I’ve never considered bananas as an easy, filling, healthy hot breakfast…until now. Another gift from brazil.

The general response was oooh yum bananas yay what? Hot? Hot bananas? WTF?!

So here’s my recipe for quick, healthy, delicious, easy, HOT banana breakfast, which I learned from my host Tânia:

Brazilian Breakfast Bananas

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon coconut oil
2 bananas
1/4c shredded mozzarella
Cinnamon to taste

Directions:
Melt the coconut oil in a pan over medium high heat. Cut the bananas in half lengthwise, and put in the pan, cut side down. Cook until they get brown, then flip them over and brown the other side. At this point they should be fairly soft; using a fork mash the bananas in the pan forming a banana mash pancake. Sprinkle with the mozzarella until it melts, then sprinkle with the cinnamon and serve.

Optionally, if you want to skip the cheese, you can just brown both sides and sprinkle with the cinnamon. The mashing just creates a nice platform for the cheese.

Enjoy!

When I set out to embark on this trip, all of my thoughts were focused 100% on the preparation; saving the money, the vacation time, the airline miles, the coordination of keeping my bills paid and my dog happy and arriving at the same time as my brother’s family, not to mention managing the cobweb levels in my house to a sub-haunted level.  Also, there was the matter of finding the right place, the right school, the right situation, to make the experience a non-sucky one.  All in all, I have to say that I’m quite happy with all my choices and preparations; I did one bang-up job, if I do say so myself.  I am good at organizing and managing chaos, after all. 

Then, during my three months, I was focused 100% on making the most of my time there; learning as much Portuguese as my brain could handle (which was less than I hoped), and immersing myself in as much culture, activity, and life as I could handle (and afford).  I’d give myself an 84% on that one.  I think I could have done more, learned more, if I’d spent less time hanging out in my room hiding from the sun in the last few weeks, but am still rocking an amazing tan, and never turned down an opportunity to go do stuff, and have some truly amazing and treasured memories (some of which were documented in video!) as well as some great new friends.

But with the prospect of going home in front of me, I was only focused on getting in the last few times out on the beach, having that last tapioca, that last tall glass of caldo, my last classes in Capoeira and with my MMA gym, the last times with my friends, the last bit of shopping for gifts and cachaca.  I thought about how happy I was to be going home, and how I missed my house and my friends and my dog and my routines.  But I never thought about how being gone for three months in a foreign country with a foreign language would impact me when I did return.  And to my surprise, amazement and (slight) consternation, I find that the culture shock of coming home quite outstripped the culture shock of living in Brazil for three months.

The first thing I experienced was having to intentionally remove the mental blocks I had apparently placed on my ‘You are permitted to speak English all the time’ neural pathways.  Odd, since I did speak English at times, quite a bit occasionally; but I always felt guilty about it looking back, as if I was robbing myself of an opportunity to get just a little bit more fluent.  Now, that excuse was gone, but the mental block was still there.  It felt weird, allowing myself to speak English.  I miss speaking Portuguese.  I find myself wanting to go to all the Brazilian stuff I can, just for an opportunity to continue speaking it.

The next thing I noticed is how all of my prior habits, routines, and proclivities were, if not gone, then certainly greatly weakened.  It’s as if I hit a reset button on my life, and I could pick and choose which ideas, habits and propensities I wished to take up again, and which I decided to toss in the trash, with not a single emotional thread (or very few) to bias my decisions.  And while that has been a truly awesome unlooked for blessing, it also caught me off guard, because I did not see it coming AT ALL.  It’s like getting hit upside the head with a lucky stick.  It still smarts!  Kinda like this:

It’s also acted like oxygen on the fires of my love of travel.  You’d think that after three months I’d be all like “Dayum that was a long ass trip and I am stayin’ HOME for a while!!”, but I’m already looking forward to my next trip.  Most likely I’ll be returning to Amsterdam and London in May again.

I feel like there’s a ‘lastly’ here as well, but I’m not sure what it is.  Like I should be able to sum up my trip in a pithy sentence, like many of my coworkers and friends seem to hope I will when they ask me ‘how was your trip?’, but I’m not sure I can; nor do I think I’d want to.  There was a lot happening there.  I learned a lot.  I learned a lot about teaching, about myself, about my values and how they affect me.  I thought about language and culture and the impacts they have on each other, and how they can affect the interaction between other cultures.  I thought about how important art is to a community, and realized how proud I am of mine.

If I were to come up with a ‘lastly’, it would be this:  I now have offers of a place to hang my hat for a few days in five different countries.  That’s something special, and is always in the back of my mind.  And it means I need to find a better way to generate a metric fuck ton of airline miles.

That’s my friend Suel, his wife Carol and me live painting a new mural at a beach bar called Milk Beach Bar, where I learned to pay attention to which cup holds the beer and which cup holds the paint, to my cost.  And also found out that water based paint, initially, tastes kinda watery.  Suel is an artist, and Carol teaches art history at the local university.  And all of it was fabulously documented by my other new friend Matias, all of whom will hopefully visit me in Portland someday.

There are still a few more days in Brazil, but the end is soon and I will shortly be reunited with my friends, my dog, my house and my city on Thanksgiving day.  A perfect end to an amazing experience.  And while I still have much I’d like to show you all about brazilian life (and yes, food) those posts may come after I’ve returned and have time to organize all the photos and video I’ve taken – which is a hell of a lot, have no fear!  I’d like to put together a couple of videos and will be posting those up as well.  As for my feelings, they are mixed; I look forward to going home.  I miss my home, and my life and everyone and everything in it tremendously. But I will also miss the people and things that have touched me here, and feel certain that I will have to return soon.

This is a short story I started writing on April 1st 2010, and never finished.  I just ran across it when I remembered I had an account at 750Words.com and was poking around in there to see what I was writing about back then.  I didn’t even remember I’d started it, but I liked it so much I decided to take a crack at finishing it.  Hope you like it.

