Winner winner chicken dinner

Brazil is world-famous for churrasco, or barbeque, and it is a big part of the culture.  As such, Carol and I have been doing this fun thing on Sundays that we call go to the kiosk in the little town and get a rotisserie chicken. It's a pretty good time. Kepner loves it. He sits with rapt attention watching the sausages and pieces of meat as they rotate and roast. I'm pretty attentive too and for the same reasons, some of those pieces of meat are really big. Carol does the talking. Pretty soon a roasted chicken is placed in a box, and then the guy adds a bunch of potatoes from the bottom of the roaster, potatoes that are buttery on the inside and flavored by the drippings. Then he throws in a baggie of farofa to make it a meal. Farofa is cassava flour that has been spiced and fried in bacon grease. It's a subtle but addictive substance added to many broths, beans, stews and meats here. It's a winner, this chicken dinner. It smells fantastic, tastes divine, feeds us for days and is fun for the whole family.  

Hard knocks

We learned our drinking lessons the hard way growing up but by the time we reached middle-age we had it pretty dialed in. Unfortunately, we are having to relearn the hard way again as new-comers in this country. They don't meter the shots here; plus, the cachaça can be a little moonshine-y and the caipirinhas can get rough.  On the day I virtually attended a buddy's wedding I was feeling warm and happy after my first caipirinha so I ordered another. I had eaten very little. The drinks were very big, served in mason jars and filled with a cachaça made by the devil himself. I don't remember that much more about the evening. I wasn't driving, I made it home and I am truly grateful that Carol wasn't there to witness what occurred. Carol knew this and we discussed the red flags and tried to learn from the experience but some things have to be relearned the hard way, again. We were trying to soothe our sad selves last Monday, listening to some music having drinks down by the canal when she ordered a second caipirinha. She was feeling much better after the first one. Talking bem good in Portuguese. Not eating much. We got her home and she is recovered but it was not pretty. I hope we learned this time because, frankly, we are getting too old for this shit.

Time flies

Today marks ten years since I kissed the back of Carol's hand after boozy drinks next to a warm fire on a cold night in Leadville Colorado. We were just kids back then, 43, monolingual and nervous about love. We had no idea what adventures or trials would come. We had no idea of the joy we would find. It's a pretty good chunk of life, ten years. It will change you if you let it and it sure does fly when you are having fun.

The last Pimsleur

One of the most consistent resources that we've used to learn Portuguese has been Pimsleur language courses. We just finished our last lesson and its hard to believe that it's over. The very first Portuguese words I ever heard were through Pimsleur. They sounded unintelligible and scary but things got better over the course of five years. We kept on listening and repeating, off and on. Five courses, one hundred and fifty lessons, half an hour each, almost always more than once, often more than twice.  We kept on, off an on. Lessons in front of the stereo sipping campari. Lessons in the middle of nowhere, CDs skipping across washboard roads. A year or more in between lessons. Lessons everyday. It became part of our culture, singing Gloria from Flashdance and American Man. Checking the time to see how much longer. Learning about foods and places, some of which we have been able to sample and see. It is the end of an era, finishing Pimsleur, and even though it was just a language course, there will be an empty hole sometimes. 

Low-brow life

 

We are perched on the precipice of exchanging our American tourists existence for more of a working class Brazilian existence. I think we are good with it.  You can only be on vacation for so long. The change started to solidify this week when we decided to splurge at the gas station. Instead of just filling the tank, we went inside to treat ourselves to something nice. We each chose a soft drink and a baked good from the case. A coxinha for me and pão de queijo for Carol. We took our treats to one of the little tables outside.  I shared shared a sip of my soda which was a type we had not tried, we watched the traffic, smiled at a nearby baby, and talked about our plans. Eating gas station food on the street seems very different than eating seafood on the beach, but sitting in front of that gas station, it hit the same. It gave us a taste of the culture and time to enjoy our surroundings and each other and we didn't have to cook or do the dishes. I think we will do just fine with this new chapter.

