Luxuries I Missed While in Brazil - Part 2

It’s so tough to write something like this without sounding b*tchy or otherwise ungrateful for all of the good things that I experienced in my most recent trip to Brazil. So, as I did in Part One , I’ll start off with a disclaimer:

My wife’s family is still awesome and seemingly still dedicated to making my stay as pleasurable as possible. For this, I am extremely and sincerely grateful. I truly am. In hindsight, I’ll admit that the problem was almost definitely with ME and not them. I grew up in the greatest country in the world (…at least in my opinion) and I've enjoyed all of the spoils that go along with it. So yeah, thirty days in Brazil kinda took a toll on me. Everybody’s got their threshold and everybody hits their limit at some point.

Regrettably, when this happens to me, it gets tougher for me to remain a gracious guest. So each day, I kept having to remind myself that I was, in fact, a guest in another country. Who knows? Maybe in a way, writing this out is therapeutic because it allows me to summarize the various frustrations that I don't feel at liberty to vent while I'm there. And before my ranting begins, this isn't so much a list of "Luxuries Missed" as the title would imply.

No, Part Two is more like, "Here's me whining again like a little b*tch." I admit it.

Having said that, let's proceed, shall we?

HEAT: Not only did this trip mark my longest stay in Brazil to date (30 days), but we (wife, daughter and I) went down there during some of the hottest months that Brazil has to offer. Thirty days of blistering heat wound up being just a bit too much for my system to endure without cracking the veneer in a few spots. As stated above, even the many well-meaning gestures of magnanimity doled out for my benefit started to wear me down a bit when my polite refusals weren’t immediately acknowledged. I'll expatiate.

KNOWING WHEN TO QUIT: Here’s one difference between your average American and the majority of my in-lawed Brazilian family members. When an American offers you something to eat and you respond by saying, “No thanks, I’m fine,” That’s usually the end of the conversation. The aforementioned American might put the offer back on the table at a later time, but that’s about as far as he'll go.

When somebody down in Brazil offered me something that I didn’t want, I usually had to turn them down about five or six times and even then, they didn’t completely give up. My five or six “no” responses to various offers of food or other services generally convinced the one making the offer that I either didn’t understand the offer or that I would accept it if offered by someone else.

Here’s a sample conversation to drive the point home. In this example, the magnanimous Brazilian family member is A and I’m B:

A: “Bill, would you like some pizza?”

B: “Oh, thank you, but I’m not really hungry right now.”

A: “Do you want some?”

B: “No, but thank you anyway. I really don’t have any room for pizza. But thank you.”

A: “We got you some pizza. Why don’t you come into the kitchen and have some?”

B: “I appreciate your offer, but here again, I really, really don’t have any room for pizza, so I can’t have a piece. But again, thank you.”

A: “It doesn't have any onions on it.”

B: “Oh, no. It's not an onion issue. I'm just stuffed. Thank you though.”

A: “I’ll get you a plate and put a couple of pieces on there for you.”

B: “And I do appreciate that. However I really, really, TRULY can’t imagine fitting as much as a grape in here right now, so thank you, but I just can’t eat anything right now.”

A: “Tati, tell him that we got pizza for him. I don’t think he understands what I’m saying.”

When it happens once or twice, it’s actually kind of funny. When it happens several times a day for thirty straight days, blood starts trickling from my ears. On the plus side of things, I actually heard two Brazilians engage in a conversation just like this in Week 3, so apparently, it’s not just me anymore.

I suppose that if I want to drive home the message in under five questions, I just have to say, “Obrigado, mas não quero.” Which means, “Thanks, but I don’t want any.” By saying that you don’t WANT it as opposed to you can’t fit it or can’t see yourself possibly eating another bite, you’ll probably knock down the rate of questions to two or three before the message is clear. My favorite is my mother-in-law, who seems to require a profound answer to every spoken question, thought or observation in order to not wind up repeating herself several times.

Quick Side Story: My wife’s driving one day, I’m in the passenger side and my mother-in-law’s in the backseat holding my daughter (car seats aren’t required in Brazil – more on that later). She pointed out my wife’s old college (something she does at least once every time I’m down there). So, I kinda grunted my acknowledgment because I was tired. Though slightly different words were used each subsequent time, she managed to say the same thing two more times before I found myself forced to remind her that she points this college out to me every time I’m in Brazil and, at this point, I could probably find my wife's alma mater faster than I could find my own bathroom.

EVERYTHING’S A F**KING CONVERSATION: The meaning of the term “double-standard” was never so accurately illustrated than it was during my time in Brazil. My wife, God bless her heart, sees nothing strange about waking me up at 8:00am and expecting me to be dressed and ready to go out the door at 8:01am to do whatever it is that we need to do. So, I’ve gotten accustomed to being ready in like three minutes and by that third minute, I’m literally out the door and ready to roll.

The problem is that I’m the only one held to this three minute blitz.

For everybody else, they can’t seem to drive from one end of the street to the other without having a 15 minute conversation. It seems like every simple move requires a f**king committee to gather on the street and discuss things that won’t even come close to happening for weeks. I get my ass kicked out of bed as if the place were on fire, then I’m roasting out in the hot sun, waiting for everybody else to have their say so that we can go.

And I love how everybody’s always late for everything. Before I married my wife, she told me that Brazilians are infamous for being late, which is why her urgency to get me out of bed kinda puzzles me sometimes. What good does it do for me to turbo charge my engine if I'm racing a bunch of turtles?

The logic eludes me.