Popcorn
“But I don’t have any cash,” the boy mumbled.
“You don’t need any cash. Just follow me, and do what I do. Ok?” said the older one.
“But,” the younger boy whispered, “isn’t it illegal?”
“You wanna see it, don’t you? You came down here with me and said you wanted to see it. You’re not chickening out now, are you? Are you some chicken little baby now? You know, I don’t like hanging around with babies. Want me to take you home, baby?” The older boy glared at the younger one, derision dripping from his words like venom from a cobra. The masterful barrage of mockery worked perfectly. Just as expected, the answer: “Fuck you, Evan. I’m not a stupid baby. Quit sayin I’m a baby!”

“Well alright then! Way to man up, Jakob!” replied Evan, smiling through slitted eyes and slapping the younger boy on the back heartily. “Let’s go. Just remember, stay quiet, look like you belong there and follow along.”

Jakob watched as Evan peered around the corner of the brick wall. They’d been hanging out at the soda shop down the street for a few hours, staring at girls and imagining what it would be like to kiss them, when Evan had cracked this plan. Jakob had just mentioned that he wanted to see one, and wouldn’t it be great if they could, not really thinking that it would ever happen. His family didn’t have the money for that kind of thing. They weren’t that poor, but his parents sure had to cut out all but the strictest of necessities. They said it was for the war effort, but Jakob didn’t know anything about that.  And extravagances like these, he’d dreamed of it, lying in his room late at night, gazing out his bedroom window and pretending he was there. He would lie in his bed and watch the hazy dream images of his young imagination dance before him, but he’d never had the guts to try and go by himself. And he certainly couldn’t come up with the money to pay for it; his parents didn’t allow him to work because of the asthma. So when he mentioned it, when Evan had gotten the look in his eye, and was so sure of the plan and its success, he’d gotten carried away in the hope that this would work. And he had Evan to give him the courage to try.

He followed Evan around the corner and down the alley. There was a single green dumpster, and a metal door hiding next to it with a sign that said “Employees Only”. The dumpster smelled of rancid butter, and there was an odd colored liquid dripping from one corner. It ribboned down the alley a few feet, shiny and multicolored, before disappearing into a drain in the center of the way. It smelled like caramel, sugary sweet, but mixed with the cloying stench of rot and piss.  Real life stink, thought Jakob. He tried breathing through his mouth, but the smell still crept into his unguarded nostrils. Evan was frantically whispering at him and waving him over. “Come here you little pipsqueak, you’ll get us caught!” he whispered loudly in Jakob’s direction.  Jakob crept up to him, and Evan grabbed his shoulders.  His grip was tight. “I told you to follow me and do as I say, or I’m leavin!”  He thought he could feel the sweat from Evan’s hands seeping into his shirt, the tension and fear transmitting like an electrical current from the older boy. He was shaking Jakob by the shoulders and glaring at him, waiting for a sign that Jakob was back on the payroll and ready to follow wherever Evan lead.  Jakob nodded, his own fear starting to crawl up his insides and claw at his heart, his intestines.

Evan whispered again, quieter. “Ok. I’m gonna open the door and poke my head in first. If the coast is clear, I’ll wave you in behind me. When we go in you gotta act like you belong there, ok? Anyone thinks we look suspicious, they’ll start askin questions and we’ll be hauled out on our asses for sure. Got it?” Jakob nodded again. Evan stared into his face hard for another second, and then nodded back. “Alright. Let’s do this.”

And it all happened just like that.  Well, at first.  Evan slowly cracked open the door just enough to get an eyeball into the interior, then slowly opened it up a little more.  Jakob was holding his breath, trying to ignore the boiling fear that was cooking his bowels into a frothing stew. He could feel his lungs starting to revolt.  No, no nonononono not now! he thought in desperation, but the tightening in his chest could only mean that his lungs were staging a mutiny on this adventure, his medicine left on his bureau at home.  He’d thought he would only be gone for a few minutes.  He closed his eyes and forced himself to breath slowly, evenly, despite the increasing tension in his chest and the rising panic in his throat. Slowly, the tension eased, and he sighed with relief.  He opened his eyes, and saw Evan just turning to wave him in, the door ajar a scant few inches.

Evan whispered harshly “Get in get in quick! I’m right behind you!” and shoved Jakob through the open door.

Jakob stumbled into the hallway.  He fell to his hands and knees for a moment, the feel of thick carpet cushioning the fall.  For a split moment, his hands gloried in the luxurious feel of the floor, before he rose to his feet again.  He glanced behind him and saw Evan slipping through the doorway like a shadow, the dim light barely glinting in his eyes, which were all upon him.  He turned and faced the hallway.  It was full of people, adults and children, their hands gripped tightly in those of their parents; yet it was strangely muted, the low voices of people speaking in murmurs, the soft carpeting and thick walls soaking up the sounds.  It’s like being underwater, Jakob thought.  As he gazed at the scene, Evan came up behind and shoved him forward again.  “Quit gawking, dammit!” he whispered harshly in his ear.  Jakob stumbled again, and the motion caught the eye of a man in a strange sort of uniform, red with gold trimming.  Jakob thought he was a soldier, but he’d never seen any of the other soldiers wearing a uniform like that.  The man walked over to them, a dark look in his eye.  Evan was whispering “fuck fuck fuck!” and glancing left and right in panic.  Jakob felt the fear and panic rise from his belly again, gripping his throat and squeezing his chest.  Like he really was underwater, and the water was rushing into his lungs with the force of a tidal wave, forcing out his air with a rush.  He grasped at his throat and fell to his knees, gasping for breath.  Help, he whispered…or maybe he only thought it?  Help me…  He thought he heard the sounds of a woman’s voice nearby.

