actors-from-Blackadder-3-style 'Rrroarrr' to get their attention, and then said very forcefully, "Todo mundo sentado AGORA! Eu não quero ver NINGUEM parada! Se alguem fica parada mais uma vez, vai SAIR da sala!". They looked mystified. Trying to improvise with Spanish, what I'd actually said was not far off "Everybody sit down NOW! I don’t want to see ANYONE bus stop! If anyone’s bus stop one more time, they’ll go OUTSIDE the classroom!".

Not my finest hour, linguistically speaking. It did calm them down for a bit though, while we all worked out together what I was trying to say.

At home…

I've only taught part-time all this time, and working for Butterbeans as well has meant spending a lot of time alone in my flat, and in fact began to wonder if that had become a bit too much this morning. After declaring war on the cockroaches with every chemical weapon at my disposal, I routed them horse, foot and artillery months ago, but have never succeeded in ridding the place of the tiny ants that get everywhere. Every so often, when they form actual columns to march for death or glory on some forgotten crumb, I defy my conscience and massacre them in droves, but mostly I just try and ignore them.

Feeling magnanimous this morning, though, as a small file of them trekked industriously across the hob, I found myself gesturing grandly at them with the stove-lighter and intoning, "You May Live". Really: I said this out loud. However, I'm telIing myself I don't *really* need to worry until they start to reply.

I've really enjoyed just pottering round my little flat though. Reading in the hammock with a cold beer to hand is one of my all-time favourite ways to spend an afternoon, and I've got through some serious tomes since I've been here, including Susan Faludi's second book, a surprisingly readable 700-page explanation of why it isn't ALL men's fault.

I frequently fall asleep in the hammock, because it's more comfortable than my bed; my mattress is made of sponge-lite(TM); a stunted, emaciated, possibly early Pleistocene forebear of sponge foam. It covers the double bed, but I can pick it up and wave it around quite easily with one hand. More pertinently, I can feel every slat beneath digging into my hip and shoulder. I only thought of putting cardboard boxes underneath about a month ago, sadly, so I'll probably come back with the beginnings of some horrible spine curvature or something, and have to take up a career in bell-ringing. I hope you'll all still be my friend. :-(

Socially…

However, life here isn't all crazy parties with insects. I've been extremely lazy about making friends, mainly because Aline's group are cool, so I've just latched onto them. Apart from saving my bacon a hundred times, from finding me a flat to sorting me out a rented fridge after I stabbed mine to death while trying to defrost it, my sweet Aline has also nagged me more than my mum ever has.



Unfortunately, her stupid firm transferred her to Salvador a couple of months ago, but by that time her family and I had adopted each other, and apart from when Dan was here, I don't think I've ever gone more than a couple of days without seeing them.

Mah bezzies: Janaina, Meire and Alice



Don't miss the next instalment: Thrilling tales of culinary adventures featuring "Mish's Genital Gumbo" - with pictures!

Oh... and I'm back on 17th July. :-)

The Joys of Being Foreign, pt 2

Come back Ken, all is forgiven

I find taxis are very habit-forming. You buy some expensive item and hail a cab to transport it home securely one day, and the next thing you know you’re slinging another 24 cans of beer into your trolley every time you go to the supermarket, so as to justify riding home in comfort. Or maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, having trudged round Shopping Recife (there’s a reason why you’ve never heard the phrase ‘imaginatively-named mall’) on yet another fruitless search for speakers for my laptop the other day, I had nothing to show for it and resolved to take the bus home. This is always a bit risky, as I don’t know enough place names to be sure of where they are going based on what they say on the front panel. However, this one said ‘Airport’, which is about five minutes away from me, so I thought I was pretty safe.

What I wanted to avoid was having to ask someone, and then getting into a long conversation which would end, as always, with me pretending to understand solely in order to extricate myself. I could have walked it in about ten minutes, but I’d walked a lot that day and was really tired.

Airport, my arse. A scenic two hours later, we pulled up not at the same bus-stop exactly, oh no. This bus-stop was *the other side* of the several-acre Shopping Recife complex. Imagine how I laughed when I realised that I had added not just two hours worth of time onto my ten-minute walk home, but also about a quarter of a mile.

Mind you, when I realised, after getting off the bus and managing not to shake my fist at its stupid self-satisfied rear end, that it would now actually be on its way to the airport, via my house, I nearly split my sides.

Páscua-super-mare

Easter means different things to different people. For many of us, it means masses of chocolate and two days off to eat it. Over here, its religious significance is given much more attention. I was surprised and interested to see all the little kids in my class dressed in white (why?), although this failed to have a calming New Age effect on them. Revved up by chocolate and the prospect of a short holiday, they yelled just about continuously for the entire hour. My only (slightly pathetic)comfort was that, during the fleeting moments when I managed to get them to stop shouting, we were deafened by the roars from the other two groups in the adjacent classrooms. Ha! None of the other teachers could control theirs either!

