Yesterday I had lunch at my neighbor's house. Let me tell you a bit about Paolo:
- He's in his late 60s, but very youthful. He wore swim trunks to lunch yesterday. - His home has 54 rooms, including eight bathrooms and a guest wing built into a turret. - He makes designer handbags for a living and shows them at international fashion weeks. - He is obsessed with Queen Elizabeth and got to meet her at a dinner in Buckingham palace (on Brasil's 500th anniversary [this confused me too, apparently the event celebrated the arrival of the Portuguese on the continent, not the actual date of independence], the country invited renowned artisans on a diplomatic/cultural tour of the world). Paolo also loves Whitney Houston. - He was shot twice leaving his warehouse in Zona Norte five years ago, and after recuperating began to do all his designing from home. Three more of the 54 rooms are designated as purse workshops. - He served us a traditional (and delicious) Brazilian meal with traditional Brazilian portions -- two HUGE scoops of rice with tomatoes, two tong-fuls of salad, and an enormous piece of chicken cooked in a red garlicky sauce. When Anna, who weighs maybe 100 pounds, cleaned her plate, Paolo asked her if she wanted more. When she refused, he asked "you did not like it?" For sobremesa (dessert), we had a Brazilian pudding made from blended avocado, cream, and sugar. The avocados came from Paolo's backyard. After two cups of coffee to end the meal, I could barely move my stomach was so full. Luckily the great conversation (half in English, half in Portuguese) allowed us plenty of time to digest.
Took a ferry to one of Rio's 'burbs, Niteroi, Thursday to see their giant spaceship/contemporary art museum, designed by really cool architect Oscar Niemeyer. I'ma be real, the art inside was less than inspiring, but I spent the better part of an hour photographically exploring the exterior. (Now that I have that huge memory card, I can mindlessly take about 100 photographs of the same thing and not realize until they take 20 minutes to transfer to my computer.)
This piece was four blank pieces of notebook paper, framed and hung on the wall.
Niteroi also had some awesome beaches and this kid who works in a Thai restaurant and invited us back for free dinner next week. More pixx to come.
If you said 'tomato, duh' you are WRONG. As wrong as I was when I bought one last week and put it on my ham sandwich only to find out that it is in fact a persimmon (called caqui here). The inside is far more gushy, far less seedy, and very sweet. The tomato/persimmon mix-up was just the first lesson in my ongoing fruit education. During a given breakfast about 6-8 different kinds of fruit are presented in either solid, smoothie, or liquid form. I'm slowly developing an exotic-fruit palate. (Haven't had a banana in daaaaaays.)
I've learned that I really like goiaba (guava, yet another fruit the Milaca Supervalu doesn't / will never stock) and that I really hate papaya (seriously spit it out the first time). Carambola is deec, but involves waay too much work to find the worthwhile parts for eating.
Totally forgot until now you could cut it up into stars! Gonna be having too much fun at breakfast tomorrow.
Brazilians love sucos (juices) and the juice aisle of the supermarket can be incredibly overwhelming. I've made myself try both maracuja (passionfruit) and caju (cashew fruit? i know right?) but still love a good old carton of strawberry juice -- morango, in case you actually care about the italicized vocab lesson here. Picked the grossest pic I could find
Spending the summer at Camp Nectar
But my favorite Brazilian fruit is and forever will be
açaí, which, I'll be honest, is never this well-presented -- usually the sorbet that's synonymous with the fruit's name comes in a 300mL plastic cup. About R$2 and full of antioxidants. Perfeito.
Today I stood under this: Tijuca National Park in Rio de Janeiro is the largest urban forest in the world; destroyed in the 19th century to create coffee farms, it was re-planted by a baller general named Manoel Archer (who sadly does not even have a Wikipedia page). Today I went with friends to the other side of town to do a lil' bit of hiking there. The going was a bit brutal at times -- it rained (hard) last night, making the ground incredibly slippery and every rock/vine foothold the muddiest. You can imagine my trepidation; remember how I'm the textbook opposite of coordinated/dexterous? Luckily though, among the five of us, we only had one fall -- poor Anna slid about 10 meters in a scene that could have been from a horror film (she was actually clawing at the earth to stop and later slowly rose out of the mud). She was a total trooper, though, and the at-times-utterly-terrifying hike also allowed us to see butterflies, monkeys, and scenic gems like these:
all without a single snake sighting!