“My goodness what’s wrong with this boy! Mr. Chichester, did you see what happened?”

“I’m sure I didn’t, Mrs. Katz.  I thought they may have been sneaking in to watch one of the films, and I…”

“And you scared the poor boy to death!  Does he look like a hoodlum from the streets?  I’m sure his parents are here somewhere.  Please, do go look for them.”

“Eh, certainly, madam.  Come, boy.  Let’s see if your parents are here as well, shall we?” Jakob heard the sounds of Evan protesting. “I shall return shortly.”

Lying on that soft plush carpeting, he heard the woman’s now soothing voice saying “Just lie and rest for a moment, my dear.  There, look, your color’s coming back now, isn’t it?  There’s a good boy.”  Jakob felt the tightness gradually leave his chest once more.  Why did he ever leave the house without his medicine?  He gasped out “Th-thank you miss.  I’ve got the asthma, see, and I left home without…” She tutted at him.  “Shhh, the attack has passed now, hasn’t it?  Just lie here a few moments more.  This theatre belongs to my husband, you see, although he’s off helping with the war effort, of course.”  Her eyes grew far off, for a moment.  “He’s in Africa, last I heard.  The stories he tells! But then, he always did love a good story.”  She smiled down at him.  “I, uh, think I can stand now, miss.”  He slowly rose to his feet.  Her smile grew wider.  “Lovely!  Now, tell me the truth dear.  Did you sneak into the theatre without paying, or are you parents here with you?”  Jakob took in a deep breath.  She was so kind.  Would she call the police, have him arrested if he told the truth?  His whisper was barely audible.  “I snuck in, miss.”  He looked up at her again. “But…I’ve never seen a movie, not ever.  I dream of going to the theatre every night!  I mean…everything always turns out right in the end, in the movies.  Don’t they?”  He paused, feeling ashamed, feeling desperate to have come so close, to end up here.  “I just wanted to see if my dreams are real.  Are you….are you going to arrest me?”  He dropped his gaze to the floor, afraid of the answer.

The woman was silent for a few moments.  Jakob closed his eyes, and sighed, his head dropping even lower.  “My husband always loved a good story, did I mention?”, the woman said finally.  “When he was a boy, he used to sneak in to the theatre to watch the westerns.  That’s how we met, you know.”  Jakob’s gaze rose to meet hers, her eyes twinkling with laughter.

(Apparently the video was taken down, so I must describe: Remember that Married…with Children episode where Al tries to get Kelly to enter a sports trivia game show and crams her head full of sports trivia until stuff she already knew started leaking out? Yeah. That.)

Yes.  Well.

Last week in class, I was showing my instructor some of my pictures and we were talking about them as a discussion exercise, and I happened across some pictures I took in Seattle this summer.  I pointed to the tall pointy thing in the Seattle city skyline, and said “…and this is the…the….um…”

“……”

Um.

I forgot the name.

I FORGOT THE NAME.

OF THE FREAKING SPACE NEEDLE.

Now either this is the early onset of senility (which is actually no laughing matter, as my brilliant and determined uncle who may have engineered a cure for certain types of cancer is now suffering from Alzheimer’s disease) or, like Kelly in the Married…with Children episode, my brain is full and has started dumping out unnecessary information in an attempt to continue learning portuguese.  Now that the mental version of faceplanting into an invisible wall when running which happened a couple weeks ago appears to have calmed down, I’m once again trying to cram as much information as I can in the last few weeks of class before I begin my volunteer period.

Before I left, I called my mom and she cautioned me to ‘not forget how to speak English’.  At the time I thought it was a silly thing to worry about.  The joke will be on me when I go to greet my friends when I return and it comes out as “Bom dia meus amigos! Estou muito feliz por estar de volta, eu faltei de vocês muito!!” and my friends stand there and blink at me in surprise.  Maybe I’ll just have to teach them all portuguese?

During one of the classes, we came up with the fabulous idea to have a cooking-themed class, and one of the students, Marcos, offered to teach us how to make the original Minas Gerais pão de queijo – one of the iconic Brazilian foods.  And luckily for you all (sort of, because you might find yourself addicted), I managed to get a copy of the recipe in English!

Minas Gerais Pão de Queijo (Cheese bread)

Ingredients:
3 cups sour mandioca flour (polvilho azedo)
2 cups of grated semi-aged cheese (If you can get it, get the cheese from Minas Gerais; otherwise, a semi aged cheddar should suffice)
1 cup of milk
1/4 cup of vegetable oil
1 tablespoon of salt
2 eggs

Directions:
Preheat the oven to about 350 degrees.
Put the flour in a bowl. Heat the milk, oil and salt until it just starts to boil. Pour the heated milk mixture over the flour to scald it and then mix them to start forming a dough. Mix in the eggs until combined, followed by the cheese and mix thoroughly. The dough should not be too sticky; add more flour if necessary.
Roll the dough into small 1 inch balls and place in a baking pan or cookie sheet. Heat until they start to turn brown on the bottom and are the consistency of bread on the top. Remove from oven, let cool a few moments and eat! For a truly cheesy experience, add some of any leftover grated cheese inside one of the rolls.

The trick to this recipe I think is getting the right flour. It is a very fine sour flour called ‘polvilho azedo’ (Hikari makes a decent one, and you can find it on Amazon). I’m not sure exactly what it’s made from. The cheese is cheddar-like but white; a white cheddar or similar aged cheese should work if you can’t find ‘Minas cheese’ from Minas Gerais (although Marcos insisted that it was the key ingredient!)

Here’s a couple pictures of the cheese bread making:

I have apparently broken my brain.

