So, I went to Brazil about a week ago for the purpose of, among other things, attending my daughter’s first birthday bash. I set foot on American soil again a couple of days ago and felt compelled to share some observations and experiences I had on this particular journey.
Loyal Vituperator readers may recall my “Luxuries I Missed” rant in Part 1, as well as my list of kvetches in Part 2. This third installment is really just a review of what happened as well as some of the odd things I noticed. Yes, I have a few new b*tchings to get out of my system, but trust me, they’re far fewer in quantity when compared to the amount I shelled out for Part 2 (…after all, I wasn’t even there a full week this time). And I must say, most of the proverbial fan-hitting sh*t seemed to happen to my wife while I just kept dodging bullets.
So, here’s the story.
During our January/February Brazil trip this year, the wife and I agreed on what looked to be a great function hall to have our daughter’s first birthday party. Granted, our little girl was fewer than two months old at the time, yet we had already started making plans in anticipation of the big event. First birthdays are a really big deal in Brazil and those who remembered our huge wedding were sure to be keeping their eyes on us to see how (or if) we’d ever top our 2004 nuptials.
So, in an effort to keep some sort of organization to this blog, I’ll separate my observations and comments into three categories with subsets for each.
CATEGORY 1: GETTING TO BRAZIL
For starters, whoever coined the phrase “Getting there is half the fun” clearly never had to fly to Brazil. Oh, and we flew with the same F-Me Airline as last time (click here for my F-Me rant). We didn’t choose them because we liked them, rather because pickins were slim by the time we had enough money to buy our tickets and F-Me had the best prices. So, we get to the airport and the fun starts… for my wife.
A.) PAY NOW OR WE KEEP YOUR DAUGHTER: My mother-in-law, Dalva needed to get to Brazil about a week before the wife and I were able to fly out and she really wanted to take our daughter with her for a plethora of reasons. We acquiesced, but to make this a reality, she’d need our daughter’s name (we’ll just use the pseudonym of Sabrina for the sake of the story) printed on her tickets for the flight over... and on my wife’s tickets for the flight back. We were given assurances from the travel agency that once we had Sabrina’s name on those tickets AND got written and notarized permission slips into Dalva’s hands, all would be well.
Dalva had no problem getting our daughter out of the country, but when it came time for us to check in, an F-Me clerk told my wife that she’d need to pay for Sabrina’s tickets if she wanted to bring her back home. My wife showed him her tickets and how Sabrina’s name was already printed on all of them, but since Sabrina wasn’t with us for check-in, she somehow got disqualified on all counts and would be ineligible to join her own mother back on the flight to America. My wife was broke to begin with, so I fronted the money to ensure that Sabrina would fly home with my wife.
Fear not though. The travel agency has already promised to refund what we paid for the first tickets. Whether they uphold their end of the bargain when we go to collect, well… we’ll just have to jump off that bridge when we come to it.
B.) COUGH UP THE PERFUMES, TERRORIST!: I have like a MILLION reasons why I prefer to travel light, but ever since marrying the Transporter, I haven’t had an occasion to enjoy my "Light Travel" preference. Everybody in Brazil wants American paraphernalia, especially when it comes to Nike sneakers and electronics, so whenever the family down in South America gets wind that my wife’s heading down there, they all cut deals with her to have her buy stuff for them with the promise of reimbursing her when she arrives. For example, we might pay $200.00 for a digital camera here, but try buying that exact same brand in Brazil and you’re guaranteed to shell out at least DOUBLE that. So, one of the many things she was asked to bring was perfume. Her brother’s wife has a thing for Victoria’s Secret crap and she cut a deal to reimburse her for a variety of perfumes and lotions. The only thing is that my wife forgot that we can’t fill up a carry-on bag with liquids (…not even water), so she wound up having like sixty bucks worth of Vickie’s Secret goop confiscated. Plus, she was gone for like a f**king half hour, so my guess is that they must have “white rubber gloved” the hell out of her for having the audacity to attempt such an evil deed.
C.) SPEAKING OF TERRORISTS: For all of your frequent (and even semi-frequent) flyers, I wanted to ask you a question. Is it just me or is it impossible to get on a plane these days without seeing at least two guys who look exactly like they just graduated from Osama bin Laden’s Infidel Decapitation Academy? It’s weird because I can spend months in the city without seeing so much as one turban. I get on any plane in the States and it’s almost a given that I’ll see at least one poster boy for al-Qaeda with a beard thick enough to hide a Beretta and a few extra magazines. And if he doesn’t look like a terrorist, he most certainly will look sketchy enough to want to bring the plane down just for sh*ts and giggles.
