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.
12 April 2007
10 April 2007
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.
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.
02 April 2007
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.
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.
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