I was also buoyed up by the knowledge that I was about to spend the weekend at Meire's family's beach house. Among her many fine qualities is having a pair of loaded parents: see below for why. It was her birthday, so about sixteen of her friends plus a few children all crowded happily into the place (I say 'crowded', but it has six bedrooms, each with a bathroom that makes mine look like a Portaloo), along with three domestics who kept up a constant supply of barbecue (after Good Friday, that is... it was strictly fish-only on the Holy Day), cold beer and other delights. Check it out...



It was excellent. The only clouds on the horizon were servant-guilt, forced inactivity and the usual barrage of Portuguese, but, well, I survived somehow. Frequent infusions of beer helped with the last two, as did an impromptu ride. We were out on the beach on the first afternoon and two boys came riding past, and for some reason one of the guys asked me half-jokingly if I fancied a go. People ride horses a lot here, even in the city, and I've been absolutely dying to have a go, so I leapt at the chance and, amazingly, the boy agreed to let me borrow his horse. And after a minute or so of slightly embarrassing attempts to get the damn thing to move, she responded heroically to a kick in the ribs, and took me for a blissful gallop right up the beach and back, which was a fantastic start to the weekend. Yee-ha.

The Joys of Being Foreign

An occasional series, devoted to the many and varied ‘learning experiences’ one encounters along the road to fluency in a foreign language.

JESUS CHRIST, SAVE ME FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS…

Brazil is a mahoosively Catholic country. The churches are packed out for Mass every evening, and it’s only just beginning to sink in that all those ‘God will keep me safe’ and ‘Jesus is walking with me’ t-shirts and bumper stickers you see everywhere aren’t meant to be ironic. Coming from England and seeing slogans like ‘Jesus is coming’, you kind of expect stuff like ‘…look busy’.

I'll chat to anyone to practise my Portuguese, so I’m constantly falling into the clutches of the Random Converters. These people start conversations so that thirty seconds into them, they can hand you a little printed tract and ask if you’ve accepted “Jeh-zoo-ees Crees-toh” into your life. They’re mostly perfectly nice, so I don’t want to be rude (ie honest), and I find myself apologetically explaining that my parents were atheists and it’s very hard to develop faith if you weren’t brought up into it.

Unfortunately, some of them, like the guy I was just trying to buy bread from, take that as a challenge; finally, a chance to prove their devotion AND save another soul! Or the woman in the supermarket whose daughter was talking to me at the fish counter (where she was poking all the fish’s eyes out with somewhat un-Christian glee; a future Torquemada, perhaps?). The weird thing is, after a monologue masquerading as a conversation thanks to the occasional ‘But…’ from me, they all have the same parting shot. “Jesus Loves You!”, they say, nodding significantly, and I try and look as if I’ll certainly give it some thought.

However, that phrase just reminds me of Salvador. The favelas there, like those in Rio, are perched on the steepest, muddiest, most prone-to-landslides-causing-multiple-deaths-every-time-it-rains-a-bit hillsides above the city, so they’re generally visible from the streets. In this case, someone had picked their way up the dirt roads and across the overflowing gutters, and bothered to whitewash the wall of a shack just so they could stencil “JESUS TE AMA” in stentorian black capitals on it. At the time, I felt genuinely guilty about the thought that came unbidden into my head: “Well, maybe so, but he doesn’t seem all that bothered about you, does he?”. Luckily, I've now realised that Satan must have put it there.

The ink is black, the page is white/Together we learn to scream and fight...

Imagine the shortest 'o' you can. Imagine the 'o' in 'hot', and then imagine yourself cutting the sound off rather than letting it trail away. And then - well, you can imagine someone else doing this bit - imagine them saying 'tee-chair'. 'O tee-chair'.

This is how the kids in my classes get my attention, and although 'O' is not as nineteenth-century-poet as it sounds and in fact is more akin to 'hey', the way they say it sounds so sweetly plaintive to my English ear that I have to suppress a grin every time I hear it.

Some of the younger ones can’t quite manage ‘teacher’, and call me ‘Tia’ (auntie) instead. This just makes me laugh.

N-N-N-N-N-NINE YEAR OLDS

There are some things you don't really know unless you're a parent. I never know when it’s half term back home, for instance, and am always unpleasantly surprised by the sudden flocks of pygmies noisily infesting shopping centres and public transport.

And when I accepted an offer to take over a class of nine-year-olds from a pregnant colleague, I discovered that I had only the vaguest idea of what nine-year-olds actually look like. I mean come on, fellow non-parents: how big are they, for instance?

What I wasn't prepared for was that they would be so adorably cute. On my first day, confronted with a circle of enormous shining eyes and little, spindly, delicate limbs, I felt as if I was teaching a classful of Bambis. Or… or… baby seals, or something.