D.) SKYMALL IS MY CRACK: I travel the F-Me Airline and these damn SkyMall catalogs are on every damn plane. They’re the most addictive catalogs in existence because they have all of the crap you never knew you always wanted. All of the really innovative inventions of the day are featured here and they create a demand for stuff that, twenty minutes ago, you didn’t even know existed. Plus, they let you take the catalog home so that your torment can continue long after the wheels touch down on the runway. “Hey, now that I think about it, I do need remote-controlled laser combat cars… and a singing animatronic Elvis robot… and a Steinhausen chronograph watch… and a vintage hot dog cart… and roses hand-dipped in 24K gold… and a scoop-free self-cleaning cat box… and an Oh GOD get this damn catalog away from me before I liquidate my house!”
I don’t even HAVE a cat!
E.) NEVER BUY ANYTHING FROM DUTY FREE: Those of you who have flown to other countries will have heard of duty free items. I’ll summarize the phenomenon for those of you who haven’t. Folks who bring more than $500.00 worth of certain types of crap to another country are required to pay an extra fee. I’ll illustrate the reason for this with an example. Let’s say someone in Brazil wants to buy a digital camera, but can’t afford it at Brazil’s prices. Then, they realize they can get this item much cheaper in the states. If they get somebody to buy them a camera in the states and then give them the money for it when they arrive, they have, in a sense, hurt Brazil’s economy. That’s money they could have kept in the country, had it not been for the nice American contraband smuggler.
So, as an incentive to buy expensive sh*t without penalty, they offer duty free items at airports (…and in some cases, on the airplanes themselves). Buy a digital camera at a duty free shop and, as long as you keep your receipt, said item is exempt from that extra penalty fee. The problem is that duty free items are f**king expensive. Seriously, buy duty free stuff only if you have money to burn because I guarantee you’ll find the exact same items almost anywhere else for a much more reasonable price.
I mean seriously, who the f**k is stupid enough to blow $500.00 on a $300.00 iPod?
F.) LUGGAGE? WHAT LUGGAGE?: Want to hear another great reason for packing light? Because you never know what the airline will do with the luggage you choose to stow away. Case in point: I checked in two huge, heavy-ass suitcases filled with stuff for my daughter’s birthday party. So, where did I put my clean clothes? In my carry-on bag… because I pack light and have little difficulty fitting my clothes into one small bag. Good thing, too... because while we may have arrived in Brazil without a problem, our luggage stayed in f**king Miami. Was this a big deal for me? Not really. I had my hygiene items and all of my clothes so I was sound as a pound. As for my wife, she chose to fill her carry-on bag with perfumes and a laptop she bought for her brother. Her clothes were checked in, so she was stuck wearing the same clothes for almost three full days before the airline got our luggage delivered to our Brazil address.
G.) YEAH, WE’LL TAKE THAT OFF YOUR HANDS NOW: Remember that laptop I mentioned just a moment ago? Remember that extra fee? If you bring expensive electronics with you, you need to declare them when you arrive. If you don’t, you run the risk of getting heavily fined. Well, my wife might have had a shot at slipping the laptop past the prying eyes of Brazil’s finest had it not been for the fact that she needed to fill out claim slips to get our luggage back. But fortune failed to smile upon her here as well and she was told she’d need to cough up $500.00 for the privilege of stepping onto Brazilian soil with the laptop for which she already paid $900.00. Meanwhile, I strolled right past everybody with my digital camera and my video camera. Go figure.
H.) IT’S ME! IT'S DADDY!: This part kinda broke my heart a little. I don’t know how strong the long-term memory of an infant is, so for fear that Sabrina wouldn’t recognize us after being without us for a week, I decided to burn a DVD for her. The DVD was basically a short video of me, talking to her, showing her all of the things she likes to play with at home, saying all of the things she has come to expect from me and showing her pictures of her mom and me to ensure that she wouldn’t forget us. Dalva assured us that she had Sabrina watch the video at least once a day and sometimes twice, yet when Sabrina and I saw each other, she didn’t smile like she usually does. I knelt down with my arms outstretched and called to her to come give me a hug. She didn’t move. She just looked at me with her wide eyes and her pout. Inside, I almost panicked.
“Has she actually forgotten who I am?”
I’m the only one who sings the ABCs to her, so I quickly belted an ABC tune out for her, followed by a tune that I made up that she loves to hear. I did all of my signature sound effects and kept repeating the fact that “Daddy” was here. She says “Daddy” a lot when she sees me and, according to Dalva, she said “Daddy” whenever she saw the video. After a few more seconds of nervous tension, something must have clicked because she walked towards me and stretched out her arms. Her facial expression revealed nothing, but her hug assured me that she remembered me.