EVERYBODY’S GOT LOUD-ASS BARKING DOGS: Every morning in Brazil, I woke to the sounds of five dogs in a barking war. I went out to somebody’s house and if they didn’t have a barking dog, their neighbor did. There are leashless dogs walking the streets during the day and as I tried to sleep at night, I had to endure feverish arguments by dogs who really should have been off the streets and, you know, in school or something.

I'd been staying in a city called São Bernardo do Campo during my vacation in Brazil, but for my brother-in-law’s wedding, we had to take a ten hour bus ride out to the other side of the state in a hick town called Pacaembu (...pronounced: puck-KAIM-boo). I figured, “Well, at least I’ll get a break from the f**king dogs.”

No such luck.

Dogs are everywhere there, too! And damn it, they got something to say…. loudly. But believe it or not, the dogs weren't the things that bugged me the most in Pacaembu.

INSECTS AND REPTILES: Ever see “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom?” Remember that scene where Indy and Shortround are trapped inside of that cave with the spiked walls that were closing in on them, all the while that whiny blonde was freakin’ out about the creepy crawlies all around her? Well, there weren’t any moving, spiked walls to deal with, but I sure got the lion’s share of creepy crawlies.

My poor mother-in-law lives in a small house that's just full of little insects, harmless though they may be. The bathroom’s a haven for various types of flies and spiders. The kitchen, TV room and bedroom all have ants f**king everywhere, which really puts a damper on things like, you know, dinner and sleeping.

One evening, I had a small Dixie cup with some Coke in it. I drank the Coke and left the cup on the computer table (in the bedroom). Since I don’t regularly lick Dixie cups clean of all liquid, there were a couple of drops of Coke left in the cup. Next morning, there were about 4,000 ants crawling all over, inside and around the damn thing. My mother-in-law is operating under the delusion that, had I not left “something sweet” out, there’d be no ants in the room, as if the existence of a drop of Coke was enough to perpetuate the magical spawning of these ant infantries.

I could drop a f**king cake on my kitchen floor and get nothing for days.
I leave a drop of Coke in an elevated spot of her bedroom and I’m the Pied freakin' Piper of the ant world.

And it only got worse when we went out of town for my brother-in-law’s wedding in Pacaembu, São Paulo. Unfortunately, the dog and insect population’s just booming down there, the ants are practically on steroids… and oh yeah, they got f**king reptiles and amphibians, too.

Fortunately, we managed to score a bassinet with a nylon-type net that draped over it to keep the creepy crawly population from carrying our daughter off into the sunset. One night as I was shooing flies away from me by the dozen, I spotted a small frog climbing the wall of our room. After a few failed attempts, I managed to trap it on the wall with a glass cup. I took the frog outside, discarded him and figured that was the end of that.

I get back to the room and there’s a small lizard on the opposite wall, closest to the bedpost. This time, I didn’t bother catching it. I just killed the motherf**ker with a rolled up magazine and carried the debris to the garbage pail in the kitchen. I didn’t even make it to the pail before I saw another lizard of about the same size climbing the kitchen wall. This one was a bit craftier and eluded about four swat attempts before the fifth one basically severed the little bastard in half.

So, I cleaned up the crime scene, grabbed a soda can from the fridge and headed into the other room for a Coke and a smile. About two minutes later, I went back into the kitchen and I saw what I can only presume was the dead lizards’ father on the same kitchen wall, creeping me the f**k out. I say “father” because this one was roughly the size of a twenty ounce bottle of Pepsi that no magazine at my disposal was ever gonna come close to killing. So, by that time, I was just like, “Aw, f**k this,” headed for the bedroom, rolled up a bath towel, shoved it under the crack at the bottom of the door and went to bed, praying that I wouldn't wake up with a damn tarantula on my face.

DAMN BRAZILIAN BEDS: In Part One, I talked about a bed that I unintentionally broke with my big, fat ass. Because of that fateful incident a couple of years ago, I always climb gingerly into whatever bed I happen to be using during my time in Brazil. I can only assume that the bed I slept in during my stay in Pacaembu was glued together with pieces of Hubba Bubba because it only took my wife a second to climb in on the opposite side and cause the damn thing to collapse. I just couldn’t wait to get to my bed back in America.

You could drop a f**king piano on my American bed and the biggest problem you’d have would be dusting off the sheets.

I toss loose change on a Brazilian bed and it's in toothpicks.

ONIONS IN EVERYTHING: I’ll be b*tching about food for a while now, primarily because I haven’t really had a thoroughly satisfying meal in a month.

Here’s a concession: I’m a picky-ass eater; always have been. So, if I starved for part of my time in Brazil, it was my own damn fault. I acknowledge that. And I can’t stand the taste of onions and garlic. I hate them with a passion and though garlic isn’t as much of a problem, virtually everything has f**king onions in it. The dilemma presents itself when people invite us to dinner and cook food that’s action-packed with onions.

And I can’t be polite in these situations either, because I hate onions that much. I don’t recoil in terror or anything, but I’ll just wind up picking at whatever’s on my plate as I do my utmost to avoid the little white bastards, which are usually finely chopped and well-mixed into whatever I’m trying to dissect.

Again, I’m the b*tch in this scenario and I’ll always be first to admit that. I should just learn to stomach the f**kers, but I’m 32, set in my ways and a finicky-ass eater. If you want me to change my ways at this point, stick me on a deserted island with onion trees. Twenty bucks says I'll be eating grubworm salads and sandcastles before I even think about trying an onion.