An hour later, having shouted more in that period than I have in the previous *fifteen years*, I was almost beginning to sympathise with the Canadians. If only the little buggers would just shut the fuck up for thirty seconds, they'd be so lovely that I'd have wanted to take them all home and keep them as pets. Hmm... perhaps that's why God made them that way, eh? *strokes beard philosophically*

Anyway, I have discovered that making them sit boy-girl-boy-girl rather than in the same-sex groups they’d have chosen has an almost miraculously calming effect on the volume levels. I’m sorry, Dan, I know you were railing against the sexism of ‘sugar and spice’ versus ‘puppy dog’s tails’ at five years old or whenever it was, but it turns out to be true. Little boys are monsters. Little girls are nice.

THE TERRIBLE TEENS

"If you want a man to eat for a day, give him a fish. If, on the other hand, you want a man to stare blankly at you and then copy his friend, try and teach him to fish." You deluded fool.

It’s impossible not to be emotionally engaged with your class. If, half an hour into your lesson, the kids are politely smothering yawns and surreptitiously looking at their watches, it’s hard not to feel as if you’ve failed. On the other hand, when they’re so engaged they’re getting flustered when it’s their turn, and taking the piss out of the others when it’s not, and even come and argue about who won after the class has ended, it’s a brilliant feeling.

My other class are aged 13-15, and some of them are terrifyingly cool. It's hard to judge what teenagers are going to like; some of the games I think they'll enjoy cause them to nearly dislocate their eyeballs, rolling them around. And yet when I gave them an exercise which involved cutting pictures out of magazines, they all fought over the scissors. Work that one out if you can. It's certainly taking me a while.

I can't even fall back on what I would have liked at their age, since I wasn't a very cool teenager. In fact, I was so insufferable that Dan, who was apparently also a bit of a geeky smart-alec at school, has questioned the wisdom of our having children at all. I can see his point; with our combined genes, we'd spend all that money on nappies only for them to be lynched within minutes of arriving for their first day of school. And who wants to spend nine months worrying about giving birth to Eugene from Grease?

Day 3: Bloco Party

From the earliest days of Carnaval in Rio and elsewhere, it’s been a tradition that anything goes during these four days, and there are loads of hoary myths about masked couples kissing and then discovering they’re husband and wife, or brother and sister (I am quoting an official source here). This should obviously be taken with a pinch of salt, although the number of by-the-hour motels does beg a few questions, but it’s unquestionable that the tradition of indiscriminate kissing is still a huge part of the carnival spirit.

As a resolute spectator – this time round! – from that point of view, it was actually very funny to look round for a friend every so often and see just the back of her head, firmly clamped to a stranger’s by his hand… or possibly just the power of suction. You have to be careful though; merely catching someone’s eye and smiling is invitation enough, and since I was grinning like a loon pretty much all the time, I must have spent the whole four nights looking like a particularly incompetent liar.

It could be sordid, I suppose, but waxing drunkenly lyrical later, it seemed like the happy and natural result of a concentration of youth, health and sexuality – what the world could have been like had *strenuously avoids the R word* people’s endless desire to control each other not got in the way. [That’s enough uninformed opinion. Ed]

Anyway, this was our night in a bloco, which the girls were very excited about (and in fact, I think, this was their favourite night). The blocos consist of two huge lorries with the band on top of one and the toilets, bar and first aid on the other, plus the surrounding groups of up to two thousand people, all wearing the official vests to show they’ve paid for the privilege. There’s a whole street of makeshift tailor’s shops, where the girls take their vests in the daytime to be customised almost into oblivion; it’s like a competition to see who can leave the smallest amount of material while still being identifiable by the bloco security and allowed within the ropes.

The unsung heroes of carnival are the cordeiros, the several hundred rope-holders who circle each bloco, keeping the whole thing together with no more protection from the coarse rope and the mayhem on the street than a pair of old gloves. They’re mostly black and invariably poor, and are paid around £4.50 for at least eight hours of hauling, straining and acting as a human shield for the people in the bloco. The bloco fills most of the road, leaving only the pavement for the stalls and vendors, plus all the pipoca (the ‘popcorn’ crowds, remember?) to squeeze into, and the cordeiros bear the brunt of the resulting chaos. None of this occurred to me until I read – kind of – an article in the paper the next day about a journalist who’d gone ‘undercover’ as a cordeira. It was quite sobering to hear that the euphoria of the choruses is also the part the cordeiros dread; she said that the worst time for fights was, unsurprisingly, when everything goes mad during the most popular ones.