No really, it’s broken.  I imagine it was all resilient and springy a month ago, soaking up new information happily and processing it with alacrity.  But it got fuller, and fuller, and more and more new information – absolutely necessary information for continued and improved human interaction – kept being added.  Kind of like when you put more and more and more sugar in your tea until the tea just won’t get any sweeter and really tastes like liquid teeth rot by this time and you still have clumps of sugar floating around in your tea laughing at you.  My brain has developed soft spots that refuse to learn anything more.  I can sort of feel them, one in front of my right ear, and another one all the way in the back on the left.  These spots flop down on the ground and hold their breath until they turn purple and when that doesn’t work they just turn their back on me and stick fingers in their ears and cry “LALALALALALA I’M NOT LISTENING LALALALALAAAAA”.

Broken.

Most of this past week has been like this.  I think my teachers are starting to worry about me, but they keep saying it’s normal and this sort of thing happens and it’ll pass.

But until then I could really use some aspirin.

(Incidentally, if you’re curious about other stuff, like local sports or beer or poverty, please let me know in the comments!)

Today I had this for lunch:
[ngg_images image_ids=’208′ display_type=’photocrati-nextgen_basic_singlepic’ flash_watermark_logo=’1’]

That is caldo de cana (sugar cane juice) and a coxinha, a pastry made out of wheat flour filled with shredded chicken. Caldo de cana is one of my favorite things I’ve consumed here. It’s basically the juice squeezed out of a sugar cane and ice. Or as I like to call it, what sugar water would taste like if sugar water tasted like it was good for you. The coxinha is tasty too, if a little dry on the inside. There’s no sauce or anything, it’s just plain chicken as far as I can tell, but the outside it a tasty bread pastry that reminds me a little of stuffing, and is quite moist.

Here’s a video of the vendor making my caldo:

Now before all my friends think that I don’t miss them, I do.  I miss you all tons and tons.  And more tons. In fact, without all the people in my life, I  *would* be quite homesick. I miss hanging out and eating and drinking and training and laughing with all of you.  I miss a good cheeseburger with a glass of cheap-yet-delicious red wine from Trader Joe’s, or a glass of Bulleit on the rocks.  I miss my dog quite a bit too.  I miss training in my school, and my favorite bubble tea spot, and my favorite bar (I’m looking at you Bar Dobre!)  I miss hiking trails in cool evergreen forests.

There’s things I don’t miss, but that’s not the point.

The point is that even though I truly do miss all those people and places and things, I don’t feel homesick, like I’ve felt it in the past.  My prior experience with homesickness was when I was in Japan for 2.5 weeks or when I was in Spain for a mere 10 days. It’s important to note that those two trips occurred in 1999 and 2001, respectively, and in both cases I did not travel alone.  About a week into those trips, both of which I have far surpassed in length at this point, I felt quite homesick; longing for foods and comforts and people who were completely and absolutely unreachable, at least without extreme cost or effort.  You start wishing that the trip would end sooner so you can go home and eat a nice reliable slice of pizza instead of trying to decipher what kind of meat you’re about to consume, and that everything around you just made sense and you could understand what everyone is saying all the time.

But that is not how I feel here, in Brazil, surrounded by a language that is VERY, VERY slowly becoming …um… intelligible? (Is that even a word?  I think it should be, if it isn’t.  But I think it is.  Anyway.)  While I miss all that stuff, there isn’t that ache that I felt before. And I think that it is because of one, single thing that I have now that I did not have then.

Social media.

And even though I am a huge proponent of the fact that Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other forms of social media have created a large and somewhat disturbing illusion of intimacy which I fear might change human connections in ways that are not totally for the best, it sure does for in a pinch when you’re roughly 6500 miles away from home and want to feel like your friends haven’t forgotten you.  And I also get to share my thoughts and experiences back, and know that there are people out there in the world who are reading. It is these digital social interactions, via email, Facebook, Twitter, and text messages that are keeping what could be a pretty intense bout of homesickness well and truly at bay.

And I’ll finish off with a video of a Caicó vendor walking the praia.  Kind of like the Maceió version of ‘The Entertainer’ played from the ice cream truck, the sound of ‘Picolé e Sorvete Caicó’ really gets under your skin.  Especially when you hear it a lot.  Every.  Single.  Day.

In sprucing up and dusting off this blog both before and during my adventures in Brazil, I’ve come across quite a few things which made me smile and laugh, experiences I’d forgotten I’d written about, pictures I’d taken.  I wanted to share one of them with you all, since it’s about a thing I’m finding I sometimes miss quite a bit here:

Jessie vs. Snowpocalypse, The (Silent) Movie.
Edited, filmed and produced by me. Shot on location in Portland in front of my house during Snowpocalypse, 2008.

Click to get a closer view of my notes and textbook!

Language
It’s been one heck of a long time since I seriously tried to learn a new language.  Languages have always seeped into my brain with or without my permission, like water finding passage through cracks in the rocks.  I always liked that about my brain – it’s one of the reasons I was so confident in my abilities to take on this challenge.  But it’s been a long time since I’ve opened the floodgates, and the water pressure was never quite this high when I was taking French for an hour a day in high school.  I certainly didn’t have to use French after my first day of class in order to explain what kinds of foods I liked or didn’t like, or to ask a cashier to repeat the amount of money I owed.  I never had to know enough French after my first day to understand what someone was trying to tell me about when I would eat, and what, and how to get in and out of my house, and how to get to a new school the next day, and where to find a new roll of toilet paper.

As for French, having learned it all those years ago is mostly a big help.  Having gone through the mental process of learning a new language, and one that has many similarities – especially in sentence construction – is a big help.  But because it’s French, it also sometimes messes me up.  And sometimes when I try to answer in Portuguese, instead the French wants to come out.  Or sometimes Spanish.  Obrigado, NOT gracias!!  Muito, NOT muy!!  From what I can tell, of the major Latin-based languages French is the least helpful in learning Portuguese.  Spanish or Italian would make this MUCH easier.

