Land Reform Settlement and Ouro Preto

Always striving for new highs (lows?) - this one's about 2.5 weeks overdue!

The UC Education Abroad Programs director here at PUC arranged another trip for us for the weekend of Friday May 11th to spend a couple days in Ouro Preto, in the state of Minas Gerais.

We met at 8:00am (ugh.) on Friday and got underway. On the way to Ouro Preto, Steven had arranged for us to stop at a land reform settlement. Land reform is a hot issue in Brazilian politics, and has been for many years (in pretty much all of Latin America, actually). Basically the deal is: as a result of Brazil's history, there are tons of huuuuge plots of land which are owned by a (relatively) few rich people. In many of these situations, the land is laying fallow, for whatever reason (I really don't know why - maybe a bunch of the rich people are just too damn lazy to do anything with it?). This land originally belonged to small-time farmer families, but when all this land was concentrated, they were all kicked off. As such, there's a huge landless peasant/farmer population, who formed a movement - the MST - which is one of the best organized and most effective landless farmer movements in Latin America. So often times, the MST will organize an "occupation" of some of this fallow land, and they'll live there until the government expropriates the land from the owner and redistributes it to them. This happens in an infinite variety of different ways - sometimes with bloodshed and massacres, sometimes with an "oh, ok, yeah sure, you guys can have it" (since when it expropriates the land, the government actually pays the landowner a market value for the land - it's not like they're getting totally screwed-over). Anyway, it's a fascinating aspect of Brazilian politics & culture, so it was great to get to see a land settlement in real life.
We drove about 5 hours (was supposed to be ~3 hours) to this land settlement in the middle of nowhere. The place was pretty phenomenally beautiful (times I wish I had my big camera...), and we had a unique opportunity to talk with and ask questions of the community leader, and learn about their struggle with the land. They were granted permission to move onto the land 2 years ago, but as of yet have not been able to get any state loans, and thus the ~30 families have been living in primarily homemade-brick huts about the size of my room for 2 years. Definitely makes my digs here feel nicer!

Land Settlement

After hanging out there for a couple hours, we got back on the bus for another too-many hours and wound up getting in to Ouro Preto at about 8:30pm (the supposed 5 hour drive had somehow turned into 10 hours... not including our stop-time at the land settlement!). Ouro Preto was definitely worth it, though - even if just for the crisp "wow, they actually have real winter in Brazil?" cold mountain air that welcomed us upon leaving the bus.

We were all pretty hungry when we got into the hotel, so we split up and headed off for dinner. Galen, Ella, Alice (Ella's sister who's visiting and was allowed to come along since it would just be plain mean to not let her) and I found ourself a charming little restaurant in what felt like the basement of some ancient building, but in a charming surrounded-by-brick sort of way. While we were eating, Stephen, his 8-year-old daughter and a couple of UC-ers wound up wandering in for dinner as well. The 8 of us took our sweet time with our dinner and wound up pretty much shutting the place down. The (1) waiter seemed reluctant for us to leave, so engaged yours truly in an impromptu magic- and bar-trick contest. I flabbergasted him with the ol' get-the-Real-from-under-the-empty-upside-down-wine-bottle-without-touching-it trick (thanks Mitch). Somehow, we talked Steven into accompanying us to get an after-dinner drink at one of the town center's 2 bars. And lo-and-behold... the University of California wound up buying us drinks! Woo! Thaaaaanks Cal!
Steven and his daughter (quite the conversationalist) left us college students to... well... be college students. Galen, Alice (Alice was kind of the silent partner given her lack of Portuguese) and I wound up meeting a small handful of awesome students from a university in São Paulo who were in Ouro Preto on a stop on their field-trip with their geology department and spent a good amount of the evening exploring one of the many things Minas Gerais is famous for - cachaça - and, well, chatting. Always making friends. Sadly, they were leaving the next morning at 6:45am. I don't know how, considering I (think) we wound up parting with them at around 4:00am.

