(perpetually?) a student....: 02/01/2007

Transportation, in all its trappings.

The start to my carnaval, like that of many, began at the Rodoviaria (bus station) at about 7:30 pm on Saturday evening with some pão de queijo and a Skol (quase-gelada), eaten standing up by a railing. Keep in mind this is the day after peak travel day (Friday), in which many of these people didn’t even get to leave the city, the buses were running so far behind. I have learned a couple things about bus travel: one, always see if you can get the seats in the very front—they have twice the legroom, and two, two long-sleeved layers, a pair of socks, a blanket and a pillow will be essential. They say they keep it at 22 degrees C, but the sensor must be near the ceiling, not where the air comes out of the window. I truly think that in shorts and a tank top I would probably die of hypothermia over the course of a 12 hour bus trip. The bus trip to get to Itaúnas was more like 15-16 hours instead of the anticipated 12. But hey, at least I got to see some countryside in the daylight. One more short local bus leg, and I had arrived.

Two stories, yellow. Lots of trees in the yard.

The house I was staying in had been offered by my colleague Britaldo who is a professor and spatial modeler at the University Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, and works for Woods Hole. He has a cool freeware product that he and his team have pretty much invented, called Dinamica. He is a great guy, and who can resist a free beach house that is otherwise not going to be used? I was, however, a little concerned about finding it and getting in, because the directions had been given to me over the phone in the office on Thursday and went as follows: “When you’re coming in on the bus, the road forks. Take the right fork, and the first right after that.” “About a block later, you’ll see a two-story yellow house with a gate and a bunch of trees.” “Just ask around for “The German,” and he will give you the keys.” “Great,” I’m thinking. I find what appears to be the house, no problem. I go next door to a bunch of people partying in a house, and ask if they have any idea where I can find the German. They look at me kind of funny (as does their big dog), but go and ask their next-door neighbor and tell me that the German has a shop a couple of blocks back towards the main street. I walk back by Britaldo’s house, and lo-and-behold—a man appears at the gate. “You must be the German,” I say. “Yes,” he says. Easy as that. He shows me the cold coconuts in the fridge and hands me the keys.

This tiny little town is chock-full of tour buses and flipflop-clad, belly/breast/behind-baring, beer-drinking Brazilians. The sounds of samba and forró and the smell of grilling meat are everywhere.

On Sunday afternoon, I explore the estuary by kayak with a guide, a woman and her friend and her daughter, and some guy the mother had picked up.

The mother and this guy mysteriously disappeared during the first portion of our trip, later to reappear during our return trip downstream. I will let you speculate about what they were doing in the bulrushes (wait, I think those are in Exodus and pertain to Moses, which would be the wrong geographic region—). They may have innocently been kayaking around in some other channel. But I will say, I have never seen so many signs advertising the cheery aspects of condom usage in bus stations in my life. “O sexo é bom, mas, previna-se!” (Sex is good, but protect yourself!)

Monday morning was spent on the (beautiful) beach of Itaúnas. Brazilians in general I think feel sorry for you when you tell them that you are traveling by yourself. I really think they can’t fathom why anyone would want to travel by themselves. Or why an American, who in their minds could pick up friends easily, would continue to be by herself. That’s pretty much a common element of conversation ;) Older women ask me why I am not taking advantage of the many ‘gatos’ who are hanging around looking for women like me: “clearly it is because you don’t want to!” They at least make me feel good. One clever Brazilian teen approached me on the beach and asked me if he could leave his sunglasses with my stuff while he went and played soccer—good ploy. He then returned to talk to me at least twice—I only escaped when he decided he was going for a walk and needed his sunglasses. Released of my guard duty, I returned to the town for lunch.

Brazilian comida por kilo self service pretty much rocks my world. It is like all the benefits of an American all-you-can-eat buffet with none of the drawbacks. The food is better, is actually home-cooked and fresh, and you pay for what you eat. Usually for me, this means I fill a plate with salad, rice and some meat of some sort, and it’s just right. If you were going to stuff yourself like at an American buffet you would have to pay twice as much, and actually have to go through the act of weighing another plate. All the variety, none of the temptation. And better food. Comida por kilo, in summary.

Other exciting food highlights: agua de coco straight from the coconut. Self-made caipirinhas. Yummy breakfast sandwiches at hole-in-the-wall places. Açai on the street.

Monday afternoon: horseback riding. Pretty much nothing can match galloping on a beach. Except maybe doing it with a few people who couldn’t be with me. It was a great group (friendly, imagine that--), and we had a lot of fun.