But, there comes a time when you have to stop trying to put a language in terms of your own native language, and just let it be itself.  I did that with French, and I think that experience and its similarity with Portuguese is far more of a help than a hindrance.

At this point I know enough Portuguese to get by.  I can understand simple instructions, can make myself understood, and can generally clearly communicate what I’m thinking.  Communicating feelings is a bit more advanced.  However, I also know enough Portuguese (and according to several people, my accent is very clean) that other Brazilians think I can understand Portuguese at their normal speed of talking, which I most certainly can not.  At all.  Not yet.  And they all…ALL…talk fast.  Very, very fast.  The only exceptions being the teachers at the school, they speak a teensy bit slower, and keep their sentences a teensy bit more simplified.  That’s it.  So when people are speaking normally, I can understand maybe one word out of four, while I can understand like 75% of simpler writing.

I’m drowning in Portuguese.  Welp, I did say I would sink or swim, right?  Time to get out my bubble-arms and start dog paddling!

I think this dog is always sleeping here.

Weather
It never gets below 70°F here, even at night.  It sometimes gets super windy when it rains, and when it does rain it often comes down in sheets, but the air is always warm and thick and humid.  It seems to rain more often at night then during the day, and the rains are surrounded by gorgeous blue skies and sunshine before and after.  When the sun comes out, it starts pushing above 90°F.  This is the end of winter.  I freaking love the weather here so far.

And I managed to go almost two weeks without getting at all sunburnt, or wearing any shirts with sleeves.  And once the sunburn is peeled off and gone, I shall start tanning in those hard to tan spots.  I hope.

Beaches

Ponta Verde Beach. Three blocks from where I’m living.

Hermit crab maybe? Regardless, this guy is apparently a rare find here.

The sand here is marvelously soft.  The water that I’ve seen is relatively clear – I haven’t really seen the crystal blue water yet, but I haven’t made it out to the natural pools yet either.  It is truly beautiful, especially considering the weather.  However, sections of the beaches in Maceió have tons of this seaweed stuff, which seems to always be mixed with quite a bit of refuse; bottles and plastic and….just junk.  There are workers out there every day raking and cleaning it up, but every day there is more.  Please recycle your plastic.  Please use less plastic.  The oceans will largely clean themselves eventually, if we quit putting so much crap in it.  Seriously.  Today I saw a rusted out CFL light bulb amongst all the other plastic bottle caps and plastic bottles and building materials and plastic bags and and and.  Thanks for saving energy, but I don’t think the ocean is the proper disposal area.

Stray dog at Paripueira begging for food. Obviously has puppies.

The other beach I went to last weekend is called Paripueira.  It’s a very lovely beach and seems to be better tended, but it is definitely a tourist trap.   The kind of place where they charge you money to come in and spend more money.  If you want to do anything more than sit on the beach, it’ll cost you.  And the food will cost you. And there’s people on the beach trying to sell stuff to you. We spent $200 Reais – nearly $100 – on lunch for three people. They didn’t mention that at the school when I signed up for this trip! I guess I was expecting a more hands-off kind of beach, where you just walk in and set up your spot, then if you feel like eating out or shopping, there’s options, but it’s not expected.  However, the part I disliked the most about this spot were the dogs.  There’s sad looking stray dogs everywhere.

One in particular was skin and bones, probably sick, with lacerations near his tail and looking truly miserable.  It kind of made me ill to see it.  I bought some french fries to feed the dogs, however none of them seemed interested.  I don’t think I’ll go back there.

But the Brazilian dog story isn’t all sadness.  I see lots of pampered pooches here as well, and have met several people who’ve taken dogs off the street.  Nor are the beaches so touristy and regimented.  And they’re all of them, every one, gorgeous.

Martial Arts
I’ve taken two classes so far.  One is a basic MMA class taught by a guy named Tony, who trained with one of the Gracie brothers (The guys who invented Brazilian Jui-Jitsu).  The other was a Capoeira class taught by a guy named Jair who comes to the language school to give private classes.

The MMA class was a fabulous workout.  It kind of reminded me of Crossfit, with stations that would switch every minute; however one of the stations was with Tony himself, and he would have you punch targets or hold a car tire above your head while he hit your near the waist with the targets and you blocked them with your legs.  Each station was pretty hard – one was even an ab roller, and we all know how much those suck! – and that was just one of the stations.  My abs hurt for three days afterwards!

The capoeira class was the next day, and for all that it was far less intense than the MMA class, I finished it feeling pretty shaky and I sweated harder than I ever had in my life (although it may have been the weather, it was pretty hot and humid that day). Jair taught me the basic movement, called Jenga (no I don’t know if it’s related to the game), the four basic kicks and the four basic dodges, and of course cartwheels.  I’m definitely going to do that again; and if my understanding of what he said was right, he offered to bring me to some local capoeira events on the back of his motorcycle.  Speaking of motorcycles…

Maceió
…it seems lots of people have them.  Not a lot of big cruisery type bikes – nor a lot of rice burners either – but functional ones, or scooters.  If they do have a car, it’s a little European economic style car, although not a lot of hybrids.  People here are far freer with the car horn, but it’s more of a ‘hey I’m here, just FYI’ than a ‘get out tha fuckin way asshole’ manner.  But driving…man.  I’ve already seen one car accident, and I’m amazed I haven’t seen any pedestrians hit yet.  I haven’t seen driving like this since I was in Spain and fearing for my life in a taxicab on the freeway.  The driver there literally said that the traffic signs were more suggestions than laws.  Ha!  But then again, the cost of taking the bus here is about 30 cents cheaper than taking a taxi.  And apparently the bus system has never published a schedule.  You just go to a bus stop and wait, and hopefully one will come along in the next 30 minutes…makes a taxi drive seem almost worth it.