I swear I almost cried tears of joy with her in my arms again. I’d missed her terribly and the thought that she might have forgotten me nearly tore my heart to shreds. A few giggles later and she was happy as could be, belting out “Da das” and “Daddies” as if not a day was lost.
CATEGORY 2: BRAZIL STORIES AND GRIPES
I said that I didn’t have many gripes, but I did have a few and I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention a few of them. Again, nothing huge – just me having a little b*tch session, but fear not. Some of what I have to say this time around is actually good.
A.) SANTA’S DAUGHTER: One of the things that Dalva wanted to do with Sabrina in the week prior to our arrival is to attend a Catholic church event for underprivileged kids. It’s called “Festa dos Pobres” which quite literally means “Poor People’s Party.” It’s like Brazil’s version of “Toys for Tots,” except on a smaller scale. The church members raised money to buy toys for children who would otherwise have nothing for Christmas and, though it would make more sense to have this shindig closer to Christmas itself, it was held in the first week of December.
Anyway, Dalva thought it’d be great if Sabrina helped with the distribution of gifts, so Dalva dressed Sabrina in her “Baby Claus” outfit for the party. Many of the kids actually believed that Sabrina was Santa Claus’s daughter and one of them actually said, “Santa didn’t bring us any gifts this year, but Santa’s daughter did!” Many of the kids posed for pictures with her and one of the kids even gave her a picture of him to keep and share with Santa when she gets back to the North Pole.
I just really thought that was awesome and I felt honored and flattered that these underprivileged kids thought of my little girl as being responsible for making their Christmas holiday a little bit brighter and happier. It's a short and sweet holiday anecdote to keep for the future when Sabrina gets a little older.
Okay, time for the gripes.
B.) WOULD A QUICK SWEEP REALLY KILL YA?: My wife’s family is great. I’ve said that on numerous occasions, so whenever possible, I give them every benefit of every doubt imaginable. Yet I couldn’t help getting just a little bit pissed off when I saw some of the areas where Sabrina was playing. One house we went to had a concrete floor patio area thingy just outside of the house. There were a TON of little bits of plastic lying around, not to mention cigarette butts and a few sharp metal objects and shards of broken glass, all within a baby's reach. Now, Sabrina had been there for a full week before we arrived and I’m fairly certain this wasn’t the first time she’d been in this area. My question is why couldn’t they have at least tried to sweep the area up? They knew a baby was coming. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that she might want to check out some of this debris for herself?
Sabrina may be a year old, but she's still small enough to want to pick up everything she finds on the ground. True, she doesn’t put absolutely everything in her mouth anymore, but that’s not to say she’s given up the pastime altogether. In the few short minutes I was in there with her, I had to pull several of those plastic bits out of her hand and one out of her mouth. Once she got a hold of one of the cigarette butts, I picked her up and brought her to the sink to wash her hands. From there, Sabrina walked to another house owned by one of my wife’s family members. Only this person owns a poodle who took a dump in the walkway leading to her house. Naturally, Sabrina made a bee line to the dog droppings and cried hysterically when I stopped her from picking them up. I’m sorry, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before I let her juggle pieces of dog sh*t in her hands.
C.) PLEASE TRY TO KEEP HER ALIVE, WILL YA?: It was this lack of proper baby care that made me suspicious when I saw Sabrina for the first time. Back home, we keep the house pretty clean and we do our darndest to ensure that Sabrina is healthy. She’d been in Brazil for all of a week and it seemed like she was falling apart at the seams. When we arrived, she was coughing quite a bit with night sweats. A couple of days later, she busted up her nose and forehead and two days after that, her throat was inflamed and she was screaming into and past midnight. Plus, she had a nasty diaper rash; something she virtually never gets under our care. So, what happened? Well, for the busted up nose and head, all accusing fingers pointed at her grandfather.
Dalva asked "Granddaddy" to watch her for five minutes and, within that time, Sabrina apparently made a break for it and landed face first onto the ground. Yet from what I’ve learned about this guy, I can’t get mad at him. He never did much in the way of parenting when my wife was a baby, so I can’t imagine he somehow magically learned how to do the job now. As for Sabrina's other maladies, I told Dalva to keep her in clean environments whenever possible and to try and keep her physical contact with other kids to a minimum. She did the opposite, so perhaps my fears were warranted. After all, under grandpa’s short watch, Sabrina almost f**king died and in the time before my arrival, she had a measles/rubella shot and a shot to clear up her inflamed throat.