McDONALD’S AND PIZZA SUCK: So, with the onion dilemma, what’s a guy to do? Well, there are the stand-bys of Mickey D’s and a few slices of the Za, except for the fact that they suck, too. The McDonald’s burgers aren’t made with the same type of meat and, believe it or not, they actually taste more like dried up sausage-flavored hockey pucks than burgers. And they can NOT do sodas. They just can’t pull it off. Their Diet Coke tastes exactly like bland grape juice and their ice cream tastes like lukewarm ass. It just ain’t cool when that’s what you taste when you’re expecting something crazy like, oh I don’t know, Diet Coke and ice cream.

What sucks is that you can’t even mask the horrible "burger" flavor with ketchup because they don’t have ketchup. Oh, they SAY it’s ketchup, but since when has red sugary water ever passed for ketchup? I missed my Heinz. The other thing you’d think would work in a food crisis is their pizza, but you’d be wrong…. again. The cheese sucks, they use absolutely no discernable tomato sauce whatsoever and they insist on packing the crusts with a “cheese” called catupiry. For those of you who have never tried catupiry, just imagine cheesy gnocchi, blended into a thick paste and crammed into the crust of your pizza.

Every variation of pizza they have is either fraught with onions, catupiry or other such fun nuggets of food, the very thought of which twist my stomach into braids. Again, "picky eater" b*tches about food. Fine, I accept that, but please don’t throw ten pounds of cheese on a circle of dough with whole green olives and four slices of half-ripened tomatoes and call it a pizza.

It’s a circle-shaped coronary with no sauce, folks.

NO VARIETY: Americans are really spoiled when it comes to food. I mean, we have every conceivable kind of food that exists, so our options are virtually limitless. Go to a foreign country, however, and variety in the cuisine seems to depend directly on how many foreign-born folks live there. Countries like the US and England have variety because a variety of people live there, so supply has to meet demand.

Brazil is made up of, wait for it......... Brazilians. There are very few foreign-born folks living there, so variety’s not exactly abundant. Regardless of what part of Brazil you go to, you pretty much find yourself looking at the same f**king menu. Rice and beans are a given, so you gotta deal. You’ll also find a significant number of “lanchonetes” which are like fried snack places. Same snacks; same drinks. Restaurants that aren’t either rodizio-style or restaurant slash pizzerias seem to be rare. And here again, you get pretty much the same types of food.

BRAZILIAN WOMEN HAVE INCREDIBLE BODIES: So, what is this? A complaint? Is the Guileless Vituperator gay or something? Nope. Just married... and yes, faithful to my wife. It’d just be nice if I could shut my "hot chick" radar off or, you know, throw it in the garbage or something. Instead, I’m in Brazil and gorgeous women (or images of them) are all over the place. Hot chicks can be seen on billboards, on display at magazine stands, on television shows and out walking the streets with belly shirts and short shorts on. And my wife will occasionally point out attributes of certain females that I’m doing my damndest to avoid looking at.

I love being married, I love my wife and I love being faithful to her... and I've got absolutely no problem with my diet or the salad I got in front of me. Just don’t make me eat it in Willy Wonka’s f**king Chocolate Factory. That's all I'm sayin.'

NO CAR-SEATS REQUIRED: Now, maybe this is the spoiled American in me, but I can’t believe that infants aren’t required to ride in car-seats in Brazil. We actually brought our car-seat with us, but we only used it when I insisted upon it. If you read Part One, you may recall the section on cars and how automatics are virtually non-existent. Couple that with the horrendous condition of like 70% of the roads in this country and I’m actually amazed that my little girl isn’t in traction by now.

I couldn’t even tell you the amount of times my daughter’s neck snapped forward, backward and from side-to-side with the herky-jerky cars on these ridiculous roads. It's all legal though.

I could have tied my girl to the bumper like a bunch of “Just Married” cans on strings and we’d have sooner been pulled over for the tinted windows than for the reckless infant neglect.

DRESSED TO THE NINES.... FOR T.G.I. FRIDAYS?: Apparently so. Reason? I’ve got a couple of hypotheses. For starters, and I don’t mean this to be an insult in the least, but the line between the well-to-do and the poor is sharper in the part of Brazil that I stayed for the past thirty days. My wife’s side of the family’s never been affluent, which is one of the reasons why I like them so much. They’re authentic people who work very hard for what they have; not like these bratty teens who are partying off of Daddy’s money, flashing their digital cameras, using their cell phones and dressing for success.

Friday’s maintains their rate from American dollars to Brazilian Reais, so for the majority of Brazilians, a dinner at Friday’s is a bit too much of a blow to the monthly budget. You’ll rarely see slum kids dining there, but you do see the priviledged kids hanging out there, trying so hard to show everyone else that they belong where the money is by dressing like champs. I’m not rich, but my American dollar goes farther here, so a dinner at Friday’s doesn’t exactly put a bullet hole in my budget. I just don't see the need to be a poser while I'm knocking back some flavor.

A REAL BRAZILIAN SOCCER GAME: I had expressed an interest in going to an authentic Brazilian soccer game, so a few members of my wife's family took me to see Santo André hosting their team, Santos. Members of my wife's family either cheer for Santos or Corinthians. But here's where it gets weird. Most oftentimes, women and children who may never even watch soccer will always tell you what team they "cheer" for. And, near as I can tell, it's hereditary. If your folks are "Santistas," odds are you'll be one, too. Americans like myself might be nuts about football, but we're not psychotic about it. Brazilians, on the other hand, are damn near homicidal when it comes to soccer.