Saturday morning I found out why Ouro Preto is worth the trip: it's beautiful in a way that is unreal in Brazil. I say that because there's no beach anywhere remotely close, and no forest. Ouro Preto became an important city during the gold-boom in Brazil as the then-capital of the state. It had several gold mines and at one point was apparently the largest and most important city in all of Latin America - even rivaling New York for a time. The city looks like it was frozen in time - there are strict laws protecting the 18th and 19th century colonial- and Brazilian-baroque-style architecture. With the backdrop of never-ending green that plagues almost all of Brazil, stunning views abounded. Combined with clear blue skies and the cold mountain-winter air made for a overall phenomenal locale.
Steven had hired a tour-guide for our group so that we had the option of touring around with him to learn about the city or adventuring off on our own. Most of us decided to hear what he had to say - for the first half of the day at least. There are some beautiful churches in Ouro Preto, including one which was built and attended only by the black population of the time (almost all of whom were slaves). Most of the funding for the church came from gold smuggled out of the mines in the hair of female slaves, as well as from one slave who managed to buy his freedom and become an exceedingly wealthy landowner. The most impressive and interesting part of the tour, in my opinion, was the tour of an old slave-worked gold mine. Everyone knows that slavery sucks, but I have to say this was the first time I really got to (to some degree at least) feel how much it must have sucked. Slaves of this region were bred to be very short and very strong, because they usually worked in mines maybe 3.5 feet high (and wide, for that matter). Try swinging a pick-ax with any effect there. The place was... claustrophobic to say the least. If a slave showed signs of growing too tall for the mines, he was immediately castrated in order to keep him short and ensure that he didn't go and reproduce and make more too-tall slaves. Slaves' average life-span was about 21 years. I'm not ready to die. (Or be castrated.)
Galen, Ella, Alice and I wound up deciding to break off after lunch + another church and just meandered the streets on our own for the rest of the afternoon. We stumbled upon a purveyor of that current specialty of Minas (I'm not talking about gold anymore - and I swear we totally found it by accident), and all picked up a couple of souvenirs (see: How to Make your Friends, Parents and Roommates Love You: a Guide to Drinkable Souvenirs, by Daniel Katz). Dinner was an all-you-can-eat affair paid for, once again, by the University of California... and any of you who have ever seen me eat, especially of the all-you-can variety, can imagine how that went. We managed to talk Steven into a nitecap again, so yours truly did his part to make contribute to the delinquency of an authority figure. And the night welcomed us with open arms.

Sunday we took an old locomotive to the next town over - about a 45-minute ride - for the novelty of riding in a train-car that smelled like a sauna and opportunity to see a bit more of the countryside. In the next town, we got some lunch and got back on the bus to watch Back to the Future III and make the (much quicker) journey back to Rio.

Once again, all told: a great trip.

Ouro Preto

The Little Things Which Actually Do Make Life More Pleasant

Or: "Things I'll Miss When I Return Home"

1. The porter at the building across the street who's an amazing guitarist and passes his time at work strumming away on guitar or mandolin.
2. Someone who lives nearby and enjoys practicing jazz saxophone at high volume with the windows open. Makes me want to pick mine back up when I get home!
3. A meal of MORE than enough food, including a drink, for less than US$5. Healthy? No. Satisfying? Very.
4. The weekly produce fair a 5 minute walk from my apartment.
5. The 10 minute walk which brings me to the set of most of the 2nd half of the video for Snoop Dogg's "Beautiful"
6. Portuguese - and getting to feel productive sitting at a bar talking to old drunk guys, 'cause I'm "working on my Portuguese"
7. Becoming best friends with a cab driver on Friday night and winding up making a pasta dinner with him and his wife before he drives you and Nicole to the Jorge Ben Jor concert

Pancakes and the Lapa Antique Fair

Woke up this morning at about 9:15 to the sound of an absolute downpour outside. Combined with the sound of Rafael and his friends celebrating a short school-day with animated bouts of video-game soccer, the morning had a powerfully surreal and exciting feeling. So I decided to follow my gut, skip my usual Wednesday schedule of capoeira and yoga from 11 to 2 (oh what a hard life I live) in favor of a trip to the market in order to make pancakes! From scratch! Woo! They turned out surprisingly well, although I sorely felt the lack of dark chocolate chips (I had to use some gross milk chocolate bar instead, and banana) and maple syrup. Of course they didn't hold a candle to Mom's famous pancakes (the powers of which have been known to motivate my friends to rise at the crack of 9:30am on a Saturday in order to be at my house for pancakes at 10:00am), but they'll do in a pinch!

It's 1:45 now and the rain has barely changed! This is the most consistent rain I've seen since I've been here. (What was that about a rainforest, Mom and Mitch?). I love the rain - I'm shocked at how much I've missed that aspect of Berkeley being here. There's something very surreal and magical and exciting about it, especially when you're inside with a cup of tea and some pancakes when you should be out... you know... "exercising".
A place you know intimately can be completely transformed by the rain.

Anyway, I figured I'd take the opportunity to write about the Lapa antique fair.
Every first Saturday of the month, there's an antique fair during the day in Lapa. I decided to go last Saturday. There were a bunch of vendors with booths set up, and a lot of the antique stores and studios had opened up their doors to allow people to walk in and out. The antiques themselves were nothing super-amazing, but the opportunity to see all the old-Rio buildings in the daylight, especially in an atmosphere of festivity, was well worth the trip. Lapa certainly is an amazingly beautiful area. The mansions of all the old, early 20th-century wealth, now in varying states of decrepit decay or restoration are fascinating and beautiful, especially considering the proximity and contrast of nearby ultra-modern buildings like the Petrobras offices and Municipal Cathedral.