There are large, cross security men every ten yards or so within the bloco, and they are as bad as the police in many ways – the second there’s any kind of trouble, they pile in at warp speed with extraordinary violence, and don’t bother with the asking questions later. However, the police have more power and (perhaps as a result) added spite. As one of their five-man files passed at one point, there was a can-collector scrabbling around in front of them, trying to grab the few cans that had just been tossed aside from the bloco. This is what some people live and feed families on; the R$3 (75p) they earn from each kilo of cans, but even so he was very careful to stay out of the police’s way. As he straightened up with his back to the last policeman, however, off-balance as he counted his cans, the policeman turned back to give him a great full-bodied shove into the line of cordeiros, leaving one of them holding her face where his shoulder had smashed into it. I bet the miserable bastard beats his wife.

Anyway, as a pasty gringa with a bloco vest on, I was relatively safe from such kind attentions, and this, plus the fact that the bloco had assembled in the early afternoon, plus the fact that I hadn’t eaten much, meant that I drank not wisely but too well. The final hours passed in a merry blur and I forgot about our meeting point at the end and struck out to find my own way home, carrying my shoes to save my filthy, aching feet. I promptly got lost and may have burst briefly into tears at one point, although this last information was obtained from a highly unreliable witness, ie myself.

It was a good experience, and fun in many ways, but I guess I’m just a peasant really, as I still prefer the streets. It’s easy to romanticise things as a foreigner, and the girls I was with are very wary of the pipoca (although being middle class, their natural environment would be a bloco or camarote), but on the other hand, only a hundred thousand or so of Salvador’s two million enthusiastic revellers are foreigners, so clearly some people like it.

__________________________________________

I won’t do a separate post about the last night, as it was a bit of an anti-climax; more of the same, but half-heartedly so as Janaina was headachy and Meire was a bit tearful about not having been able to meet up again with some guy, plus we were leaving really early the next day (when my fears about the roads were sadly proved correct – of the two major crashes we saw, one certainly involved multiple fatalities). It had been a second once-in-a-lifetime experience, though, if that makes any sense at all, and apparently, there’s another major festival in June…

Day 2: So rone-ree!

My second day in Salvador was spent fazendo de gato zapato, although I didn’t know it at the time. We’d gone to buy a place in a bloco for the next day, and after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, went for Bloco Cheiro at R$120 (£30ish) each. The girls were so busy haggling and discussing what they could afford and so on, that I had very little idea of what was going on amid all the rapid, slang-ridden Portuguese and unexplained changes of plan.

It was only when we finally went for dinner that they explained that fazendo de gato zapato means just going along with everything without question. I'm not sure whether it would translate better as 'easy-going' or 'brain-dead', to be honest, but thought it might be better not to know. Anyway, it usually works out fine; in the restaurant, for instance, they ordered moqueca, a local speciality of saffron-spiced prawn stew that I’d always wanted to try, and it was gorjus.

The girls were tired and anticipating a long day tomorrow, so they decided to stay in that night. There was no way I was watching any of what could be my last ever Carnaval on TV, though, and to be honest I was very happy to spend one night doing exactly as I wanted. This was to return to Barra, the area where M2 and I had stayed in 2004 and one of the two big circuits, and the only one next to the beach.

I got the bus back into town quite easily, apart from attempting to flag one down from the wrong side of the road. Briefly puzzled by the driver’s blank stare, I then felt like an utter spazz, as everyone else politely ignored the waving nutter and boarded the bus which was now pulling up on our side. MEH.

But it was a longer ride than I’d expected, and I didn’t get to Barra till 9.30. The girls had said that the best bands would have gone by about ten or eleven, and I started to wonder if this was really such a good idea. More so when the first thing I saw at the main Avenida da Barra was a crowd of people and paramedics; obviously the aftermath of a fight. I peered through and saw a man and quite a lot of blood, although luckily he was conscious and moving. For some reason, this failed to lift my mood, as did being briskly shoved aside a moment later. The street had started filling up with the surge of people that always precedes a float, a bit like when Arwen calls up the river waters in Lord of the Rings.[/geek moment] I stepped up onto the pavement among the beer sellers to avoid the crush, and began to sway rather listlessly to the end of a tune I didn’t know.

Seconds later, the first bars of possibly my all-time favourite Brazilian tune, the undisputed anthem of 2004, crashed out from the sound system. The float was Daniela Mercury’s, the song was Maimbê Dandâ, and I was over the moon. I’m embarrassed to say I was actually blinking back tears… it felt like 2004 all over again, when all this was a shiny new adventure and I danced all night and came home on a quiet bus as the pearly dawn light coloured the entire bay a delicate rose-pink, while a group at the back softly sang this same tune.

So it all came right in the end, and I danced alone or with randoms for a few hours, drank beer, and cheerfully dodged three or four nasty but short-lived fights and a rather persistent cordeiro. I have to admit that the police, humourless vicious bastards as they are (more on this later), are also so ubiquitous that they are there in seconds when a fight breaks out. Also, the men in general, being typical South American machistas, are pretty protective of the women and I was shielded by complete strangers the only time a minor stampede came anywhere near me.

