Nullius in Verba

Segunda-Feira 17 Março 2008
Búzios

We are ready to go. Packing took very little time. We decided that everything would need to be washed when we got home. Those items we had washed two days ago are still wet. Humidity is high here.

At around 11:30 AM, we were enjoying one last cup of cha on the porch overlooking the water, trying to burn the scene into our permanent memory. Rosa, one of the condo complex caretakers, walked up to the top of the hill to the condo where we are staying. She speaks no English. We speak halting Portuguese and recognize only ten percent of the words when someone speaks to us. I wish I could turn on the captions. If I could read what is said as well as hear it my comprehension rises slightly. Out of the cloud of sentences, we are able only to understand the words cinco minutos (five minutes).

Mario indeed arrived five minutes late just as Rosa explained.

Domingo (Palm Sunday)16 Março 2008 Búzios

We hoofed into Búzios centro twice (mind you I had few complaints).

On the first trip our plan was to use an ATM, get some folding cash, a cafezinho, and wander about a bit. The first couple ATMs could not would not read our card (not on a train, not on a plane). As we considered our options, a guy slightly older than me asked if we were having trouble having our card read. The British accent gave away the fact that he wasn’t from around these parts.

“There’s a Bradesco Bank just down the road on the left,” he said. “I’m going there myself.” He had lived in the US for twenty-four years and had been now in Brazil for nearly three. He was traveling with friends and headed over to their black Land Rover.
We hiked down the street and held the door open for the man, who had arrived at the same time we did. Inside, none of the machines we tried read our cards. Not his. Not ours. One can only surmise that some sort of problem existed in accessing accounts outside Brasil at that moment. Or maybe it had something to do with the fact that JP Morgan just bought Bear-Stearns and the economy is melting.

Whatever the reason, that reduced our options to the cambio, which also meant walking back to the condo to retrieve traveler’s checks and passport. At $R1.51 to the dollar, the exchange rate was not ideal. But we had them for times when the ATM didn’t work, so it was what it was.




Reais in hand, we went off in search of (lunch).

It’s difficult to find bad food in Brazil. Lunch in Búzios is a treat. The least expensive meals are found on the praia (beach) where food vendors abound; the most expensive overlook the waterfront. We chose Boom again. We had the system down (grab plate, fill plate, weigh plate, receive coaster with bar coded price, find seat) and the food tastes great.

After lunch, we went in search of açai (pronounced ah-sa-ee) and found it listed on a menu in a narrow open-aired cafe. Brazil has many frutas e legumes that have no other names except what they have in Brazil. Incredible tastes. Açai came in 150 ml to 750 ml cups and had a list of what we suspected were toppings: mel (honey) and banana (with different possibilities for said banana listed in Portuguese that our dictionary didn’t explain). I ordered a 200 ml cup with banana and mel.

The counter-moça took my name and we passed the time talking with a university student from Israel until she picked up her order and said goodbye. Açai looks like a motor-oil Slurpee or blended coffee drink. It’s a dark purple almost black, very sweet, and can induce a whopping brain-freeze if you consume it too quickly. Mary and I found 200 ml was plenty. The cup of sliced banana on the side helps cut the sweetness and the cold.

That left one last item on our to do list: down Brazil’s famous drink, the caipirinha.

About an hour before sunset, we walked down the rua to a restaurant overlooking the praia. The first, O Pescador (The Fisherman) was playing loud music, as it had every day we passed. At no time did they ever play anything that we would say; “now that sounds nice.”

We saw dolphins swimming offshore, and we saw everyone run to the water’s edge with their cameras, trying to capture it.

We picked the place next to O Pesky and sat down at a table and ordered uma caipirinha and uma agua com gaz (sparkling water). A caipirinha is something of the national drink. It is made from cachaça (distilled sugar cane, the Brazilians do not call it rum) and who knows what else. It tasted something like a margarita. One goes a long way. They do heft a wallop.

We watched the beach close down for the day as we sipped–the umbrellas and chairs taken down and folded up for the night as each party left. The sun was setting as the bar staff started to tip the empty chairs against the tables, and our waiter brought our bill and apologized for having to close. We had thought the bar scene would be open all night, so we were glad we hadn’t put off our caipirinha any longer than we had. Another hour and it would have been too late.

Sexta-feira 14 Março 2008
After the storm

I thought that at least the roosters would not crow. Neither sun, nor rain, nor gloom of night will stop these cocks from their appointed duty of interrupting the town’s sleep patterns.

I got out of cama after 8 am and walked downstairs to make some cha. My right foot splashed water as it hit the tiled floor. I grabbed a broom and towels and started herding and sopping up puddles of agua off the floor. We have fan blades whirling to dry the floor. A man is moving tiles on the roof as I post this. At the next chuvarada we will check for leaks and place the necessary buckets and pans. Forecasts call for mais rain.

Terça-Feira, 11 Março 2008

We slept like bricks until 1:30 AM when two, maybe three, roosters crowed for while (maybe an hour) and then shut their beaks until dawn.

I’ve been fighting a cold and a sore throat for a week so Mary wandered out into town in search of comidas for café de manha. She returned with bread, bananas, super-evaporated milk. We fixed some coffee and felt like royalty.

Mary did a little work (yay for Skype where it’s $0.02/minute to make international phone calls) and I read and relaxed. After one o’clock we strolled toward Centro Buzios in search of more comidas. The condo is one block from the praia (beach) where the women wear fio dental (a thong bikini, it literally translates to “dental floss”).