One More Quick Side Story: My brother-in-law had just come back from his honeymoon and managed just enough energy to drive us to someone's birthday party. By the time he arrived, he crashed on the bed. As a goof, this Santos fan was draped with Corinthians paraphrenalia so that photos could be snapped. It'd be like people draping Indianapolis Colts' sh*t on me, knowing full well that I hate Peyton Manning with a passion. Yet, I'd see the humor in it and have a good laugh. My brother-in-law could have CLINICALLY KILLED everybody in the room when he woke up. He was that pissed. In fact, I think he's still fuming over it. It's that serious in Brazil.

Anyway, the stadium in Santo André has one side that's covered with a roof and the other side is in the open air. Now get this. They separate home team fans from visiting fans. No bullsh*t. Home team gets the covered part (naturally), so the visitors had to endure the rain in cheap ass parkas that outdoor vendors sold them for less than a buck a pop. The family members who were kind enough to take me to this game were Santos fans.... who'd decided to sit on the dry, Santo André side.

And all of them warned me not to let on that we were backing Santos (who actually won 2-1 that night). For those few fans who dared to bear the colors of the opposing team, they literally had half of an entire stadium berating the f**k out of them until military police escorted them out.

I swear I'm not making any of this stuff up. They even made an announcement about two minutes before the game ended to tell the fans which exits they should take, depending on what team they were rooting for. I once asked the family if Santos ever played Corinthians. They said yes. I asked if I could go to one of those games sometime and everybody looked at me as if I'd just shoved the barrel of a gun in my mouth. Apparently with the multitude of die-hard fans supporting both teams, I'd be safer walking into Compton with a white hood on my head than going to one of these games.

So anyway, I'm back home again and feeling good, now that I've had a couple of enjoyable onionless meals and a few good nights of sleep that didn't involve crispy critters crawling into collapsing beds. It's still freakin' cold where I live, but it's better than losing seven hundred gallons of water in thirty days through my sunburned pores.

I'd tell you whether or not the grass is greener over here, but first I'll need to wait for the snow and ice to melt. Until then, my kvetching is complete.

Luxuries I Missed While in Brazil - Part 1

Well, it´s been almost a year to the date since I last wrote about my experiences in Brazil (in a MySpace profile of mine) and I'm back in Brazil right now. With each trip comes new experiences, so I'll want to write about them as soon as I get back to America and to a normal keyboard (...see below).

But before I delve into new observations, let me take you back to Friday, January 27, 2006; the date of my last Brazil blog, quoted in its entirety for your reading pleasure.

Enjoy.

Well, I’ve been back from Brazil for a few weeks now. I survived, albeit barely, but I’m home, doing some web searches for a new job (…I came back to find out that I’d been downsized. Way to ring in the new year, eh?). I’m sure I’ll delve into more detail on specific events as time wears on, but for now, I’ll just say that our Christmas was absolutely awesome. My wife said that it was the best Christmas she’s ever had and that doesn’t surprise me in the least, considering that it was the first holiday she got to spend with her family in over five years. Needless to say, it was an emotional experience and I, for one, will never forget it.

Now, it’s no secret that when you travel to a foreign land, you miss certain things about America. Often, they’re the things you least think about until they’re gone. Now, some of my observations may come off as humorous at Brazil’s expense, so let me say this first. I love many things about Brazil and, more specifically, Milena has an awesome family down there. My wife’s family is, quite simply, the best family I’ve ever known. They’re incredibly amiable and kind in a way I never even knew existed. They bend over backwards to help each other (and me) and they give without ever wanting favors in return. Without a doubt, I grew closer to my wife’s side of the family on this trip and, as long as I live, I’ll be forever grateful for all that they are and all that they do out of the goodness of their hearts.

Having said all of that, I undeniably missed many spoils of our great country and, in the spirit of good fun, I thought I’d share a few of them. Bear in mind that these are my observations and they do not necessarily reflect the views of others. For sure, there are many Brazilians who probably have it a lot better than how I describe things below, but I’m only speaking from what I personally experienced. Like I said, you never really learn to appreciate some of the finer things until they’re no longer at your disposal.

TELEPHONES: Frankly, when I’m home, I barely even use the telephone. I have a cell phone, but again, it’s primarily used for calling out to my wife, fielding calls from my wife…. or playing Ms. Pac-Man. That’s basically it. However, we left our beloved home in the care of two Brazilian ladies who are living with us for a period of time and, like a mother feels leaving her baby with an untested sitter, I felt the slight anxiety that goes with being a homeowner who has left his abode for a faraway land. So, not too long after arriving in Brazil, I bought a calling card on the off-chance that a whim to call home might hit me. The drawback here was that the place where I was staying was phone-less. To make a call, we had to drive to someone else’s apartment. Again, this was not a super-huge, monumentally big deal; rather more of a minor inconvenience really. Besides, this is the year 2006 and we surely have other ways of quickly getting a message to someone, right? Well……

INTERNET: Yep! Same story with the internet I’m afraid. Simply put, if we wanted to use it, we had to go elsewhere. I managed to check my e-mails only once during my eleven or so days in Brazil. In defense of Brazil, I’ll admit that I could’ve had these top two luxuries almost anytime I wanted, but we’d either have to have a car handy… or trouble someone to drive us over to a phone or internet-equipped home and, really, who wants to put someone out like that?

KEYBOARDS: On the “internet” train of thought, I had another obstacle to overcome even when I was near a computer; that being the slightly weird keyboards that Brazilians use. See, the Portuguese language uses characters that we just don’t have to deal with in English, such as ã, é, ê, ô and ç to name a few. Well, Brazilian keyboards are designed to allow a user to enter symbols such as these without all that much difficulty. However, my inglês typing suffered as a result. My “can’t” came out like “can~t” and my semicolons appeared as “ç.” It took me forever to find the apostrophe and I swear I left Brazil having no clue how to apply a question mark to anything.