It was still in full swing at midnight and I was *dying* to stay, but had promised Aline I’d be back by 12, so reluctantly went to get a taxi. The taxista was shocked that I’d refused to kiss the guy who’d showed me where the taxi rank was, and spent the whole ride telling me how I couldn’t leave without sampling the local negrinhos (just about translatable as ‘homeboys’).
Those very male double standards - you can't really call it logic - about the fidelity of other people's girlfriends made me laugh so much that it was actually quite a good end to the night. I always seem to forget how little of a language I know when I'm blasting people... it's very odd. ;-)

Carnival Day 1: Alô Salvadooooor!

I was very glad to arrive in Salvador, for more than merely carnival-related reasons, after a hair-raising 800km career across potholed one-lane highways. During the journey I confirmed with the help of my trusty Portuguese dictionary that Brazilians have no phrase for 'tail-gating'. Or for 'blind bend' (see: Overtaking On A). Or, indeed, for 'death wish'. This is rather like the British not having a phrase for 'getting drunk'.

However, two million people somehow arrive in Salvador to line the streets for Carnaval, and only the people looking down from the camarotes (raised viewing cabins) are here as spectators. The rest have come to dance, to sing, to drink and kiss, and occasionally to fight. The streets fill up more the closer you get to the circuits, with makeshift beer and barbecue stalls dotted everywhere and groups of happy, excited people merging into the joyful chaos of the big avenidas.

The excitement reaches its height as the best groups come by on the most popular floats and the pounding beats of the biggest songs begin. Down among the pipoca (literally, popcorn), as the crowds are so appositely known, I am reminded of something I once read about locusts. Apparently, in the right conditions, they hatch out in their millions and the heat and the constant stimulation of overcrowding, having to climb over and around and on top of each other, causes them to mutate from small, drab, olive-green creatures into an oversized swarm of bright, sharp orange.

With the singers yelling above the music and whipping up the crowds as the chorus builds, the individually swaying and samba-ing dancers seem to merge, with the heat and the overcrowding, into great swelling waves of people leaping into the air and waving their arms, shouting along in unthinking, giddy euphoria. I thought I remembered what it was like to be in the middle of all this, but it can only really be physically felt. Oh, it's so breathtakingly mental. I’d picked up some of the words from the girls, and even four days later writing this, I can still hear ‘Quebra-ai, quebra-ai, olho o Aza ai!’ being belted out a hundred thousand strong, and it’s still making me smile.

Mind you, being a lowly street reveller has its problems. Every building along the main avenue is boarded up at the front, and there’s a severe lack of Portaloos. As always, this isn’t as much of a problem for the men, who then add insult to injury by leaving the pavements streaming with rankness. *stamps foot* It’s SO UNFAIR! And as I left the girls in order to fight my way through the crowds at a snail’s pace, looking everywhere for even the smallest corner to crouch in (believe me, I wasn't fussy after a while), things were starting to get desperate.

Right, I thought, f*ck this. There have to be some advantages to being linguistically marooned. I went up to the nearest boarded-up apartment block and told the security guard in English that I was a friend of Ana Paula’s and she’d said I could come in. Obviously, during Carnaval the avenue flats are busy with parties and so on, and I was hoping at best to be directed to the ground-floor toilets that most blocks have, or at worst, be told to sod off. The security guard asked me a few questions in Portuguese which I pretended not to understand, including whether I meant the Ana Paula on the third floor. Bingo! I smiled and repeated ‘Yes! Ana Paula!’, and the poor guy, clearly at a loss, wisely passed the buck by calling over a resident who allegedly spoke English.

This guy spoke our dear language badly enough that by replying enthusiastically and at length to everything he said, I confused him sufficiently to say he’d take me up to Ana Paula’s flat. Naturally, he didn't wish to admit that he hadn't a scooby doo what I was on about, especially in front of the lowly security guard . Going up the stairs allowed me time to ask myself what on earth I thought I was doing, and also to agree with him that, yes, I was indeed Ana’s friend Carol. This momentarily appeared to have badly backfired when Ana’s friend Carol answered the door, but thank Beelzebub and all his devils, Ana was unable to say she'd never set eyes on me before, as she was out. My rather bemused namesake pointed me to the bathroom, where the utter, sweet relief now left room to feel rather bad about taking advantage of everyone’s good nature.

However, sisters, we must not fear collateral damage when duty calls us to take a stand against yet another example of ruthless phallocentric oppression. Protesting against which, incidentally, was obviously my main motivation for this selfless deed. Nay, let it never be whispered that I allowed a couple of sheets of bog-roll to stand in the way of the Glorious Wimminstruggle. Every little helps, eh? Hasta la victoria siempre!