Speaking of, happy St. Patrick's Day, y'all! I'm going to a pub crawl in Ipanema in the early afternoon to drink beers by the beach with one Irish girl, some Brits, and a Mexican. It all makes so much sense?
Remember when I said that when it rains it pours in Argentina? Turns out it's true in Brazil too.
So I leave the house yesterday evening to walk to a church about 30 minutes down the road in my neighborhood of Santa Teresa. As I walk, faint overhead flashes and far-off rumbles of thunder begin to disquiet my evening stroll. As I look out over the [spectacular, unrelatedly] view of the city, I see dark clouds ploughing across the sky. Knowing some, but not quite enough, about how lighting/electricity works, I begin to feel sheer terror about walking next to metal tram tracks under sketchy power lines with an umbrella at one of the highest points in Rio de Janeiro. Having no idea how much farther I need to go, I stop under a tent where a woman dressed completely in white wearing a turban and a lot of jewelry sells some kind of banana-cakes to ask a young man directions to the street with the church. He tells me I'm only about five more minutes walk, and just as he finishes explaining how to get there, the sky opens up and it POURS. In the ensuing shitshow, I get completely drenched (even with my umbrella as a shield under the shelter), the turban woman's hot pan of banana-cakes gets knocked over, and about 6 passing motorbikes send huge waves of water up to splash everyone's faces. I move to a nearby bar to experience power outs 1 and 2 of the evening (5 total) before trying again to walk the last five minutes. My fear/the downpour are faaaaaaaaaaaaar too great, however, and I run back to the bar, where the owner invites me to "dry myself off" in the bathroom (aka pat down my head and exposed skin with paper towels, knowing that there's absolutely no point when I'm just going to have to go back out in it. I miss my car more than ever).
After 10 more minutes of watching the rua turn into a rio, I give up the goal of Mass (figuring God might understand) and look instead for a combi (Volkswagon van that's cheaper than a bus and functions as a large, multiperson, multistop taxi) to take me home. I don't have enough to pay him, however (I didn't take any money to church in fear of getting robbed on the walk), and get out promising to grab money from my house. Set on this goal, I run into the road through an enormous puddle of water and avoid by inchesgetting hit by a taxi with low visibility. The combi driver, perhaps taking pity on the drenched, frightened gringa, drives away without giving me an opportunity to pay.
Please watch this video to understand the magnitude of the rain -- it gets good at about 2:00, when the power goes out and the game gets delayed for 18 minutes while the field becomes a wading pool. So good.
Next time there's a storm, I'll try to take some pics/video from my house. Huge bolts of lightning are way more fun to watch epically illuminating Pao de Acucar and Cristo Redentor when one is safe and dry inside.
THE BEACH (DUH) I have been three times in the last four days. Yesterday I ran along the shore with a view of Sugarloaf while the setting sun created a pink glow on the water. Yeah no really. And really, have you ever thought about how cool crashing waves are? The water folds on itself! Also I am tan again.
THE FOOD Acai! Cheap greasy pastries with meat inside! All you can eat beef stroganoff/dessert pizzas! Strawberry juice!
REALLY, EVERYTHING As I walked down the street my first night back, I remembered what Rio has that Argentina doesn't -- people were pouring out of the open (as in, has three walls and the fourth just spillos onto the street) bars and standup food counters laughing, chatting, drinking beer, watching futbol with their shirts off. In short, Brazil has third places!
I lucked into an amazing housing situation -- in exchange for working 24ish hours a week at a pousada (like a hostel but fancier), I get a free room, breakfast, and laundry. It's in Santa Teresa, a neighborhood with amahhhhhhhhhhhhzing views of the city (see below), I'm working with cool people, AND the house has a kitten! I'm also interviewing for teaching jobs to fill up the daytime hours -- in Rio they pay twice (twice!) what they do in Buenos Aires. TUDO BOM.
Cross country busses are not so much a thing in the U.S. I mean, I've taken the Megabus to Chicago like everyone and their mother, but the idea of riding 40 hours to California is foreign and strange. DRIVE, FLY, TRAIN. In Argentina (and the rest of South America), though, busses are the norm. In countries full of backpackers with too much gear and "sense of adventure" to fly and not enough money to drive, countries with terrible train systems (they exist but let's be real S.A. is no Europe), busses are it. And they're surprisingly posh -- even the worst I've taken has a more comfortable seat than an airplane, they always show films, and sometimes they have Bingo games or free bottles of champ. Sometimes, however, they are slow and hot and AGONIZINGLY LONG.