I don~t know about you, but I can~t deal with that.

HOT SHOWERS: In a week and a half, I enjoyed one fairly warm and comfortable shower. All of my other shower attempts had me hoppin’ around and contorting my body like some drunk-ass Capoeira dancer on a high-wire. I don’t know why, but simple things like bathtubs just don’t seem to have caught on yet in Brazil. Where I was staying, we basically had a small bathroom with a toilet, a sink and a shower “area”…. but no real way of keeping the water from going all over the place. You basically have to stand in a small square, slightly indented in the floor (by about three quarters of an inch). The square measures roughly three feet by three feet… and that’s all that you have to contain the shower water. This is by no means out of the ordinary. In fact, it seems to be the norm in Brazil, so this is by no means meant to be a dig against my sogra (mother-in-law). Here again, I know of Brazilians who have better shower facilities in their homes, but I know of others on the flip side of things as well. Point of fact that I feel compelled to bring up…. My mother-in-law had a very decent shower in her former abode, before moving to a smaller venue so that her son would have a place to raise a family. Outside of me being electrocuted in her shower one day (don’t ever f**k with a shower head in Brazil while the water’s rainin’ down on ya), I had no problems with that old shower whatsoever. The shower head in her current place is absolutely not adjustable in any way, shape or form and any attempt to prove otherwise might get you zapped. On its best day, the shower delivered mildly warm water. All of the other days, it was quite cold. There was no bathtub, shower curtain or any sort of barrier to catch the spraying water; just a drain. Try as I did, I just couldn’t keep the bathroom floor from getting covered with water. Luckily for me, most of these shower facilities come with a broom-like squeegee that you can use to drag the loose water into the drain, but here again, one would think that there’s gotta be a better way. Incidentally, that one decent shower I enjoyed in Brazil did have a glass enclosure to keep the water inside. I just can’t understand why all showers aren’t equipped in like fashion, or at the very least, have a small tub-like barrier to keep the water in check.

FOOD: My wife Milena used to tell me stories of how she couldn’t eat American food when she first arrived. She literally ached and yearned for rice and beans. Frankly, the whole thing made little sense to me at the time. After all, what’s better than American food, right? Well, I sure got a taste of what she was talking about (pun shamelessly intended). I had to face facts: Rice and beans are staples in the Brazilian diet, regardless of social class. As such, I had to deal with the reality of eating them almost every day that I was there. Doesn’t sound like a big deal I’m sure, but trust me, it wears on you pretty quickly -- at least it did with me. Here again, I must include my disclaimer; that being that I was very thankful for Milena’s family even bothering to feed me in the first place. God knows they didn’t have to. They’re awesome people who just happened to be very accustomed to this type of diet. I, on the other hand, got to a point where the very thought of rice and beans (or in the case of breakfast, French bread with ham and cheese, no mayo) got me feeling a bit queasy. Coupled with the fact that I actually, clinically got sick in Brazil (more on that in a sec), and I literally ached to hit a pizzeria or even a Mickey D’s. Where Milena once ached and yearned FOR rice and beans, I now quite literally ached FROM rice and beans. By my last night in São Paulo, it was all I could do to put down a half dozen mouthfuls of rice before tapping out. But, speaking of Mickey D’s…..

McDONALD’S: Yes, rest assured, São Paulo, Brazil is not at a loss for an adequate quantity of McDonald’s stops and… I must admit that the food is quite similar in taste to the American version. However, don’t dare order anything more complicated than a number (“I’ll have a number one with a Coke”) unless you don’t mind waiting twenty minutes for your food to arrive. Milena might not dig my “rice and beans” observations, but even SHE will attest to how incredibly slow the Mickey D staffers are to assemble a slightly more than dirt-simple order. I hit three Mickey D stops in those eleven or so days (…far more than I ever imagined visiting in such a short span of time), but the story never changed. When I do hit one of these gastronomically devastating hot spots, I generally order the same deal that I do in America; a “Number Two” with maybe an extra cheeseburger on the side if my appetite warrants it. The number two is a quarter pounder meal in Brazil (…or as they like to call it, a “quarterão”). Now, here’s where I make things INCREDIBLY complicated. I order my stuff without onions. This, apparently, is what brings the big, corporate burger-making machine to a screeching halt. On the plus side, if you are low-maintenance enough to order your food by a number with no modifications, you can probably get your meal in like four to five minutes. As a bonus, if you’re not the Coke-drinkin’ kind, you can get your meal with orange juice, lemon juice or even grape juice! Plus, they have all kinds of weird things that you won’t find on an American McDonald’s menu, like those McQuente Queijo thingies, which can only be roughly translated as hot cheese…. things. I didn’t try them, but since Brazilians seem to dig cheese bread, I can only surmise that this is what they were offering. Plus, they even have something called McInternet in a few participating locations, though getting it to freakin’ work is another issue altogether. Witticisms aside, I will say this for my problematic, oleaginous burger-ordering ass -- at least I’m polite about it. My version goes something like, “Será que eu poderia ter um número dois sem cebola, por favor?” whereas everybody else is like “Me da!” which translates like “Gimme!” But all bitching aside, my Mickie D breaks were a decent change to the “staples” that I’d been consuming on those other days.