Those who can, ...come back tomorrow

I finally got my merda together to try and get some teaching work, which has turned out to be a very... Brazilian experience. The school asked me to come in for an informal interview last Friday, at which they told me they didn’t have any work for me. They then phoned half an hour later and said they had a class for me at a school out in the suburbs, and could I start on Monday. I sat up preparing my lesson for most of Sunday night, trying desperately to eke out activities to fill the 75 minutes, and turned up bright and early and gibbering slightly with fear for my class on Monday.

On arrival at the school, friendly greetings immediately became blank looks when I said I was here for my lesson, and it turned out there was no such class on Mondays. I was breezily told to come back the next day. Maybe. They would phone me in the morning to confirm. I waited to graciously wave away the apology for their lack of organisation, and after a short silence, began the quarter-mile trudge back to the bus stop for my 40-minute journey home in 40-degree heat. The sanguine, philosophical nature of my reflections on the differences between Brazilian and English attitudes to needlessly wasting several hours of people’s goddamn time can probably be imagined.

However, they did manage to confirm, and I had my first lesson yesterday. The residual effect of phoning students on the morning of the lesson to tell them about it was that ten minutes after it was due to start, a total of three students had turned up. I tried not to panic too obviously about the fact that most of my getting-to-know-you activities involved team games, but the relief probably showed on my face when, just as my non-team activities finished, a fourth student arrived, and my bacon was saved.

Well, to an extent. There’s a slight going-through-the-motions forlornness about four children sitting close together in the middle of a large, echoing classroom, competing gamely despite the fact that one team are winning everything because their teacher doesn’t know them well enough to pair the dumb kids with the clever ones.

*tumbleweed*

Still! There are always reasons to be cheerful. After all, one of the boys is called Alison.
Also, on Saturday morning Meire is taking me, Aline and her sisters Alicea and Janaina on a road-trip down to Salvador for carnival. WOO-HA! I’m so looking forward to it that not even ‘Lisie and Ina slagging off axê and pagode, the Bahian music I love, is putting me off in the least.
I merely smile at the thought that the best Recife can offer is frevo, which involves a dance that looks like a chronically pigeon-toed person attempting the can-can and the hokey-cokey at the same time, while brandishing a miniature rainbow-coloured umbrella. Frevo is quite often danced by large, muscular men.

Brazilians are notorious for throwing themselves into any kind of dance, however naff, with endearing whole-heartedness. However, a less widely-known side effect of this is that when, as in the case of frevo, they embrace the ridiculous over the sublime, they are quite capable of making Timmy Mallett look like James Dean.

Feeling the carnival heat

One of the unique-est things about Brazil is that they have a huge home-grown music industry that’s virtually unknown elsewhere. Most regions have their own distinctive music; Rio has samba, obviously, the north has forró, Recife has frevo and Salvador has axê and the second biggest carnival after Rio. Carnaval in Rio has its famous samba schools, while Carnaval in Salvador has the ‘trios elétricos’ – several megawatts of volume on wheels, with the band perched on top and accompanied word-perfect by tens of thousands of people.

Because that’s the effect of having an all-Brazilian hit parade; it means that Carnaval here is the equivalent of Madonna, Robbie Williams, and dozens of stars with talent doing a free five-day concert of all the tunes the country’s been humming for weeks. The middle-class teenagers sing along to the radio in their air-conditioned cars; the favela kids bang out the rhythms on the sides of the buses, and the street vendors blast them out from carts all day every day, mostly right outside my flat. So far I’ve only managed to distinguish one word of this year’s big tune, which is repeating itself over and over in my head as I type, making me want to punch myself in the brain.

Anyway. On Sunday, Ivete Sangalo, one of the biggest names, came to Recife along with a few other trios elétricos, with the result that the entire population of the city turned out along the 10km or so of beachfront avenue. Any excuse for carnival-type shenanigans, these Brazilians.
I was a spectator for this one, not having my partner in crime M2 to brave the streets with me, and we piled beer into cooler boxes and made for the raised terrace of Meire’s rich parents’ seafront apartment. There are advantages to being slightly above the crowds and able to see what’s happening, although I’d still rather get down and stuck in among the sweating hordes. When the whole seething mass of street suddenly starts heaving and bouncing simultaneously as the best tunes come on, your heart skips a beat just watching. Down among them, you can’t help but catch the frenzy of shirts whirling round heads and friends spinning round each other, and it’s one of the best feelings I know.

This not being Carnaval proper, there was loads of time in between the floats to people-watch and chat and try and explain to curious Brazilians what I’m talking about above; namely, the cultural (and weather-based) differences why we don’t have anything in England that unites the country like Carnaval. This is one of the reasons why the crowds fascinate me so much; the way whole families are there from baby to grandma, who tells pastel two-pieces to toma no culo and lets everything hang out instead.

This means that for every colt-legged chica wearing a hanky's worth of Lycra, there’s what Aline describes as a ‘horrorosa’, which doesn’t need translating and makes me laugh. And everyone dances, badly or well; as with the clothes, the less naturally blessed are a source of solidarity, and the talented and beautiful are a joy to watch.