D.) NOBODY HAD ANYTHING: To be more specific, I had a great degree of difficulty finding the following six things:
- FOOD: I went to a small number of houses during my brief stay in Brazil, but the refrigerators in these houses were, for the most part, empty. I don’t need food several times a day like some people. If need be, I can get through an entire day on a very minimal amount of food, yet it seemed that if I wanted to eat, somebody had to order a pizza or something else like that because nobody did any grocery shopping for real food like fruits, veggies and meats. Yet, I wasn’t mad or anything because I realize that money is tight and it’s hard to keep your refrigerator full when you’re busting your ass just to pay the bills. That leads me into the other great necessity of life that was in scarce supply.
- WATER: Sure, I like Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other such carbonated drinks, but when it’s as hot as it is down in Brazil this time of year, all a man really wants is some cold, refreshing spring water. Nobody had any. Some houses stocked Coke, so in the absence of water, that’s what I drank. Not a huge deal because at least they had something, but I would have thought water to be a cheaper beverage to buy than soda. Maybe I’m wrong, though.
- TOILET PAPER: This I didn’t understand quite as easily because a wise owl with glasses once told me to read and stay in school whilst handing me a book that said, “Everybody Poops.” Yet apparently, Brazilians don’t because it was damn near impossible to find toilet paper in any of the houses I visited. For those few times where a house did have T.P., it was in a room that was inexplicably nowhere near the bathroom. Does it make sense to keep toilet paper in your bedroom while the bathroom has nothing?
- SOAP: Speaking of bathroom necessities, I was hard-pressed to find hand soap in half of the places I visited. I’ll admit that I may not have looked hard enough in some situations, but seriously, if you want your guests to wash their hands, are you really gonna wanna tempt fate by hiding the hand soap like it's Round One of an anti-bacterial scavenger hunt?
- TOWELS: Both the paper and cloth variety were in scarce supply and I have no idea why. Go to my bathroom and, at any given time, you’ll find anywhere from two to three available towels that you can use to dry your hands after washing them. In Brazil (...and with hands sopping wet), I’d ask, “Hey, do you happen to have any towels around here?” Then, whoever I asked would look around the house and pull out a towel from some secret hiding spot. And you can forget about paper towels. Apparently, that is a luxury that few can afford, so if you spill your drink, you’re pretty much f**ked if you have to use your one house towel to mop it up.
- INTERNET: In Part 1, I spoke of how very few people in my wife’s family have internet access, but on this trip, even the few stand-bys that I knew of were of no help. One girl’s computer monitor was burnt out. Another family member’s internet was disconnected and even the Internet shop at the mall had shut down temporarily due to some weird reason. Once the Internet shop got their system back online, there was like a 90 minute wait to use it. Suffice it to say, I settled for waiting until after I got home to mess with the net.
E.) NOCTURNAL NOISES: I mentioned the annoying dogs in Part 2, but it’s an even worse problem now. Not only are the same damn dogs still barking away, but apparently the neighborhood picked up like eight new ones to join the debate. Of course, none of them are leashed and one night, I could swear I heard a battle royal of dogs barking (and fighting) louder than a Friday night in Michael Vick's garage. But the startling noise I heard on that same night was a couple of guys feverishly arguing with each other from a few streets away.
My Portuguese is fairly strong now, so I was able to pick up the basic theme of the argument; that being that some guy slept with another guy’s wife. After about maybe thirty seconds of yelling, I heard a gunshot go off and then dead silence. “Well, he’s done.” I thought as I attempted to go back to sleep. Apparently, I’ve lost the will to be shocked because within five minutes, I was in dreamland again. Sure, it’s not the ideal neighborhood to raise a baby, but she wasn’t even sleeping at the house that night. She was sleeping a city away in a much safer house with a security gate.
F.) DEAD CHICKENS: Our time in Brazil is usually hectic as we’re usually prepping for a big event. This time, it was the birthday party. Earlier this year, it was the baptism and my brother-in-law’s wedding. In 2004, it was my wedding. Always something… and we’re always running around like headless chickens, which is ironic because I actually saw headless chickens on this trip. I swear, my wife, her cousin and I were walking with Sabrina in the stroller when I came upon two small buckets. Inside both buckets were white feathered blobs with chicken feet sticking out. I asked my wife, “Is this what I think it is?” She said, “Yes... and please stay away from there. You don’t want to get too close to those.”
Hey, no arm-twisting necessary. I’m gone.
CATEGORY 3: THE PARTY AND THE PARTING
In this last part, I’ll end with just a few comments about the birthday party and the pain involved with leaving my family behind.