Ponta de Barra. Lots of shopping in this area.

As far as my general impressions of Maceió go, I feel…conflicted.  It’s a great little town, twice the size of Portland with about 1 million inhabitants.  It’s got beautiful beaches, great little bars and restaurants, fabulous music; but there is also a lot of poverty here. A lot. More than I’m accustomed to, living in Portland.  Even in the touristy, more well off areas like where I’m staying and the school is located, there is evidence of it around the corners and in the darker spots, the side streets.  You can see it everywhere if you look.  Maybe it’s my American sensibilities, I don’t know; but it makes it difficult at times to relax and enjoy myself.  It makes me feel a bit guilty for what I have, and looking for ways to help that will not be just a meaningless, fruitless drop in an ocean of need.

It’s also unfortunately littered with trash.  I mean everywhere.  There’s trash everywhere, and very little of it actually in the trash bags that are also left out on the street all the time.  From the ocean on, there isn’t a single place I’ve been that has not been littered.  Definitely something a Portland eco-conscious resident would find a bit alarming.  However, if you can overlook the trash, the area I live in is quite nice.  There’s lots of attractive apartment buildings with interesting architecture and a bunch of new ones being built closer to the beach.  Lots of rooms with a view!

Food
They have really good sushi here.

No really.  One of my fellow students is from Japan, and she agreed.

Buffet-type restaurants are really popular here.  There are two, right next to each other, at the end of the block from my school.  I’m trying desperately to not gain weight (see: Martial Arts, above), but until I started taking these martial arts classes and going for a run on the beach every few days, it was looking like a losing battle.  I already mentioned (on the Facebooks) Feijoada, which is probably my favorite Brazilian dish I’ve had so far, but let me list out a few other notable things I’ve eaten:

• Corn and coconut milk cake
• A pancake made out of fried mashed bananas and cheese with cinnamon on top for breakfast (zomg noms)
• Cheese bread.  Ah, cheese bread.
• Tapioca…things.  Basically pancakes made out of cassava flour and folded over with stuff in it; the original has coconut, but it can have anything from fruit to cheese to chicken hearts
• Pastelarias – sort of like pastry shops – have all sorts of fried and baked goods like coxinha, which are teardrop-shaped bread things stuffed with shredded chicken, and all manner of pastéis, which are thin, flat flaky crust pastries filled with (usually) savory fillings, often cheese or chicken or ham. I finally found a pastelaria which sells a ‘Romeo and Juliet’, a pastel filled with guava jam and cheese that my sister in law told me about.  I haven’t tried it yet, but I hope to this week!
• 

  Johan and I about to try sururu for the first time with Luis, one of our teachers

  Sururu – The local dish of the area, it’s like tiny little mussels in coconut milk over rice with a side of the sauce blended with some sort of thickener to pour over, and farofa (a toasted cassava root flour) sprinkled on top.  The first version I ate also had shrimp (camarão) and a whole fillet of fish (peixe) on the bottom, while the second version made by my host had just the tiny little mussels in them.  They’re about a half inch long on average.  Tiiiiiny mussels….in my wine…wait no.  Wrong food.  Also, someone told me it’s the viagra of the Brazilian northeast.  Heh.

• All sorts of doce, or sweets – I prefer the ones made with banana.
• 

  Açai! This was the small bowl. Glad I got the small bowl.

  Frozen blended açai berries with banana and granola and puffed rice and honey.  Oh, yeah.

When it comes to sweets, my brother was right: They use condensed milk a lot.  Chances are if it looks like a cupcake or a truffle-like treat, expect that there’s condensed milk – doce de leite – in it, or that it’s pretty much entirely made of it.  Very chewy, thick and sweet.  It tends to make me long for something a bit more bread-like and less like eating a solid hunk of milky taffy made out of sweetened milk.

Also, that’s a starfruit tree in front of my school.  Starfruit.  Yum.

Also again – I like cachaça.  I’ve had it straight, with honey, made with a mixture of clove and cinnamon, infused with pineapple or cherries.  I like it all.  I’ll be bringing some home with me.  Just probably not the one in this next picture.  I just don’t feel that crab flavored alcohol should be a thing, you see.  Call me crazy.  How did they even get it in the bottle?!

Crab cachaça? No thanks.

And caipirinhas?  They’re Brazilian margaritas, they just use cachaca instead of tequila.  And who doesn’t love margaritas?  If you’re in the mood for something other than lime, you can get a caipifruta, which is just a caipirinha with other fruit in it.

Money
I don’t know why I had the idea that Maceió would be cheap.  Perhaps it was the fact that  Brazilian Reais (hay-ice) are about .40 to the dollar.  Perhaps it’s because of my image of South America.  Perhaps it’s because of those nice people I met in the airport in São Paulo who told me it’s much cheaper than São Paulo (yikes!!  SP must be crazy $$$$!!).  It is most certainly not cheap.  At least not near the beach, of course.  It’s not exorbitant by any stretch, but I literally was looking at suntan lotion for R$40.  $20 suntan lotion?!  Come on!  I pay on average $8-$12 for lunch, twice that for dinner.  A beer goes for about $4-$6, although they’re about 24-32oz bottles.  Not super spendy, but not the cheap I thought it would be.  Certainly not cheap enough for the cash I brought to last me until I leave.  Good thing I got a credit card with no foreign transaction fees!

In summary…well, I actually don’t really have a summarizing thought for this post.  I’m getting lots of relaxation, meeting lots of really cool people both brazilian and foreign, getting totally overwhelmed but still doggedly pursing my portuguese, and enjoying the tropical weather immensely.  I mean, how cool is it to be sitting at lunch with someone from Germany, Japan and Denmark and chatting in Portuguese with all of them?  The litter and the poverty and stray dogs make me sad.  As for being homesick…I think I’ll leave that to another post.