All of a sudden, there's a rush to the balcony to watch as people surge through the crowd below like ripples on a pond, running outwards from the epicentre of a fight. Two seconds later a single file of police, brutal but effective, shoulders everyone out the way to get through to the trouble. The speed at which they take the offenders into custody gives a new meaning to the term summary justice. It seems pointless calling them ‘suspects’; judging by the cheers and whistles from the crowd as the officers punch and slap their prey into the vans, it appears that the case is done and dusted-up already.

A couple of niggling thoughts; how can they be so sure they’ve got the right men, and if they’re so happy elbowing each other out of the way to kick and beat them in front of the crowd, what the hell will happen to the poor buggers when they get them to the station? As always, I’m torn between the diffidence of imperialist guilt*, and the conviction that respect for human rights is the only thing that differentiates the civilised from the barbarism they claim to be fighting. Predictably, the only solution that currently offers itself to this conundrum is to have another beer.




* Although, yet another thing to love about South America is that it wasn’t we gringos who murderously colonised and viciously exploited this particular perfectly-OK-before-we-came-along paradise. The Littlewoods-sized catalogue of atrocities that occurred here were entirely perpetrated by the Spanish and Portuguese. In your face, Iberians.

Smash and crab

The other night we went to bash crabs with mallets at an unpretentious (bare concrete floor, plastic chairs and TV blaring out a hundred decibels’ worth of nowt) local place.

They keep the crabs out the back, in a series of rather smelly and unappetising tiled enclosures, feeding them on – well, what *do* crabs eat normally? In this case, it’s couscous, fact fans – and you can go out there and choose your dinner, if you want to. Perhaps I should have made it clear earlier that we were going to eat them rather than torture them for fun, but for some reason I find mallet-based violence irresistibly comical.

Each enclosure contains progressively larger specimens, with prices scrawled on the wall. The boy comes out with a bucket and a pair of tongs and grabs the ones you point at, after which they start frantically scrabbling around in the bucket. I’m sorry to say that the flicker of guilt this induced was instantly swamped by a tide of gleeful anticipation.

They went and did something to make them dead, and then we got to smash them to bits. Unfortunately I was a bit over-enthusiastic and ended up expressing profound regrets to Aline’s sister, who kindly waved my apologies away with the hand she wasn’t using to wipe crab brains out of her eye. This did have one happy result though; our friend Meire, who was my instructor for the night, finished up by scraping the brown, slushy contents of her crab’s head out with a spoon and eating them, and would certainly have insisted I do the same were mine still in situ rather than pebble-dashing Alicea.

Last time I tried eating crabs (the last time I was here, in fact), I ended up hungry and frustrated. You’re supposed to wrench off the legs, crack them a bit and then suck the meat out, which is harder than it sounds, although pleasingly atavistic. (Ug.) Thanks to Meire, I managed it this time, and they were actually really delicious – you know how chef types are always raving about the freshness of ingredients – and I’m going to take anyone who comes out to visit me to the same place, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. I promise to place you out of range, however.

Hell is other species

Oh god, oh god, I’m so freaked out… I keep glancing over the breakfast bar counter to see if it’s really dead. I can’t sit there and look at it, it’s too disgusting. I can’t clear it away for the same reason. And …oh god …what if I get up tomorrow and it’s not there?

I wish I’d never wondered if it was true that they’d survive a nuclear war; maybe it was tempting fate. This utter bastard has just very nearly survived one-to-one mortal combat with me, and I’m several hundred times its size and was armed with nearly a full can of what I was told would be Instant Death.

I know I should probably have bashed it with a shoe, but the only one handy was a renegade flip-flop that was in the cupboard already so it had probably been walking on it. Plus I couldn’t bear the massive crunch – it’s at least an inch long. So instead I had to zap it and watch it agilely disappear at the speed of light while I clumsily poked things out of the way with a broom handle, too scared to get close in case it ran – or, horrors!, flew – out at me.

And when I finally got it out in the open it was like trying to blow out one of those re-lighting candles on a child’s birthday cake. I was spraying and spraying it and it kept doing final death throes and then… and then… starting up again as I wailed out loud ‘Oh, please die… please, just die…’.

I was really starting to think I would run out of death spray before it gave up the ghost, and then I’d have had to concede the apartment. It didn’t help that I was having vaguely Buddhist, or something, guilt about killing a living thing. It was alright for him, he grew up in Thailand, or possibly Tibet. India? Somewhere where things with excessive legs are no big deal, [IT’S STILL THERE] anyway. Come to think of it, even the deities have extra legs, so no wonder they're not fazed by insects. I’d already chucked all the bleach I had left into the cupboard …that was my opening gambit, but now I’m all out of options.