A.) THE PARTY: What can I say? This party was fantastic. We might have spent a lot of money on stuff, but it was great to see it all go to good use. We had a puppet show, a hair and make-up table, a table for designer nails, a mini-ferris wheel, a monorail, ball pools, a couple of slides, crawling tubes, bridges to cross, nets to climb, ropes to swing from, a mini amusement park-style pirate ship, a basketball game, foosball table, remote controlled cars on a 15 foot race track, open bar and barbecued buffet food, not to mention the goodie bags we made, the retrospective video I rendered and the Disney characters that dropped by for a surprise visit. The funny part is that with all I just mentioned, I’m positive I’m forgetting something. We just had so much for the kids to do and my daughter’s party has been the talk of the town ever since.
B.) FAULTY DVD PLAYERS: What really burned my butt was the part about the DVD videos I burned. I took video clips from this past year, spent months putting together the best clips and rendered what, in my humble opinion, was a kick-ass video. I burned back-up copies and tested each one of them out prior to my trip. I even played one on my brother-in-law’s DVD player and it worked fine. Yet, that next day, it not only didn’t work, but didn’t even recognize that a DVD was in the machine.
Other DVDs were tested and they worked, but I asked my wife to test my DVD when she arrived at the party (…she was getting there early to set up some stuff). The player played my video, but skipped and stuttered a bit at the beginning. My back-up video did likewise, though in slightly different spots which led me to believe that their DVD player might be ready for a replacement. Most of the video played smoothly, but it just got me mad that 100% of it didn’t play perfectly, since 100% of it played perfectly at home and I'd spent so much time ensuring that we'd have the perfect video.
C.) SABRINA THE POOH: Probably my favorite part of the party came at the end of the puppet show. My wife was asked to bring Sabrina behind the platform where the puppets were doing their thing. The hostess opened a door in the front to reveal an area of black velvet. She closed it, said a few “magic” words and when she opened the door once more, there was Sabrina wearing a Winnie the Pooh outfit. The effect really went over big with the kids and I just thought it was the most endearing thing. Naturally, she looked bewildered, but I’m sure she’ll appreciate the cuteness of it all when she’s old enough to watch the video and understand what it is she’s seeing.
D.) THE RICH GET RICHER: My wife told me a story of a certain boy on her side of the family who comes from a poor home and is, by and large, a pretty annoying kid. He certainly doesn’t mean to be annoying – he just is. But regardless of his behavior, he still deserves to have nice birthdays, right? For his most recent birthday, his mom invited a bunch of people over for a humble party. Roughly 25 people showed up… and only one of them brought a present for him. They’re poor as it is. Shouldn’t the invitees have compensated by bringing at least a few presents? That’s my opinion at least.
As for our daughter, she’s not necessarily a rich girl, but compared to this boy and most of my wife’s side of the family, she’s a privileged kid. I personally bought Sabrina a small number of very good toys, saving the others for Christmas. For this party, my daughter received something in the neighborhood of thirty toys! If anybody should have received a bunch of toys, it’s the downtrodden boy; not the privileged girl. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the gifts and am thankful that she has plenty of toys to play with, but c’mon! She really didn’t need so many gifts. It just doesn’t seem fair to the underprivileged children of the family when the one who needs the toys the least gets the most.
E.) SAYING GOOD-BYE: This was probably the saddest I’ve ever been to leave Brazil and go back home because I was doing it alone, leaving my wife and daughter behind. When you become a father, there’s a chance you can get attached to your child(ren) and at this age she’s in right now, she’s just learning so much stuff so fast. You almost hate seeing her do the new things she learned in your absence because you feel like the next time you see her, she’ll be starting college and you will have missed her entire childhood. This obviously isn’t the case, but who said that love was rational?
Anyway, it was all I could do to keep from getting teary-eyed as I held her to say good-bye. I insisted on saying my good-byes to Sabrina privately and before we left for the airport because I just didn’t think I could bear seeing her directly before I had to get in line to have my carry-on bags x-rayed. It was heart-wrenching enough when I waved good-bye to her after getting in the car because she learned how to do that baby wave where she just holds out her arm and moves the four fingers of her right hand up and down. It’s so cute and so sad because she’s got that little baby pout thing happening, too. I miss her to death and I'm counting the days until I can see her again.
Anyway, they’re slated to return on Christmas Day, so here’s hoping there are no delays or snowstorms to prevent me from spending quality time with my family on the most important holiday of the year. <")))><
Labels: Airlines, baby, Brazil, father, Flying, parenthood, Terrorism