Calma

 

The Brazilians let us know when our attempts to communicate fail. Being told that "it's better" that we speak in English is something Carol and I have both experienced. Being told to "calm down" has been used only on me. I get it from my mother's side, where the women tend to be tightly wound. I remember trying to teach my grandma the sign language alphabet and worrying that she would dislocate something with her herking and jerking. My mom gets a bit frenetic too. Carol and I sometimes reenact her fraught attempts at the word cachaça, "Cashasha! Cassaca! Cacasha!" because it cracks us up every time. So, I imagine I can seem pretty het up when I'm having a hard time communicating. When this happens, people advise me to "calma." The gardener at the Açores house told me to calma, and some of our teachers, and a cashier at a buffet. Last weekend, a pharmacy tech "calma"ed me as I tried to explain that Carol is allergic to a common cold medicine ingredient. I feel like I could have gotten the message across, given time and a patient listener, but she gave me the calma and returned with someone who could speak English.  It was not a language win. 

Don't let the bed bugs bite

 

Our first night at Matedeiro, we killed the first of four Brazilian wandering spiders that we saw in that house. At the time we didn't know about the Guinness world record for most dangerous spider, or that the genus literally translates to "murderess" or that the venom causes hours-long erections. We didn't know any of the fun facts, we just knew that the spider on the bathroom wall was six inches in diameter and very creepy. Although neither of us like killing, we eventually called an exterminator. Then we got to the the lovely Açores. Our perfect beach house was crawling with cockroaches, an insect for which Carol has a particularly low tolerance. We washed dishes after every meal, including the dog bowl, wiped up spills immediately, and became obsessive about sweeping the floors and taking out the trash, all to no avail. We became killing machines and were considering our options when winter came and they just kind of went away. Our new house seemed free of creeping things at first. Then Carol got what we thought was a spider-bite on her wrist.  A couple of days latter, she had half a dozen bites including one perfect little stigmata in the center of her palm. I thought maybe she had stuck her hands into something noxious, she wondered about spiders, we joked about her piety.  Soon she had 21 of the bites, on her wrists, up her arm and on her neck. We consulted the internet and learned that we have bed bugs. An exterminator is coming.

The Doctor's Office

 

I needed to see the doctor and used google to picked one with a good review-by-star index. I didn't want to call the office because I still struggle to be understood, so I sent a text message through WhatsApp. I quickly engaged with a helpful receptionist who used a lot of energetic emojis and scheduled an appointment for the following Monday. I said that I had insurance but was told that it's mostly hospitals that take insurance, I would need to pay at the time of my appointment. It was 80 bucks. When I got to the office it was like I had stepped into a spa. The receptionist greeted me by name, inquired about my drive, and would I like an expresso or some cookies. I waited in a comfortable chair in a polished lobby and noted two enormous glass vases, very pretty, filled to their brims with used syringes and empty vials (pictured). My appointment started exactly on time. The doctor was delightful, she held my hand, looked me in the eye, wrote out a treatment plan, laughed at my jokes and hugged me when I left. The whole experience was both very similar to and very different from health care experiences I have had in the US. The similarities, I think, are western medicine; the differences, I think, are culture.

Penguins in unlikely places

 Penguin video

I've always had a thing for penguins but I guess I didn't know much about them. I thought they lived in the Antarctic. I  associated them with ice and snow. Imagine my surprise when we were walking down a sunny beach in Brazil and noticed an oddly shaped sea duck and then realized that it was an honest to god Penguin. We watched the little guy for a half an hour or more, swimming, surfing, fishing, and (in this video) coming out of the water so we could really get a good look. And then, hurrying back into the water because Keppy wanted to get a good look too. Since then, we have seen several more, because now that we know what to look for. Apparently it is penguin season here in the south and you really never know what you are going to see around here.

Filling out forms

All the paperwork that we need to do to live here may eventually pay off, but right now it is driving us to drink. Every step requires notarizations and certifications and copies and PDFs. Then there are the actual forms with complications like phone numbers not having the right number of digits and dates being reversed. Bartender please. It is a complex maze of broken links, uninterpretable question, long lines, and form sent to apparently nowhere. Probably the very worst of it is the good old catch-22. Those classic little conundrums like needing a permit in order to get the address that you need in order to get the permit. Make mine a double! 