While walking the sidewalk that skirts the beach, we met Americans. On the way in was a young (30ish) couple from Colorado. The man was tall and gangly with crinkles around the eyes from squinting into the sun. His wife was lithe and pretty. She spoke with a Brazilian accent. It turned out that we may have heard her on the Rosetta Stone program we used to study Portuguese. Returning, we came across an older couple (70ish) form North Carolina. They made little effort to learn any phrases and were staying in a hotel run by some expatriate Brits.

We asked the young couple (she grew up in the area) to steer us toward a reasonably priced restaurante. Most of the restaurants have someone who speaks passable English but we try to use Portuguese as much as possible. They recommended Boom a Kilo gastronomica (the food is paid for by weight—salads are an exceptional value this way) on Rua Turibio de Farias. We ate a very satisfying meal that included feijoada—the national dish that is a stew of beans and meat. At $R30, it came to about $18US.

Depois almoça (after lunch) we shopped for a few groceries at a tiny “supermercado.” (have you ever been in a supermarket that did not carry eggs?) We pulled out our short shopping list that we had spent an hour translating English to Portuguese. Por exemplo, we needed to know that mel is honey and eggs are ovos. Our little walking tour took quatro horas.

As the sun set, the wind gusted and we watched an intense lightning storm behind the hills across the bay. We only saw the flashes. We were too far to hear the cannons in the rain.

I’m sitting on our balcony overlooking the Atlantic listening to Maria Rita on the CD player as I write this recap. I’m fighting a head cold that has dogged me since leaving the US but otherwise, I feel great. Below is a picture of Rio de Janeiro.

Segunda-Feira, 10 Março 2008

We got up before the crack of dawn (aka “oh-dark-thirty”) to ride to Brasilia’s Aeroporto with Serge e Lu. They had a 7:00 TAM flight to Rio (pronounced “Heeoo” in Brazilian Portuguese) to catch a connecting flight to Buenos Aires. Serge asked if we’d like him to see if we could ride the same flight to Rio with them. “Claro! (sure/absolutely)” we said. Serge spoke with the counterperson and we were loaded on. It meant we would arrive seis horas early but it gave us time to rent a cell phone ($R130 for the week plus $R2/minute for each call) for emergencies and also allowed us to simply rest. The phone came in handy to call the owner of the condo and have him arrange for Mario, the taxi driver (Taxi Buzios 24 hora), who speaks no English, to pick us up earlier than planned.

Mario came into the terminal and found us. He drove very prudently and we felt quite safe. The ride contrasted greatly with our trips with Antonio and Mr. Toad’s wild cab rides I’ve had in Mexico. We sat back to enjoy the sights. Rio de Janeiro is a huge cidade of around 17 milhao. It is not the largest cidade in Brasil, that is Sao Paulo with around 30 million. One forgets that besides being a major tourist destination Rio is a major shipping port

We started out to Buzios on BR-101, the main artery of Brasil. Buzios is a two-hour ride. Here is a partial list of what we noted along the way:

• in Brasileiro jeito (Brazilian way/style): dirt roads connect to the highway without any exit, heading straight uphill, or right into the subdivision;
  many people walking along the highway, pushing wheelbarrows, riding bicicletas, and crossing the highway. People (sometimes with little children) waited between gaps in the concrete barriers. (According to Lonely Planet, about 80,000 die each year in Brasil from traffic related accidents.);
• alcohol for sale by street vendors on the side of the road;
• a man on a motorcycle wearing rubber boots for shoes;
• gas at $R1.79/liter (around $R6.89/gallon or $4/gallon);
• a priest in full-length robes on a cell phone at the Esso gas station;
• a mother riding her bike on the shoulder of highway, with child on the back with his legs splayed;
• the hills reminded us of California’s Sonoma County;
• lots of in-ground pools for sale—at least 4 displays of them;
• satellite dishes in the favelas;
• stores on the side of the road with statues of Christ the Redeemer (like the huge one in Rio) and bean bag chairs (why this combination of items was particularly common, we didn’t figure out, as we haven’t seen any bean bag chairs or Cristo statues anywhere we have been);
• lots of Retornos for turning around and going back;
• stacks of bricks in front of several partially-constructed houses (people will complete their basement and then work on the above ground portion as time and money permit);
• roadside stands that are no more than a small table and an umbrella;
• billboards proclaiming “Se beber, nao diriga” (If you drink, don’t drive);
  a profile of a cow as a caution sign;
• an incomplete pedestrian bridge in a small settlement with only flagging across the entrance to stop anyone from using it (if you walked up it, you could plunge about 25’ to the ground);
• a man on the side of the road wearing Speedos, socks and tennis shoes, and using a rake working on some kind of landscaping project;
• a man hand-tying something (hammock?) in macramé

Around 4 PM, we arrived in Búzios, one of the most charming towns in Brazil’s St. Tropez. Búzios was a sleepy fishing village until the early 1960s when Brigitte Bardot and her Brasileiro boyfriend ‘discovered’ it.

Mario wound through the narrow cobble-stoned streets of the peninsula to the condominium of a couple that we have a home exchange arrangement with. They will let us know later which of our residences they want to use for their as-yet unscheduled trip to the U.S. We hung out on the varanda, watched the boats go by, and relaxed. Our trip, which had begun at 5:00 a.m., had finally ended around 4:00 p.m. We were exhausted.