Stay tuned for my next post, where I show you all some of the…um…coisas muito interessantes I’ve come across so far.  Like giant oyster phone booths and the most amazing shower attachment I’ve ever seen…

Yes there are monkeys in Brazil.

But when I think about monkeys, the ones I’ve seen so far are not the ones I think of. When I think of monkeys I think of chimpanzees, 3 foot high little mountains of mischief and masters of kung foo poo-flinging. They can go from adorably cute little 3 year old-like humans to vicious beasts who will keeeeelyouuuuuuuu faster than a lucky turkey on thanksgiving.

But these are not the monkeys I’ve seen. Well, yet. There’s still a few months to go, and I’m not taking anything for granted.

The monkeys I’ve seen are Capuchin monkeys. In one word: ADORBS. Check it:

Still, I solemnly and with full knowledge of my total and complete lack of objectiveness, find my nephews just a tad bit cuter. Witness:

Stay tuned for further tales of fabulous Brazil! Like how I went to an MMA workout one night in the middle of a crazy scary part of town 8 blocks from where I live and had a fabulous workout that kicked my ass where I had to hold a tire above my head while blocking blows with my legs, and then had a very mellow capoeira class the next day that kicked my ass even more.

It’s amazing how hungry you can get when you’re in a country where you don’t speak the language. I found myself searching for places where I could just grab something and pay for it, instead of trying to order, then try to understand what was being said to me quickly enough to come up with appropriate responses – half the time I would just nod or say ‘sim’ and hope I got something remotely close to what I was hoping for.

Case in point: I order some cheese bread and a drink: ‘pão con queijo e suco de fruta por favor?’. The cashier asks me a question. I respond ‘Sim’. She looks confused and asks again, and I can tell it’s a ‘do you want [this] or [that]?’ but I understand exactly zero of it. Do you want cheese bread with yummy cheese or cheese bread with the brains of goats? Hungry and confused, I say ‘não entende?’ at which point she reframes the question. Desperate now, I say ‘Sim’ one more time, hoping that she will just take some of my money and give me some bread and juice. I’m starting to feel like the accused before the Spanish Inquisition.

I get bread. No juice. But I detected no goats brains, so I call that a huge win.

I did meet a lovely group of people in the airport while I waited, however. I see what they mean when they say Brazilians are friendly! We chatted (in English, thank the lord) for at least an hour, talking about dogs and kids and travel, and at the end we exchanged email addresses and I was pressed to contact them if I needed anything. Not sure what they could do, as it’s a bit of a big country and I was about to fly 1000 miles away, but still it was a great start to the next part of my stay.

So I arrive in Maceió (emphasis on the last syllable, in case you’re interested) and it’s raining. I chuckle a bit at the irony. Its not raining hard, but everything is wet. My skin looked at the rain and braced for Portland cool air, but no! The air was literally *thick*. Now that is what I call humidity!!! The temperature was in the mid 70’s (which is apparently very cold, I would find out later) so I didn’t feel strange wearing shorts. What did feel strange was that I was the *only one* wearing shorts.

Huh. Well no, wait, there’s an older lady over there wearing shorts too. Ok.

I meet my ride, a very nice taxi driver with my name on a a piece of cardboard who drives me to my host Tania’s house. By now it’s easily 2:30am, so I cringe a bit as he calls her phone outside the door to her apartment parking garage. But she’s up, and lets us in, and is very kind and genial. At this point I would at least try some bread with goats brains for a chance to go to sleep. She shows me to my room, we attempt to stumble (err make that *I* attempt to stumble) through a short conversation about breakfast and bathrooms and then I gratefully collapse on my (very very hard) bed. (I like hard beds, what? I’ve just never lain on one *this* hard!)

A lovely sleep later, and I’m up at 9am. I discover that the letter I had noticed the night before in my room is a letter from the school, Fast Forward, welcoming me and explaining how they specialize not just in language but in cultural immersion, which makes me feel really good about my choice of schools. But let’s get to the good part, I know you’ve all been so good and that you patiently read through all that other crap to get to the pictures…

Tania’s lovely apartment building, complete with stinking cute puppy visitor:

The school where I’ll be portuguesing – 1 block from the apartment, in the opposite direction of the ocean:

My first view of the ocean…2 blocks from the apartment:

A Praia!! 3 blocks from the apartment. THREE. BLOCKS.
I’ll just say this: the sand is the softest I’ve stood in and the water is the warmest Atlantic Ocean water I’ve ever had the pleasure of standing in. And you could wade out for nearly a quarter mile at high tide and it would never get over your head.

I have never been a morning person. Not ever, not no matter how hard I try. But right now, I seriously feel like I *need* to get up at 6am every morning and go for a run on this beach. Will it happen? Who knows! Check back tomorrow and find out. My first day of school starts at 8am tomorrow, and I’m feeling strangely tired even though it’s only 7pm.

Last night I heard a dog yowling in pain, cat fights, and an air raid siren just like the ones out of WWII that made me wonder if I should duck under a table or toss on some camos and start scavenging for food and a good source of alcohol.

There is also of course the familiar sounds of car alarms going off, mopeds passing by, clock ticking, …MOSQUITO BUZZING smash… dammit-I missed. But there are so many stray dogs and cats that I could easily imagine that the dog was seriously injured, or the cats were fighting for their lives. Perhaps against a hungry stray dog, even. And then barking, barking, spreading in waves back and forth across the city, sounding much like two sets of Mel Brooks and Madeline Kahn arguing in the airport in High Anxiety.

Every once in a while, however, I hear sounds I can’t place. I’ve been ignoring those. Must be cats, I tell myself.

Despite the noise, I’ve been sleeping quite well. I am a New Yorker, born and (partly) bred, after all. This is all just a new lullaby to me, who grew up falling asleep to the soft music of sirens, alarms and various people shouting.

