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!
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| 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.
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| Ouro Preto |
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