BIG, SOFT BEDS: After enjoying a ridiculously hot and relaxing shower on my first day back in America, I also briefly partook of another guilty pleasure – my cushy, queen-sized, soft-as-f**k luxury bed, complete with fluffy comforter and dark satin sheets. First off, I’m a big man. I’m over two hundred pounds and, even if I lost virtually all of my body fat, I’d still be like a buck ninety, due in part to my glory days as a steady weightlifter (…on the plus side, I’m back on the weights again to help compensate for the twelve pounds I lost from lack of fattening food). So, being a not-so-scrawny dude, I need to know that my bed will be able to support my frame. In my travels, most of the beds I’ve seen in Brazil are fairly low to the ground and, quite literally, supported by thin wooden planks. Not a big deal for Brazilians as they generally aren’t built like professional wrestlers or power lifters, but I learned a hard lesson about these beds a year and a half ago. During one night at Milena’s cousin’s house, we were sleeping over and wound up in different rooms, due to the size of the available beds. Anyway, I’d had a nightmare that really shook all hell out of me and I jumped up. Having gotten my bearings and caught my breath, I plopped back down onto the bed, which promptly collapsed like a house of freakin’ toothpicks. Needless to say, the experience made me wary of future nights in Brazil. I almost didn’t care that the mattresses were virtually as firm as the floors over which they hovered, but during this trip to Brazil, I spent a couple of nights in bunk beds at a chácara (…kind of like a modest country spot with a pool and outdoor cooking facility). For fear of killing somebody, I took the bottom bunk for those nights, but a new fear hovered over me… literally. Milena has a beautiful cousin named Aline, who just so happens to have found love with the one guy in Brazil who’s taller than me. Nice enough dude, but he wound up taking top bunk! Fortunately, he is tall and thin, but he was quite the restless sleeper, as was evident by the squeaking and cracking going on above me. I had to watch these skinny-ass planks bending down towards my head for two nights, so as you can imagine, I spent those nights praying that I wouldn’t wake up in splinters and wood rubble from a collapsed bunk. To make matters slightly worse, there were like nine of us in this tiny room and, in ninety-plus degree weather, it’s not the most pleasant way to snooze. I had at least two nights of quasi-insomnia on account of the fact that I can’t sweat and sleep at the same time. I did manage to score a few winks of sleep during the other nights though (…albeit on the floor).

ENGLISH: I concede that I basically have no right whatsoever to kvetch about the fact that nobody speaks English, but that doesn’t stop Brazilians from wearing all kinds of t-shirts with English catch-phrases or using English words in the names of some of these small mom-and-pop stores. That’s not including all of the words that the Portuguese language freely uses from English to mix into their own vernacular. The drawback? Well, for one, nobody can accurately pronounce these English words, so they made up this uniform method of resolving this issue. A well-known spot (though São Paulo doesn’t have one) is the Hard Rock Café. But “Hard Rock” in Portuguese is pronounced like, “HARJ-ee HOCK-ee.” This, I swear, is not an exaggerated pronunciation key. But my biggest handicap was my lack of effective communication in Portuguese. Sure, I can speak it, but far from the ease and mellifluousness in which Milena and her family speak it. And I gotta tell ya, nobody showed me any semblance of mercy on this trip. I got hit with everything this time around; Slang words, esoteric jokes, oddball expressions and an utter disregard for the structured Portuguese that I’d been taught at the Boston Language Institute all those months ago. Obviously, Milena was in Brazil with me, but that’s not necessarily a benefit when it comes to breaking the language barrier. I mean, I’d prefer not to involve her every time I get stuck with some odd-ass expression, you know? What was even more of a slap in the face was having to hear the speaker on the other end say, “Milena, tell him that blah, blah, blah.” I might not be fluent yet, but I do know enough of the language that, if you put it into simpler words, I’ll most likely get what you’re saying. But if everybody defers to Milena every time they need an on-the-spot translation, I’ll never become as fluent as I want to be.

MEDICINE: Call it my extraordinary bad luck, but I got hit with almost everything on this trip. I started off with third-degree burns on my face and arms (sunblock’s relatively useless when you’re sweatin’ like a dog in a Vietnamese restaurant), moved on to a significantly painful ear infection, then my burnt skin peeled off of me while I suffered through enormous headaches brought on by car sickness (more on that later). Then, for good measure, slap on some of that aforementioned insomnia, add a dash of “rice/bean” nausea and top it all off with cold sweats, a vicious cough and a nasty fever… and that was my vacation. Apparently, my immune system forgot to inform me that IT was taking a vacation, too. By the time I settled back into the good ol’ US of A, I was still trying to get over the last two (fever and cough). On the subject of physical maladies…. and perhaps this was due to the planes, but I came home to random aches and pains all over my torso, arms and legs (…though that might’ve also been from my contortionists’ showers). I found it peculiar that for every ailment I had, I was given basically the same “medicine.” Imagine someone taking a third of a glass of tap water and adding forty drops of something that looks like iodine and you get the all-curing miracle nectar of health that I had to endure. Frankly, I called it what it seemed to be -- Liquid Ass. This love juice never ceased to make my whole body shudder every time I had to drink it, which seemed like every day. To its credit, it seemed to do the trick on my ear infection that first night, but once my Liquid Ass wore off, the agony returned. I was unfortunate enough to have had to continue drinking it long after my ear infection subsided… to attempt to cure the fever symptoms that, sadly, I still had three days after coming back home. A trip to my own doctor like a week and a half later revealed that I really should have checked in with the CDC before going to Brazil. I said, “But Americans aren’t required to get any kinds of vaccinations or anything.” My doctor said, “True, but there’s Malaria and Yellow Fever going around in Brazil right now.” I knew what Malaria was, but not having the same knowledge of the latter, I asked, “Well, I had fever symptoms for several days in Brazil, so how do you treat Yellow Fever?” She goes, “You can’t. It’s fatal.”