But next chance you get, hug your pets. Unless they’re fish, that might not go over so well.

1. Fresh sugar cane from my sister in law’s mom Celia’s back yard. You put a chunk of the stuff in your mouth, chew it up until all the tasty sweet juice is gone, and then spit out the fibrous remains. It’s surprisingly good for you, considering it’s where much-maligned sugar comes from. And since Celia just chopped it down from her backyard – her BACK YARD, people, which also has a huge MANGO tree and a much smaller papaya tree – it’s absolutely100% delightfully fresh. Here she is preparing chunks for us to eat by peeling off the outside and cutting up the inside:
2. If you ever want a lucrative money making venture, you can just bring a couple pounds of pistachios or cashews and make some serious bank. Just put it into little dollar bags and stand in a trench coat on the corner: “Psst hey there man, I got some fresh pistachios CHEAP. Only 5 bucks a bag…” Seriously. That tiny little can is more than 10 bucks (21 reais and change, stupid flash got in the way):

   

3. Have you ever even seen an avocado this big?! I didn’t believe my sister in law when she said it was an avocado…I took it home to further investigate this preposterous claim:

   

But the best part of this first week is clear already: Stinking cute nephews! (yeah, that’s a Woody from Toy Story hat in his hand) 

Random Brazilian Portuguese fact: Mango in Brazilian Portuguese is manga. That made me giggle just a little bit. Puts a whole new spin on Japanese comics…

My bags are packed
They’re by the door
But my home keeps whispering
“Just one more!”

One more toss of a slobbery ball
One more check of the mulberry tree
One more dip in my soothing hot tub
One more sip from my favorite mug

All these things and people and places
Will soon be replaced with different faces
But I’ll go happily into the unknown
Knowing that they’re all still waiting for me at home.

Tchau!!

After two years of talking about it and saying I was going to do it, after two years of planning and saving money and hoarding vacation time and using my miles debit card for every damn purchase and bill I possibly could (the one bit of silver lining on the fact that I had to purchase not one but two cars this year!! gah!), after nearly 15 years of dreaming about it, I am leaving, on Sunday, for Brazil.  I’m spending the first week with my brother and sister-in-law and totally adorable nephews, who are going to be arriving at the same time for a wedding outside of Sao Paolo, and then I will head to a city called Maceio.  The banner picture of my blog is from Maceio, but just for the heck of it here’s a few more:

I will spend the next 2 months in Maceio learning Portuguese at a Portuguese language school called Fast Forward. During my third and last month there, I will be participating in their volunteer program, where I will be teaching self defense and martial arts skills to young people of an as-yet-undetermined age for an as-yet-undetermined daily time frame at an as-yet-undetermined location.

My accommodations in Maceio consist of a homestay with a family who speak no English, only Spanish and Portuguese.  Total, absolute immersion. Oh, and their apartment is apparently two blocks away from the beach.

I plan on packing scuba gear.  I’ve purchased new shorts and tank tops, since I was woefully depleted of both items.  I have spray on suntan lotion.  I will bring some Oregon wine, some lovely Great Harvest Bakery pumpkin chocolate chip bread, several pairs of sunglasses and one pair of boots.  In case I need to kick someone.

And my laptop, of course.  Because all you crazy people insisted that I continue to make you all jealous and post lots and lots of pictures.  You asked for it.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

(Trepidation.  Yeah, I used it.)

But today, I started wondering why.

Because today I also realized something. For some reason it’s the fact that others are jealous of me…of ME…that’s been making me all sorts of anxious and so insistent that they are overlooking the seriousness of the situation. I am clearly very uncomfortable with this position.  Granted, as far as I know it’s not one I’m accustomed to be in, but I could say that about being able to eat a banana sundae with brownies every day without gaining weight, and I think I’d be able to handle that with no difficulties whatsoever.

Anyway.  The fact remains that they haven’t misunderstood the gravity, the significance of this trip – they all understand it perfectly well! They also know just how awesome this trip will be, and are perfectly correct in thinking I’m going to have an amazing experience that I will most likely treasure, and will definitely impact my life in all sorts of ways I haven’t even begun to fathom, which I think is never a bad thing. They know I’m going to eat amazing food, get lots of lovely sun, go swimming in the ocean most every day, meet marvelous new people and work on perfecting my salsa dance moves. It’s me who is starting to frankly get on my nerves and needs a good smack upside the head to get me to stop worrying and start grinning like a silly fool.

So.

“Hey Morgan.”

“Yeah?”

“Quit worrying about the trip goddammit. You’re gonna have a great time. You’re gonna be safe. You’ll have no trouble meeting people. Quit downplaying how awesome this is. From now on you should just smile, or nod sadly because they can’t go, or just have them give you their address so you can send them a bonafide Brazilian postcard with a leaf taped to it or sprayed with Brazilian suntan lotion or sprinkled with Brazilian sand or chewed by a Brazilian monkey, instead of being a worrying dumbass.”

“But…”

“But what?”

“Yeah I got nothing. You’re so right. I *am* a worrying dumbass.”

“Yep.  So stop.”

So I’m done. I’m done worrying and downplaying how fabulous this is, and ready to get on with being, as my friends keep telling me, awesome.

As soon as I figure out why having people jealous of me makes me so uncomfortable.

To be fair however, there is this:

The last hurdle has been cleared.

Today when I got home I found a FedEx envelope on my doorstep marked ‘Extremely Urgent’.

HELL YES IT’S URGENT!!

It’s also extremely important, which is why they dumped it on my front doorstep where anyone could have walked off with it. Excuse me while I climb down off the ceiling…

Breath. Breathing is good.

I am now the proud owner of a Brazilian tourist visa!! Good for 10 years!!

So now? Now….we wait.