And what antiquities did I come away with? Only 1: a shave. Oh yeah, I paid R$5 for a guy who's been doing it for 55 years to clean me up with a straight-razor. Complete with pinching my nose a bit and pulling it up in order to better shave my upper lip. And applying shaving cream with a brush. Afterwards he put about 6 different powders and creams and liquids on my face... the only one I could identify was after-shave, 'cause it burned like the dickens.
I highly recommend it!

Lapa Antique Fair

The São Paulo Suburban Sprawl

Monday April 30th and Tuesday May 1st were holidays here in Brazil (and neither of us have class on Fridays), so Arthur and I decided to hit the road to visit Pamela for a nice looooong weekend.

Well, the first thing I learned is that it's official - it is COMPLETELY impossible to travel easily in this country.
Arthur and I wanted to try to get the earliest bus possible after classes Thursday late-afternoon, in order to hopefully get to Pamela's early enough to go out Thursday night. I had class until later (2:30), so I booked it home, threw stuff in a backpack and got down to the corner, to wait for Arthur. Arthur's friend Rafael had offered to give us a ride to the bus station, and said he'd be ready to go whenever we were. So I hauled ass and got myself ready by about 3:15.... and Rafael and Arthur got there by 5:30.
Lesson 1 - the double-edged sword of Brazilians doing you favors: they'll do it... but they'll do it in "Brazilian Time" (ie. whenever they damn well feel like it).
Ok, so we get to the bus station at 6ish... 6 hour bus ride and we'll be there by midnight. Not too bad, right?
Wrong.
Well, Arthur neglected to mention that Pamela doesn't actually live in the city of Sao Paulo - she actually lives another 1.5-hour bus ride South, in a town called Americana (woo!). Greeeeat.
So we get to the bus station in Sao Paulo at around 1am, and Arthur assures me that Pamela had assured him that buses run from Sao Paulo to Americana all night.
Wrong.
"I'm sorry, the next bus isn't until 4:30am."
Daniel gives Arthur a look signifying something along the lines of 'I'm going to eat your first born child'
Fortunately, Arthur's able to get ahold of another friend who lives in the actual city, and she agrees to take pity on us and put us up for the night. Of course the metro was also closed until the morning, so we took a cab to our savior's apartment and crashed for the night.
In the morning we got ourselves (via metro) back to the bus station and to Americana by about noon. Finally.

Pamela and Nina (her German roommate) were awesome enough to have cooked a HUGE lunch to welcome us, so that entertained us for a good couple hours, and then we set about wasting time until night fell. I actually had a paper for my International Relations class due on Thursday (yesterday), so I tried to get some work done on that... but mostly just enjoyed the uniqueness of having reliable, fast wireless internet.
That night, Arthur, Pamela and I met up with a couple of Pamela's friends, Tammy and Leo, and headed to some delightfully euro-trashy club called something ridiculous like "Ziff". Everyone had fun until the whee hours of the morning. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, so I'll have to try to get pictures from Arthur.

Saturday morning (probably early afternoon, actually), we headed off from Pamela's apartment to her parents' house in... some other suburban city that's something like Vinhede (something related to "vinho" - wine). We dropped our stuff off, took quick showers and then got in the car with her parents on our way to the city of Sao Paulo to Pamela's grandmother's house. (Bringing 3 unknown friends of your daughter to your mom's house: brave) Grandma & grandpa treated us (and what seemed to be practically the entire extended family) to a fantastic (and huge, once again) lunch. Daniel has difficulty standing afterwards, much less making polite conversation.
We head back to Wine-town to Pamela's parents' house (where we'd spend the rest of the long weekend) and have some nice down time (everyone else naps and I have to work on this paper. Lame.). We had planned on going out again this night, but no one was feeling quite up to it. So instead we (Arthur, me, Leo, Pamela & her parents) hung out at home and ate fondue (ugh... more eating) and drank wine and chatted for several hours. Pamela's parents are great and made us feel very welcome. We spent a lot of the weekend talking about languages - differences between Portuguese, German and English; observations on each others' respective native languages or on our own. I spent about 45 minutes trying to figure out how to define "cheesy" to Pamela and her parents... it's a surprisingly difficult word to explain!

