The dogs of Matadeiro

 

Our good boy doesn't really dig the dog scene at the current place. There are some resident dogs, but he hasn't found anyone to pal around with yet- and no one to hump. So we were all excited to visit the very doggy Matedeiro last weekend. It didn't disappoint. Jowls of Fury was quiet as we approached but we called, "hey, Jowlsy" and he responded with some slobbery rage. When we crested the hill where you can first see the surfers, Scruff-A-Luff-A-Gus showed up out of nowhere. Keppy knew him in an instant and they tore off  down the hill, around the rocks and across the sand. After things with Scruff played out, we moved on down the beach in search of more action. We didn't see the dogs we were looking for on the first pass but on our way back, luck was with us. We saw the One Who Bared His Teeth and then we saw the wheelbarrow guy and then Sandy Patty came out from behind a wall. The real Sandy Patty, Kepner's very best girlfriend. It was a spirited reunion filled with chasing and wrestling and a tiny bit of humping that got shut down fast and athletic moves and in the end, tired, smiling dogs. Sometimes things are as good as you remember. This was one of those times.

Carol picked the Black lady

During a slightly blotto phase of our going away party, Carol went to the fridge for some coconut water. She pulled out the carton, looked at it seriously and said, "I picked the Black lady." 

"Huh?"

"At the store, I picked the Black lady to bring home." Turns out, the cartons of Itapoã coconut water have different pictures on them, male/female, black/white. As Carol reached for a carton, she recognized there was a choice. She looked at the pictures, considered the people, and she made a conscious decision about who to bring home. She picked the black lady. I'm glad she told me. We make choices with our money every day. I want to be thoughtful in making those choices. I'm not sure if this is a Brazilian thing or not, but I'm going to start noticing.

Talking about toucans

Carol came home from her yoga class tonight and said one of the other yogis had showed her a picture of six toucans sitting in a tree on a nearby hill. This is cool for so many reasons. It's cool that Carol found a yoga class that she likes. The fact that other students are engaging with her and inviting her in is really cool. I like to think it would happen to an estrangeira just learning English in Utah, say, but I'm not sure it would. The fact that she followed the conversation and came home telling me stories about what was said is definitely cool and shows that language is being learned. It is also freaking cool that we are living in a place where toucans sit in the trees. There are some resident macaws that hang around in town and fly screaming over the house sometimes, but the toucans are wild, they legitimately live here, and you can't get much cooler than that. 

The wash

Turns out, our brains store information in categories. It's true. I measured it in graduate school. For what it's worth, if you read the word "animal" you will be faster to recognize the word  "aardvark" than if you had read the word "vegetable. This organization by category helps us think. Trick is, the categories are subjective. Living in a foreign country impacts thinking, partly because the categories get rearranged.  Like the way we sort the wash. Here, it isn't by colors or whites or towels or delicates. Our choices include cotton, synthetic, or wool. We're fine with thinking about the laundry in this way but it isn't how our American brains do the sorting. Furthermore, although we have googled it, neither of us knows if we should choose the coat hanger or the shirt with the clock in the armpit for the drying cycle. Just constantly scratching our heads...

If you leave your phone in an uber

 Some do's and don'ts for if you leave a phone in an Uber in Brazil:

• Don't use Uber's "have the driver call you" option - if your phone is in the Uber, you can't take the call, even if they try to call, which they won't.
• Don't enter your wife's number after selecting Uber's "driver didn't call me back" option - its a foreign number, they won't be able to call it, even if they try, which they won't.
• Don't use Uber's "someone else left something, please contact this number" option, even if you have a Brazilian number to enter because no one will call. Just forget about handling this through Uber.
• Do find the phone using whatever "track my phone" app is available.
• Do use the app to turn off all the functionality for the phone. It will make you feel better.
• Don't keep calling the phone, its on silent, nobody is going to hear it, and watching the battery deplete will stress you out.
• Don't go the the drivers house, even if you see the phone stop in a residential area for the night.   You are in Brazil, cars and residences are locked behind gates and nothing good is going to come of creeping around the neighborhoods at night.
• Do put a personalized message on the dial pad so when the phone wakes up, it shows your message ("MAGNUS, Whatsapp Carol [## #### ####] $$$$! 😁👍🙌".)
• Do use the 5-minute ring option to turn the sound on, show the message, and make the phone ring for five minutes or until someone pushes a button to stop it.
• Don't be surprised 36 seconds into the ringing when the ringing stops. Soon, the driver will contact you through Whatsapp and you can work out how to have the phone returned.
• Do tip the driver!