The dog não fala

 

To get Keppy to Brazil, we had him certified as a service animal which was expensive but effective. If you say sit - he sits, if you say off - he offs and if Carol's feet get cold he warms them with his belly. We taught him a lot in the year before we left, but we didn't teach him Portuguese. In retrospect, we should have. When someone says xo xo he doesn't go and when they say fora he doesn't get. This has caused some problems for us and it hasn't been great for him either. Little kids want to throw his frisbree but they can't make him drop it and because of the accent, he doesn't recognize his own name. No one can get him to sente-se, abaixe-se, or venha at all and people think he isn't very bright. None of this is helping him make friends or us find dogsitters. So, we are currently taking our dog with us to The Language Club and working to make a bilingual vira-lata out of him. 

Jesus Christ Superstar

Carol and I buy a fair amount of handmade jewelry and homemade goodies when we are out of the beach or the streets. We like to engage with the local vendors and to contribute to the culture, and we appreciate the art. This perspective began to develop the hard way. The first time we were in Rio, our Airbnb host warned us against flashing our cash. We took the warning to Copacabana beach where I tied, but failed, to take a picture of a Jesus Christ Superstar sand sculpture. I had barely put my phone away when someone started yelling at me in Portuguese. I stuttered and stammered and he switched to English. "You speak, English" he said, and he was right. "You took a picture, you have to pay" he explained, pissed. I said I didn't have any money. "You have money" he said, and was right again.  I had bunch of $100s in my purse (equal to a bunch of US 20s) but didn't want to pull out the wad. "My wife is pregnant" he said.  "I need money" he said, "and you took a picture of my art." I didn't know what to do. I hadn't actually taken the picture, but I felt like that was beside the point, Carol didn't have any cash and I wasn't going to pull out my roll. "I'm really sorry" I said and we walked away. He yelled after me, very clearly and in perfect English, "Fuck you!"  Carol and I talked during dinner and agreed, we did have money and it was his art. Later, we found the guy near his sculpture. I handed him a twenty and all was forgiven. He called me friend and insisted that I take another picture and offered to pose in it. It wasn't a very good picture but it was a very good lesson. 

Getting it

The Brazilians that I talk with about such things, have a hard time with the English word "set."  I have to take their word for it.  I don't remember learning English, but "set" doesn't seem particularly hard to me. I know that as a learner of Portuguese, the hardest English word for me to get is "get."  It is a common word in my internal narrative but it doesn't exist in Portuguese. You don't get married or dressed, you marry or dress.  You don't get lost or drunk, you are lost or drunk; If you get a gift you gain it; if you get a job you arrange; a number you obtain; groceries you buy; and a shot you receive. No one will get you a manager in Brazil, but they may call one; you aren't going to get a ride, but you may catch one; and you won't get a second chance, but you may have one. Want to get something done? Try making it done instead, there is no get in Portuguese. No one gets happy, or sad, or lonely or mad - but they may become these things. You can't get to there from here, but you can go there; you can't get out, but you can leave; and you will never get it, but you will struggle mightily, every day, to understand.

Manners

I talked to one of our teachers recently and asked if Brazilians think we are gross because we eat with our hands. The English word "gross" sounds like the Portuguese word "grosseiro" which means "unmannered" so he understood what I was asking. He assured me that it wasn't counted against us that we eat with our hands. Brazilians don't tend to do it, but it's cool that other people do.  He then suggested that it is the directness with which we speak that is considered grosseiro. He asked what I thought of the sentence, "Do you want to stop by later?" I thought it sounded good and this proved his point. Asking if someone wants something puts them in the awkward position of saying they don't want the thing, which is rude, or in the awkward position of saying that they do want something, which is a little too direct. Complicated, right? He suggested using, "could it be that..." instead. Now that we understand, we are going to work on asking our questions in a less grosseiro way.