Sunday, a friend of Pamela's was having a churrasca (Brazilian barbecue), so, once again: big lunch. We hung out and got to see how fun happens in the Brazilian countryside. Basically: roast meat, drink beer, eat meat, play cards, drink beer, eat meat. Sound familiar? I spent a good half hour trying to understand the card game they all were (very animatedly) playing... to no avail. So instead, we started doing acrobatics on the "soccer field" (see pictures). When all else fails: start climbing on each other.
Sunday evening we met up with some more of Pamela's friends at... wait for it... TGI Friday's. I'm not joking. It was almost painful. Overly-enthusiastic waiters with as many stupid pins as they could attach to their stupid suspenders over their stupid red-and-white-striped shirts... and everything. The menu was even designed as "Take a road trip around America!" I was tempted to try their interpretation of a Philly Cheesesteak, but I (thankfully) resisted.
We had enough fun at TGI Fridays (which was even located in a very American-style mall), so decided to head back to the parents' house. Once back in the general area, we all agreed it was too early to go to bed, so instead headed uphill to a really high point in the neighborhood which had a great view and commenced a lively game of King's Cup - a game which I will not describe here.

We had planned to spend the entirety of monday in the actual city of Sao Paulo, but by the time everyone got up and breakfasted and showered, it was well into the early afternoon. We got to Sao Paulo, had some ice cream, wandered around, and then made our way over to an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant to meet up with a bunch more of Pamela and Arthurs' friends. I ate an absurd amount of sushi... for US$15! Man I love this country. By the time we left the restaurant it was about midnight (we ate dinner for a solid 3.5 hours!), so we head straight over to a club where Leo was meeting us (he had gone to have dinner with his family). After waiting in line there for about an hour and a half, we all decided that we didn't actually have that much interest in being there... so we ventured off to some other bar which had a live band playing Bahian-style Carnaval music - all very cheesy (!) but a lot of fun. Home by about 6:00am.

Tuesday, Pamela's mom decided to make us feijoada (THE traditional Brazilian meal: beans with meat, collared greens, friend manioc flour and orange), which was delicious. I spent most of the rest of the day working on my paper, with random Brazilians coming in to look over my shoulder and correct my horrible Portuguese. By this time in the long weekend, Arthur had generously spread the ugly cold he had brought with him to EVERYONE else (thank you SO much for the headache I still have, Arthur), so we were all pretty much a big ball of excitement and activity. Arthur and I decided we'd just take an overnight bus back (straight to Rio, no stop in the city of Sao Paulo this time)... which turned out to be a horrible idea. I got back to my apartment in Rio at about 8:00am on Wednesday feeling like I'd had about a 30 minute nap's worth of sleep. Well, suffice to say I only made it out of the apartment once all day: to go buy a toothbrush to replace the one I'd forgotten at Pamela's apartment.

And that was that! Finally got the paper done ("gave up" may be the more appropriate verb) and got a good amount of sleep Wednesday night... not that it helped, 'cause I still feel terrible!
It was really nice getting to hang out in a Brazilian home for a weekend. Other than where I live, I'd never been in a Brazilian family's home before, and it was very warm and welcoming and relaxing. So thank you very much, Pamela & your parents!

Sao Paulo (well, the suburbs at least)

My pictures from the weekend are pretty selective - as far as when I remembered to bring my camera along. I'll try to get ahold of Arthur's pictures sometime in the near future!

Little things that make life more wonderful

Or: Reasons I Hate The Instinct 13 Years of Soccer Taught Me, to Try to Catch Falling Objects With My Foot.

**UPDATE 6/7/2007**: after alternating filling up with blood and then leaking all over my sock for about a week and a half, the toenail in question has now almost fallen off. It's like a loose tooth... who knows what's still holding it on, but I know if I keep playing with it it'll eventually just fall off. Do I get R$1 if I leave it under my pillow when it comes off?


The lesson I learned: when plates fall, it's preferable to let them break than to stop the edge-first fall with just your big toe.
Geni expressed her empathy/concern with "Did the plate break????"
Thaaaaaaaanks.


GROOOOOOSSS!

Just had to share that with you all.

The Red Bull Air Race

A couple weekends ago, the Red Bull Air Race visited Rio de Janeiro.

The Air Race falls somewhere in between an actual legitimate sporting event and a Red Bull publicity stunt (and I'm thinking it's more weighted towards the latter), but whatever it is... it's RAD! Just imagine light little prop planes flying ridiculously fast and ridiculously low and making turns that seem like (and probably would) they'd make any normal person black out. It's awesome.

Arthur and I got ourselves a pretty good spot, standing about ankle-deep in the delightfully filthy Botafogo Bay water... right at the spot in the course where they did the loop-de-loop. Once again: RAD!

And they even started off the festivities with fighter-jet fly-by's and parachuter-stunts (complete with smoke bombs! Ooooooo...)

So I hung out for a couple hours, oddly did not see a single person drinking Red Bull, and then got on my bike and made airplane sounds with my mouth allllll the way home.

Red Bull Air Race

For more: www.redbullairrace.com - you can even watch a video of the race in Rio!