quinta-feira, 17 de julho de 2008

What I always wanted to know about Brazil but was afraid to ask/find out…

Since my last few entries have been rather melancholic, their mood heading increasingly downward, and the slope of nostalgia becoming dangerously steep for a blog, and to avoid going into a series of flashbacks that will have me wondering what the heck I’m still doing in Brazil, I thought I’d go back to a more light-hearted tone, and comment on a few disconcerting things I discovered during my first weeks in Brazil…

- Newspapers have an incredibly high number of ads for high-rise apartment buildings, (as a matter of fact, you will find fewer news articles than ads), complete with pools, palm trees, 3 bathrooms per bedroom, ground –floor fully equipped gyms with bullet-proof panoramic views of Champs Elysees-style landscaped gardens, and hundreds of miserably-paid labourers to make this whole Disney-type garden of eden operate.

- If you’re me, you will learn to match name of high-rise building to decade and style of architecture. Above-mentioned buildings will usually have spanky Americanitis names like Coral Gables, Wall Street, Flamingo Towers. You will try to decide whether you prefer these names to the multitude of 80s and 90s architectural monstrosities with more sophisticated European names like Grenoble, Montpellier, Cap D’Antibes, Amalfi, or those Mediterannean, sophisticated Italian-renaissance style buildings with names of Italian renaissance artists, Mansão Da Vinci etc. Or you might just settle for 60s buildings with indigenous names like Ubiratã, Maiara, or 50s buildings with names of women like Maria Estela, Solange, Valentina and so on. My personal favorite is an ugly, blackened 40s building called Poesia. Apparently they had a sense of irony in the 40s.

- Water: you will spend an inordinate amount of time and energy buying and transporting water as it’s so hot everyday that you will suffer from constant dehydration- resulting in parched mouth, bad hair, and more eye wrinkles. Better call one of the countless little shops that offer the indispensible service of "water delivery": huge water dispensers brought to your front door, with men earning slave-labour wages transporting six or seven of these 20 liter-dispensers on carts and bicycles up and down steep hills, bringing one right inside your kitchen, and still giving you a smile when you realize you’ve got no change to reward them for their hard work.

- And while we’re on the subject, When it rains, it pours. You must never forget to shut all windows before you leave the house, lest you come home to huge puddles of water, wet clothes you left draped over the chair by the window, and flooded keyboard when your computer is by the window. As well, never buy cheap umbrellas from street vendors as they are programmed to self-destruct within fifteen minutes of opening. And finally, never decide to get on a bus, or head downtown in you own car when the rain starts. You might never return home again. Seriously.

- Never let the lady at the salon who’s waxing your legs and your bikini line come near you with a clear plastic bottle simply labeled “removedor”. This industrial-strength household product will be brought out to remove wax from your bikini or underwear. It smells suspiciously like turpentine (which is normally used to clean up paint brushes and rolls while wearing gloves) and will inevitably burn your “epidermis”, leaving a large patch of dark, papery, purple-colored skin, that will slowly (over a period of a few weeks) detach itself from your lower abdomen, flapping uncomfortably until it simply falls off, revealing a brand new bubblegum-pink layer of raw skin underneath.

- Plastic surgeons offer indispensable services like laser hair removal and face peels. The waiting room is an elegant island of peace, with cream-coloured modern sofas, and a coffee station -- a mahogany buffet with state-of-the art cappuccino machine flanked by two pots of pink orchids. The coffee-table boasts a range of national and foreign magazines, the walls are decorated with rare still-life paintings, the air-conditioning is silent and looks like a giant I-pod. After all, Brazil has perfected the cult of perfection. Saturdays are for manicures, pedicures, hair-straightening, special chocolate moisturizing hair treatments, waxing, lasering away body hair, varicose vein zapping , lymph-node massaging to eradicate cellulite, tooth-whitening, teeth-straightening, jaw reduction, and nose removal.


- Plentiful hired help- Every shop, business, gym, bookstore, English school, restaurant, café, and even sweets stand, will have at least three, if not four, five or six guys wearing an ill-fitting dark suit and tie in 35-degree heat hired to observe the general goings-on in the surrounding perimeter of the said business, to perform some kind of not-quite-defined security function (or perhaps social function: they usually smile at you and say hello and know everything about you after your first two visits); as well as seven, eight or ten less well-dressed guys (called manobristas) earning less than minimum wage hired to park your car in obscure little side streets (as there is no way you’d spend 92 minutes circling the block or the entire neighborhood just to find a miserable parking space). They also seem to perform a shooing-away-street kids function. Every above-mentioned business will also have a batallion of cleaning ladies earning the wage of security man + wage of manobrista divided by 15, who will mop the floor every fifteen minutes, empty waste baskets every 10 minutes, and carry soapy water buckets up and down flights of stairs all day long.
(This comment is not meant to denigrate the work of these people, but rather to call attention to the medieval time/colonial style class-structure/wage difference where 10% of the population needs an army of servants everywhere they step. Unfortunately I am inevitably part of this 10%. I don't know how to rebel against this state of affairs. And by the way, these are invented statistics, but you can look up the real ones on the internet and you'll get my drift.)

- Sunday barbecues in the neighbouring building. The Salão de Festas, complete with the outdoor patio that is attached to every narrow building in the central neighborhoods of São Paulo, exists because people love to throw big parties but don’t have enough space in their 100’000 dollars a square-meter apartments. You will learn to either enjoy, or at least put up with a) the amorphous, high-pitched sound of loads of women cackling and amorphous, slightly more baritone sound of loads of men impressing each other with stories and lots of expletives (caraaaaaaaalho being a favourite); b) pumped up sound system (meaning heavy bass) medley of pagode (sugar-sweet, watered-down samba), bad eighties music, and hits by mega kid entertainer Xuxa; or if the party is a bit more trendy, pumped up sound of hard-core electro, minimal, trance, psy-trance, and other mushroomy variations of electronic music; c) drunken singing along to out-of-tune guitar, after sound-system has gone bust due to insufficient power or generalized city black-out; d) the sound of hundreds of children screeching (actually it will only be a dozen, but as Brazilians loooove children and think that loudness is a sign of happiness, it will sound like hundreds), d) arguments over whether the ball hit the inside or outside of the goalpost coming from the football/basketball/volleyball/skateboarding court adjacent to the patio and salão de festas.

- When you buy your cell phone, which will be not only pre-paid, but (illegally) registered in someone else’s name (the dear best friend) it will inevitably be stolen within at most two weeks. It will probably be stolen when you least expect it, for instance, when you are giving first-aid to a person whose leg has just got hit by a bomb at a demonstration against Bush that’s turned sour. The thief will be someone who looks like a passionately well-meaning, high-morals student, complete with overgrown hair, Che Guevara T-shirt, Palestinian kerchief and Adidas trainers, and who will offer, just when you’re shouting for “an ambulance, a doctor, a nurse, a fireman, what the fuck??!! somebody call the emergency number!!", the guy will offer, as I was saying, to call the emergency number from your cell phone, and will then mysteriously vanish into the panicked crowd, in a cloud of laughing gas, and other types of unidentified “light” artillery, of the "just rubber" type that leaves 1-inch holes in your back.
- If this should happen to you, it is highly recommended that you immediately let the police know, by going online and filling out a form for the BO (meaning, not body odor, obviously, but boletin de ocorrencia.) Stolen cell phones are inevitably traced back to prisons where inmates use pre-paid mobiles to make their plans to take over Brazil and the world. As you do not want your best friend, in whose name you registered the phone, to be accused of being intimately involved with the top bosses of the PCC (criminal mafia prison group), you better pray a lot.

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