Score!

AUTOMATIC CARS: I mentioned car sickness earlier. This is more me than anything else, but automatic cars basically don’t exist in Brazil. They’re all the Standard H variety, which isn’t a big deal, in and of itself, except for the fact that I’m so accustomed to the feel of an automatic that the herky-jerky motion of a standard kinda gets me queasy after a while. And it wasn’t like we took small trips, either. A couple of the excursions we went on took like an hour-plus each way. The fact that my brother-in-law drives like a complete maniac certainly didn’t help matters much. He’d go like seventy with a stopped car like 100 feet away and slam on the freakin’ brakes. I swear sometimes, with the way this dude jets through São Bernardo do Campo, you’d think he was trying to go back to 1955 or something.

CLEAN AIR: Simply put, Brazilian cars aren’t held to the same emissions standards as American cars are. That’s just a plain, hard fact. Black smoke is a common sight and breathing in diesel fumes is just something you have to deal with when driving through the streets of São Paulo. That’s probably why the state’s littered with erotic billboards of scantily-clad ladies (they even had a few Paris Hilton fragrance ads up). I think they’re there to take your mind off of the fact that you’ll be in need of a lung transplant within the next ten years of your life. And much like Paris Hilton, these roads have been ridden pretty hard by way too many people, so if you want to preserve your lungs, keep the windows up. You’ll sweat, but your lungs will thank you.

CLEAN STREETS: Side streets (particularly at red lights) are littered with some very downtrodden people. Some walk up to your windshield with soapy water and a dirty rag trying to make a few bucks. Others put together little gift packages to leave on your side mirror for a few seconds. If they come back and you’ve taken the package, lay some money in its place. If you don’t want it, leave it on your side mirror and they’ll collect their merchandise before the light turns green. Still others will walk in between cars with disabled people, looking for some spare change. And when I say “disabled,” I’m not talking about a limp or a club foot. I’m talking missing limbs and, in one case, a missing eyeball (I witnessed that particular tragedy in Rio de Janeiro a couple of years ago). Just walking to a shopping center in the thick of São Bernardo do Campo recently, Milena and I saw a woman sitting on the sidewalk, begging for spare change. Not too out of the ordinary for sure, except that this woman had like five wide-open, bloody and pus-filled gashes in her legs! The parts of her legs that were wrapped in bandages were also stained with blood that had to have dried months ago. And if these less-than-fortunate people don’t tug at your heartstrings, you can bet the dogs will.

LEASH LAWS: The broader subcategory here is animal cruelty, but it’s dogs you see most often. Granted, I’ve seen some messed up dogs in Brazil before, but on this trip, the reality of it all hit me before we’d even left the airport parking lot. There was this shivering and emaciated three-legged dog just laying on the ground, looking so dead that flies had been using his body as their own little airport terminal. The dog was actually alive, but barely. An American woman brought her water bottle to the dog’s mouth as he feebly lapped at what he could. She also left him with some crumpled up crackers, since this was the only food she had on her at the time. We left the parking lot and watched the dog struggle to get up on his three good legs, consuming what he could (his hind leg was just hanging on his body like a loose hinge). At the risk of bad-mouthing the country, many dogs in Brazil are neglected to a level I’ve never before seen. Countless dogs are seen running loose in the streets and I can only guess that the many injuries that they sport are due to the cars or motorcycles that were unfortunate enough to have hit these animals. One time, I even saw a dog in a very small cage. The dog was shivering his ass off because he was stuck in this cage out in the pouring rain and nobody was making any move to bring him inside. He was clearly soaked to the bone! So, I got to thinking. I mean, you just don’t see many stray dogs in Massachusetts (…at least I don’t), and the ones that are strays aren’t likely to be roaming free for very long before someone snatches him or her into custody. In Brazil, dogs are out limping and shivering in the pouring rain and are, unfortunately, largely ignored.

PUNCTUALITY: Milena once told me of a story of a Brazilian bride who was so late for her own wedding that many of the invited guests actually started leaving and decorations started coming down before she finally arrived! Yet another disclaimer before I rant: Milena’s mother is just awesome. Truly the epitome of a heart of gold, Milena’s mom volunteers her time for church activities which include, among other things, frequent trips to a dilapidated old folk’s home to help with the cleaning and cooking efforts. Just last month, I went with her to volunteer five hours of my morning right alongside her. It’s a hard gig and you have to be so strong in so many ways to do that type of work. For that, she gets my utmost respect (…though she’d never ask for it because she doesn’t do it to gain praise or respect from people. She does it because God speaks to her heart to do it). And to her credit, she’s never late for a morning with these unfortunate souls. The only drawback is that this is the only thing for which she’s consistently on-time. For everything else (…like getting us to the airport on our last night), one should expect to wait several minutes. For some things, you may even be waiting close to an hour. And it doesn’t matter how many people she keeps waiting, either. That has no bearing on anything. The only pattern that I could detect was that the amount of minutes she’s late for any given activity seems to increase with the level of fun that particular activity would otherwise solicit. Example: A few weeks ago, Milena’s mom made a van full of adults and children wait for about 45 minutes past the time of departure. We were going to a park for children (Parque da Xuxa for anybody who’s curious to know) and this van’s driver was hired for a specific time of departure. You can be sure that ours wasn’t this driver’s only gig that day, either. Didn’t matter. Forty-five minutes past the time of departure! Oddly enough, we actually almost had her at the 35 minute mark, but with one foot in the van, she made a beeline for the house door when she realized she’d forgotten something. I don’t know what it was that she went back for, but by the subsequent delay in her return, I think I can rule out a wrist watch.