I’m calming down enough now to realise this is getting to several hundred words… but it was the nearest I could get, being currently without phone card, credit or Internet, to talking to someone.

Oh FUCK! There’s another. What the fuck am I going to do? Oh shit. Oh shit. It’s run along the wall and disappeared. Oh no.. it’s back, and it’s got wings.. it’s run along the wall to my bedroom and DISAPPEARED. DISAPPEARED IN MY BEDROOM. Calm. Calm. I can sleep out here. I could go to Aline’s. But I’m not dressed and all my clothes are in the bedroom. Plus it’s half past midnight. I’m just going to have to stay up all night. I’m not risking going to sleep and finding it crawling over me or something. And bugger the environment… in the morning I’m going to Google Agent Orange.

Oh woe, Ô rage, Ô désespoir. I can’t even get to the fridge to get a beer because I’d have to step over the first one and it might come alive again.

Coming soon - Juliette's balcony scene

The sun is blazing away outside but in my poky, stifling little hotel room, all is dark and depressing. So I've spent the last couple of days flat-hunting with Aline and her brother. As anyone who's ever rented a flat anywhere will know, you get a mixed bag, although not sure anything will ever match the place in East London with no power points and an outside toilet. But I digress.

The first place we looked at was a hilariously awful Seventies nightmare. It was a hellish vision - through nasty smoked glass - of pensionable leather sofas and faux mahogany, all dimly visible through a stale but potent fug of fags. The "American kitchen" the owner proudly presented to us included a fridge whose age and state of health resembled Fidel Castro's, but the bedroom was the last straw.

We walked in to see such a hideous "futuristic" bed with bizarre dials and plugs all over it that I very nearly got the giggles. I'm smiling now just remembering it. The mattress was brown and white with added stains, and the landlady didn't even try to tell us any of the bizarre switches and dials worked. God, it was repulsive.

There was also a staircase leading out of the living room which ended at the top in an MDF wall of similar robustness to the fridge, plus another door which turned out to lead to a second bedroom full of more sub-car-boot junk, which was to be kept locked and out of bounds. She did generously promise to lend us bits of it if we needed to accommodate passing friends, but my Portuguese wasn't up to declining on the grounds that I want to keep my friends.

All this, and a mosquito-ridden canal-stroke-sewer outside, for a hefty 750 reais per month. We got the hell out of there, wondering how on earth such a bargain was still on the market. *shudder*

However! I think I may have finally found somewhere, for a much more reasonable R$550 per month. O frabjous day!

It's filthy, and all the furniture is ancient and cracked, but it's also spacious, light and airy. Most important of all - and uniquely so far - it has the all-important balcony! With hooks already in the wall! My cup runneth over. Or it will when I get some G&T in (local weirdness: a bottle of Gilbey's here is about 2GBP, but Gordon's is nearly 15GBP. Que?)

Anyway, it also has the standard 24-hour porter service, which is actually quite a bonus because despite being less than 10 mins walk from Aline's flat it's definitely on the borders of some rather dodgy areas. People are *paranoid* about crime here, and I can understand why - on about my third day I was in this internet cafe at about 3pm and a woman came in crying, having just been robbed. Eek. Aline insists on driving me the 200m back to my hotel if I leave her flat after dark, and given her horrible experience of car-jacking some years ago I don't argue.

Anyway. The flat's also 15 mins walk from the beach and I am SO looking forward to getting in there. So I'd best be out of here.

Language barrio

Finally, here I am. Hello.

It's great to be in Brazil after all the last-minute rushing about and drunkenness (thanks to all who made my 12th Jan send-off so 'spesh' :-) ), but I also have to say that just writing this is a huge relief after a week of floundering efforts at Portuguese.

My friend here, Aline, has been fantastic; ever since she picked me up from the airport (gritty-eyed and sweaty after 36 hours awake, but still conscious enough to mentally unfurl myself and stretch out in the 35-degree heat) she's taken over all matters administrative, thank god.

Her family have taken me under their wing, so I've spent about half the last week at their flat, which is the kind of Piccadilly Circus of sisters, partners, friends, neighbours and children that reminds me endlessly of chez Bustamante circa 1992.

They're like a cheerful but diligent Portuguese police force - my occasional respite of speaking Spanish to Aline is met by indignant reproach and, on one occasion, her mother wonderingly asking her if she could *really* understand what I was saying. Spanish gets you nul points here, sadly.

The first days and weeks of a new language are like a new job; you feel you'll never get to grips with it all. One of the things I love about Portuguese is the musical rise-and-fall intonation, which is deceptively easy to fall into. This is probably the reason why my best attempts at abandoning Spanish and striking out in this strange language are invariably, and dishearteningly, met with shouts of, "Ei! Misska! Fala [speak] PORTUGUES!".

I haven't yet worked out how to say, "Sorry. I thought I was."