It's not like we are dumb

 

Carol and I are of average intelligence back home, but here we are kind of dumb. We do dumb things like throw toilet paper in the toilet. Clearly, and as every potty-trained Brazilian knows, if it doesn't come out of your body, it doesn't belong in the toilet. There are signs up sometimes, in Portuguese of course, but dumb Americans like us still come around clogging up the pipes and causing trouble. We have also been known to get lost looking for the first floor (the ground floor is on the ground and the first floor is up one, genius) and we once gummed things up in a parking garage (you are supposed to pay before you get back in your car, der). So, it's not like we are dumb but we are definitely culturally under-developed, and it makes us do dumb things, and we apologize a lot, and we do feel dumb sometimes.

Six year wish

 

Six years ago, the idea of setting our sights Brazil was being considered and we went to check it out. Carol found three very different places for us to try, Rio De Janeiro, the island of Florianopolis, and and an interior town close to a national park called Praia Grande. The picture is from Praia Grande. We checked out the city life, the salt life, and the rural life. We appreciated the differences but were taken by the similarities. The churrasco, street art, stray dogs, motorcycles and make shift soccer fields were shared across the places we visited. Maybe it was because we were able to triangulate the three different perspectives, but it seems like we were able to get a taste of Brazilian culture on that trip. We opted for the salt life and we are grateful everyday for this opportunity to soak it in. 

Age matters

 

A young guy in our class asked if we really think age matters when learning a language. Yes, junior, it fuckin' matters. The old dogs/new tricks thing is real. It's an overstatement, sure, but there is a reason the expression evolved. Babies learn language by merely existing in a speaking world. We have a teacher who gained fluency by playing American video games when he was a kid. Are you kidding me? Carol and I are reasonably smart, highly motivated, and we study hard. We have taken classes for years, read books, studied verbs, made Brazilian friends, listened to hours of language CDs, quizzed each other regularly, and spent the past 7 weeks living in Brazil doing everything we can to get a grasp on this language. We are slowly getting there, but we are far, far, from fluent. Learning a new language gets more difficult with every year that passes and don't let anyone tell you differently.  

Immerson

 

We say we are learning Portuguese through immersion, but that's largely not true. We are in the water but we aren't under it. All the signs we see are in Portuguese and the labels on our food and the media we consume. But the truth is, we can get by pretty well with the limited language that we have and mostly we speak in English. Last weekend, when the new car went belly-up, we got immersed. I was googling about tow trucks in Brazil and the whole mechanic process. Carol was googling words we have never studied in class, like insurance claim. When it came time to communicate, it took both of us and all of our effort. I learned to swim through the "sink or swim" method back in the 70s. It was pretty stressful. Language immersion feels the same. 

Vira-lata

People ask us about Keppy's "race." We thought it was strange at first because we think of it differently but the words for race and breed are the same here, "raça." When we say we don't know his raça, people respond with words we don't understand. 

Vira-lata means "turn can" and it's slang for street dog. It can also mean mutt. Brazilian vira-lata are usually small to medium sized, wiry, and often brindled. Keppy is bigger, more buff, and spotted. Turns out the words for spotted and buff are the same here too, "malhado." So, people say he is a vira-lata malhado. Since we learned this term we use it whenever we get a chance. It rolls off the tongue, usually gets a courtesy laugh and knowing this piece of language helps us fit in little better - and every little bit helps. 

We bought this car

We bought this car. Carol did the work.  No one at the car shop spoke English. No one in the inspection station, no one from the insurance agency, no one at the repair shop, no one at the notary, spoke English. It was a complicated, bureaucratic, learning event with just one breaking point which happened at a cartório in the middle of a long day. The first cartório was closed, the second was hard to find and the driving was stressful including stopped traffic because of a cow in the road. Once she got parked (difficult) and found the place (not what you'd think) there was a kiosk which provided a real life multiple-choice language test in order to get a number to get in line. She passed the test and got the number. Everything seemed to be on track when the lady asked the names of her parents, and then asked her to prove it. Turns out, you have to show a birth certificate to buy a car in Brazil. When she texted me she was crying in the car in the parking garage, calling everyone fuckers. You have to be tough to buy a car around here. You also have to have a little help, you have to be smart, and you better be pretty damn good at Portuguese.

Ceremonial ceremonies

 

The first time we went to a cultural ceremony in Brazil it was Candomblé in Salvador, Bahia. The guy told us, in Portuguese, what to wear. It was very important to not dress in black. We should not dress in black. He said "dress" and "black" a lot and we knew those words and that's what we did. It was awkward for everybody, two white people dressed in black in a roomful of Black people dressed in white. We didn't understand a word of the ceremony, but we did throw popcorn, and Carol got spun into a trance. So we were able to participate, but it wasn't pretty.  

The most recent ceremony was a cacao ceremony over the weekend. We followed the instructions and made it to the fire more-or-less on time, with food to share, dressed appropriately, and with most of the right things, although we did forget the cups for the cacao. While we were there we meditated, set intentions, drank the medicine from borrowed paper cups, listened to prayers, and participated in the music. There are benchmarks along the way and things are improving.