CIVIL CARD GAMES: If I were to pick a category to toss into my WTF folder, it’d be this one. Let me explain. For example, let’s say that a group of guys gets together in America to play Poker, right? What do you see? What do you hear? Maybe there’s a bit of friendly betting going on. Maybe chips are being used. Light conversation. Maybe a chuckle or two. Whatever. The point is that, unless we’re dealing in high-stakes betting or crack money, nobody loses their cool. Maybe you’ll hear some jovial laughter or something, but that’s about it. Everybody’s calm. Everybody’s cool. Now, let’s take a look at how card games are played in the Southern Hemisphere, though you might want to bring a helmet and shield with you. If you’re a Brazilian and you’re reading this, you probably already know what I’m about to write. TRUCO!!!!! Yes, Truco! To only categorize it as a card game would be to sell it far short of the phenomenon that it truly is. I don’t know the rules. All I know is that every now and then, some dude will get up, slam his hand down on the table and SCREAM the word “Truco!” Sometimes once. Sometimes more than that. However, it doesn’t stop there. If you want a quick lesson in Portuguese profanity, you need look no further than your average Brazilian Truco game. Just have a tape recorder handy because once somebody starts shoutin’ “Truco,” all hell breaks loose and virtually every profane word known to Brazilian man rears its ugly head. Usually, a shouting match will ensue with the Truco protagonist leading the charge. These heated Truco games used to scare the bejeepers out of my wife when she was a little girl. My point in this commentary is that I truly have NO idea what the hell everybody is shouting about! Guys in the states play Poker and everybody’s cool. Brazilian men play Truco and you’d swear every guy at that table just had sex with every other guy’s wife with the way they scream at each other. Picture this…. and this is a true story, mind you. A Truco game was being played by members of my wife’s family on Christmas Eve and the “TRUCO!” battle cry was uttered. Hands were slamming down on the table, people started shouting at each other and my brother-in-law STOOD UP on the freakin’ card table and shouted at the top of his lungs! Incidentally, if anybody doubts the veracity of the story I just told, know this. I caught this little manic episode on film. Nuff said.

SECURITY: A simple fact that you need to know about Brazil. The industrial states such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are simply not very safe places. This is not an American prejudice; rather a universally-known and accepted truth. The government is corrupt and the police force is even worse. The cops protect the bad guys and prey on the good ones. Why? Criminals are dangerous. Some have a lot of money. Brazilian cops get paid squat. You do the math. Police can be bought off, sometimes quite easily. If you’re rich enough, you can literally get away with murder. Meanwhile, law-abiding citizens live in fear of cops because, on the flip side, it’s not uncommon to be pulled over and shaken down for some money to keep the cop from arresting everybody in the car. Before I met her, Milena was in Brazil with her ex on his motorcycle when a cop pulled them over. During those years, Milena worked hard and studied harder. Her grandmother had just died and she was in tears to begin with. This cop quickly figures out that he won’t be shakin’ any money out of either of them and, matter-of-factly tells her that if he shot her in the head, he’d totally get away with it and wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over it. Now, if that doesn’t suck, I don’t know what does. Call me biased, but Milena is a good woman with a good heart. She’s never done anything in her life to deserve that kind of evil treatment, and yet…. this is what goes on every day in Brazil. So, feel free to take a walk through the streets if you like, but avoid the slums whenever possible. Watch your back and take notice of the bars on every window and garage opening. They call these garage enclosures a “portão.” I call it “your very own personal prison.” It’s just too bad that the God-fearing, law-abiding citizens of Brazil are the ones who live behind bars, while the criminals run free with all of the cash that they stole from the few who dared to venture outside of their own personal cages.

A quick anecdote on the subject of safety and security, I was at this chácara with my wife and her family to celebrate Christmas. I gotta tell you, it was awesome! I swam all day for like three days straight (…no doubt the eventual cause of my ear infection). Well, on a clear night when everybody else had tucked into their cots, I was outside with my feet in the pool, just staring up at the stars. They were, after all, incredibly clear and bright in the cloudless night sky. It was calming and relaxing to be out there and, at that time, I sorely needed some spiritual serenity, you know? Well, before my midnight stargazing was to begin, my assignment was to shut off the lights in the common area, as well as the ones in the bathrooms on either side. The men’s room was an easy fix. Nobody was in there, so I shut off the light. I went to the ladies’ room and was about to knock when I heard voices inside. I walked away, confident that the last lady to leave the latrine would shut that final light off and all would be right with the world. Well, the ladies on the inside of that bathroom saw a “shadowy figure” pass in front of the door. They emerged to see a mysterious man sitting with his legs in the pool…. and they absolutely FREAKED! Unbeknownst to me in my own little world, cell phones were ablaze with frightened women. Word of this dangerous “man in the pool” traveled faster than my brother-in-law’s driving and, if you can believe this, one of the frightened women actually wet herself in fear. By the time the toughest hombres in our clan woke up, I’d already grown weary of my stargazing and gone off to my sketchy bunk bed. One of the men was smart enough to have noticed that I just came in the door and just asked, “Hey, Bill. Were you out by the pool just now?” I was like, “Yeah, why?” He just rolled his eyes, let out an “Ei, meu Deus!” and asked his wife on the other line to spread a new bit of news:

“It was only Bill, but thanks for waking us all up over nothing! Go back to bed.”

This true story is already becoming the stuff of legends and family folklore. Is it funny? Sure it is, but what does that say about people’s perception of their own safety in Brazil? All I can say to that is,….

“Thank the good Lord above that I’m back in America!”