The trip to Patagonia consisted of five separate bus rides with varying degrees of interesting landscapes and internal misery. Bus number one from Bariloche was the first in which I was given food. Flan! Twice! and two ham sandwiches for lunch -- one with jamon crudo on a croissant and one on white bread with regular ham. This was very funny to me.
The bus also showed The Dark Knight in English, without subtitles. Great for us, likely quite annoying for the other 85% of the passengers. We arrived in Bariloche excited and fully sated.
Bus number two took us from Bariloche to El Chalten down Ruta 40. It took 30 hours. That's two overnights. Ruta 40 is unpaved, so the regular two-level bus is not an option (too dangerous/wobbly), nor is food service. We traveled at an agonizing 20km/hr, stopping to sit on the bus stop curb of Perito Moreno (note: the town is about 13 hours away from the glacier, and in no way majestic) for three hours about halfway through. Kat took Benedryl and said funny things, and a smelly man accused me of stealing his cookies. Other than that, nothing of note happened with that day and 1/4 of my life.
Our trip from El Calafate to Ushuaia began at 3am -- rather than booking a hostel, we decided to stay at a bar until 2:30 and then head directly to the bus station without sleeping. After a transfer in Rio Gallegos (which, by the way, looks ASTONISHINGLY like a medium-sized Minnesota town, Becker maybe) at 7:30am -- juuuuuust enough time to fall asleep and be woken, we began the second half of the journey to Ushuaia, set to arrive at 9pm. We had big plans to get seafood upon arrival (it was a port town, and a lenten Friday) and walk around before settling into our hostel. PLANS THAT FELL TO PIECES. Two hours waiting for an exit stamp at the Argentina-Chilean border, 25 minutes driving, then another hour for an entrance stamp, trip to the Magellanic strait, where we got off the bus then on the bus then off again in a 2.5 hour ferry-crossing process, then after more slow driving, another two-part border crossing and five more hours to the destination. We finally arrived at 2:45am, almost 24 hours after we'd left El Calafate. APPARENTly no seafood restaurants are open at 2:45.
These trips, though seemingly full enough of foibles, are also apparently nothing compared to those in Bolivia and Ecuador -- I spoke with two friends last night who had just arrived back to Buenos Aires from a month of traveling around Bolivia. They listened with polite empathetic faces while I told of the Slowest Trip in the World, then described the three broken tires, bus accident, and week-long bus cancellation they had experienced. Sooo I'll count my blessings while I'm still in a semi-developed country, I guess, and anticipate the adventures to come in June.
Tonight I take a 40-hour ride to Rio, crossing the border about halfway in (at Iguazu, though I presume there's no pit stop to walk around the Falls) and arriving Sunday afternoon. BUT this bus has cama seats and food service, and I have a charged ipod and a book to read. Plus who KNOWS what hot Brazilians will be riding next to me m.i.right??
HI so I arrived to Buenos Aires last night at 2am from a journey down the eastern side of Argentina through the Lake District, Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego in what was probably the most incredible trip I have ever taken. Twelve days of travel (3.5 spent on busses, I kid you not) is a lot to process, so this week I'm taking time to unpack, load pictures, catch up on the internet, and consider another small piece of information, the fact that I'm moving to Rio de Janeiro on Friday.
I know, right? Seems sudden, but I've been thinking about it for a few months now. I have really enjoyed the people I've met in Argentina, and have done some baaaaaller traveling, but as much as I love the ice cream and as comfortable as I'm getting with Castellano, I want to take advantage of the rest of this post-grad gap year to go back to the beach. The plan is to find work teaching, relearn Portuguese, drink acai, and get tan tan tan until June-ish, then travel through Brazil with my good friend Nate (potentially on the AMAZON? let's work on that snake fear first maybe) to La Paz, Bolivia, past Macchu Picchu in Peru, up through Ecuador into Colombia before flying home from Bogota. If any of that sounds remotely interesting to you, come join me. Like, actually, let's talk.
In the meantime, here are some teaser photos from Patagonz. Detailed posts to come (duh) as I take packing breaks this week.