Plantation Forestry in the Tropics (you might want to ignore most of this if you aren’t interested in trees)

I had noticed on Sunday as we descended onto the coastal plain that there was a new row crop common to the region: trees. I guess this shouldn’t be at all surprising, given that the southeast of the U.S. is a pretty good place to grow trees, so the eastern part of Brazil in similar latitudes might be similarly well-suited. Here, however, they grow tall, spindly trees with tufted tops (after they strip the stems, I suppose) that look as if they should be the very trees appearing in “The Lorax”. They are thin enough that they look like you could take them on with a sturdy pair of scissors or a small army of beavers, and easily decimate them with commercial harvesting equipment. Certainly, you could feed enough Koala bears with this many eucalyptus trees to satisfy the supply for a sudden exotic pet frenzy and a serious koala bear pest problem, which has been foreseen already by the all-knowing Mitch Hedberg. You could also make enough natural insect repellent to cause the mosquitoes in Alaska to relocate for a season. More importantly, you can make enough particle board, plywood and paper to…write on. And build with.

For you forestry people, it looked as if these were planted at about twice the density of loblollies and on very short rotations. Eucalyptus grows fast. It didn’t look like there was any thinning going on, though there was some serious work on the competing vegetation. Some of the vegetation you have to compete with to grow eucalyptus is pretty nice, too----I wonder what kind of herbicide is most effective at killing these guys (see below)? I wonder if anyone has ever though about double-cropping tropical flowers that are shade tolerant with Eucalyptus?

I took a bike ride through many miles of Eucalyptus plantations on Tuesday afternoon. They close over the road when the wind blows, and I almost had a moment of claustrophobia in which I wondered, if the wind blew hard enough, whether they would snap like matchsticks and I would be pinned mercilessly like a ladybug under a windshield wiper. For effect:

I pulled on one to see if it would come down, but it seemed pretty sturdy.

Tuesday night, I had promised myself I would go check out the forró scene, which was disappointingly quiet. I think I must have missed the hot nights for forró, and had to satisfy myself with watching a few couples live it up on the nearly-empty dance floor. So much for putting on a denim miniskirt and making myself leave the house at midnight to learn to dance…maybe I just needed to wait around until 3 or 4 before things really got hopping. I thought about dragging a random man in from the street and sweetly asking him to teach me, but I was not feeling the need. Maybe next time….It was captivating to see the nightlife and watch the teens and smell the fun in the air. And see some stars over the night lights of carnaval in Brazil. Pretty sweet.

Poor Bernardo finally has more than one or two women living in his house…little did he know how much work this would actually mean. In the past several days, he has had us (meaning Luciana and Sara) chew him out for letting the garden turn into um mato (a forest), and for the fact that the fascineira (maid, who, incidentally, has showed up all of one time in my tenure in the house previous to this) didn’t scrub the fridge. Additionally, he was called at 10:30 pm one evening to come and catch a mouse. I saved him the trouble of removing one from a mousetrap the next day.

I walked by the interesting-looking figures in the area to the side of the house outside the kitchen window yesterday, paused for a moment, wondered why someone had put them there, and then continued with whatever I was doing. Sunday I was cleaning my bathroom, and I hear Sara yell: “MARIA”. I run out to the side of the house where, wide-eyed, Sara and Luciana are staring at the three figures. Luciana starts to explain to me that they are voodoo icons etc., which of course makes sense, and then they begin to speculate about who would be casting spells on our house and how long they have been there. She continues babbling about bad omens and how their presence offends their religious sensibilities. Understandable, I suppose. When they go to call Bernardo, I sneak out with my camera and capture them before they get banished:

It was as I had suspected: Bernardo had simply placed them there for a bit of good luck. I laughed inwardly and breathed an empathetic sigh of relief with Luciana after she returned them to him. I was reminded of one of the more interesting experiences I have had in my travels in Brazil….

September of ´05, in Rio Branco, I was staying with Foster Brown (a Woods Hole scientist). A biologist named Marcus was also staying there, and we ate a lot of açai and drank beers together. Marcus’ friend (Mariana, I think) was an anthropologist, and she invited us to go to a service. This wasn’t just any service she was inviting us to…this was a not-quite-catholic, not-quite-voodoo mix of icons, scripture, smoke cleansing by shamans, and imbibing of a psychotropic substance called daime (Ayahuasca of Ecuador). I was pretty freaked out about the whole idea of imbibing a psychotropic substance, especially after Marcus had told me about his first experience. So I didn’t try very much, in an effort to not be that foreigner running out in the middle of the chanting to puke on the church steps. As a consequence, I experienced little more than an odd sort of relaxation and detachment from my surroundings. I’m not sure it was my idea of spiritual enlightenment. But I did feel thoroughly cleansed and blessed after being chanted over by a shaman, who was probably more in touch with the spirits of the other world than I.

Anyhow, I think I might have been touched to have three icons blessing my house. But I guess I’m not at a point where I wanted to push my new housemates to be embracing of what they probably consider to be devil worship.