The Great San Francisco Fly Brother Meet-Up

On Saturday, I had the absolute pleasure of meeting up with a couple of old friends and more than a few new ones at the first ever Fly Brother Meet-Up, held at the aptly named Fly Bar and Restaurant in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. We talked travel and music and politics, the girls beat the dudes at shuffleboard (twice), and there was even a possible hook-up among two of the guests. We had law students and market researchers and public relations folk and jewelry makers and opera guild event coordinators and half-priced pizzas and nachos with roasted chicken on top. Our tab was picked up by the generous Brazilian husband of the indomitable Ali la Loca (muito obrigado, moço!) and I ran into a surprise celebrity guest!

Thanks to Ali, Ricardo, Mike, Ana, Diana, Sharif, Rasheed, Cassidy, Tommie, Keith, and Dave for a fly weekend in San Francisco!

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And Just Like That, Plans Change

On Monday, I announced that I'd be hitting a Grand Tour of Guatemala and Honduras next month, using frequent flier miles I'd accrued with Delta. On Tuesday, that entire scheme fell apart.

See, what had happened was:

Because Delta was merging the former Northwest Airlines' computer systems information into its own, many of the functions on Delta's website were not working properly. I ended up spending a total of three hours on the phone (half of that on hold) while the customer support people tried to square away my award ticket. Mind you, this is after I spent hours on delta.com trying to match dates and destinations to my personal timeframe and mileage account balance. Finally, I was booked to fly from Fort Lauderdale to Guatemala City via Atlanta on February 3rd, returning on the 18th. As I said in the previous post, I was supposed to have been charged $55 for taxes and debited 35,000 SkyMiles. I shot off emails to friends and contacts in Guatemala and posted the news here.

Tuesday morning, I check my bank account balance and notice it's been debited $150 by Delta.

I broke out the People's Eyebrow.

Then, I called my dear friends at the World's Largest Airline to find out what the hell's going on. After another half-hour wait, I finally spoke to someone who informed me that I'd been charged $55 for the taxes, $20 erroneously for booking over the phone (this was supposedly already re-credited, since it was their website that was screwy), and $75 for booking a ticket using miles within 21 days of departure.

Two things:

• Out of the three hours and three customer service agents I spoke to, not one mentioned the $75 fee.
• I could eat off of that $75 for the WHOLE TWO WEEKS I was supposed to be in Central America.

Her: "I'm sorry, sir, but your SkyMiles account is self-service, and if you check the rules and regulations section, you'll see that the penalty for booking within 21 days is $75.

Me: "I acknowledge that I might need to go back and review the fine print, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect somebody at Delta, while booking the ticket and reiterating the tax amount, which is even LOWER than the booking fee, to say, 'Mr. White, you are aware that you will incur a $75 fee for booking this ticket on these particular dates, are you not?"

To make matters worse, cancelling the ticket altogether and having my miles reinstated carried a penalty of $100.

Rock. Fly Brother. Hard place.

I explained to the agent that I know $75 might not sound like a lot, but in this economy...! And that normally, even non-refundable tickets can be cancelled without penalty within 24 hours of booking, and I had about 3 hours left.

She spoke to her superviser, and to Delta's credit, the entire itinerary was voided, my miles were reinstated, and I should see an additional $150 back in my bank account within a few days (otherwise, I would have talked lots of shit about them on this blog).

Checking back on delta.com for flights leaving 21 days later, I found I could leave for Guatemala on February 16th and, for the same amount of miles, return February 18th or March 3rd (two weeks after I'm supposed to have the visa paperwork back from Brazil). Sayonara, Guatemala.

So for 25,000 miles and $7.50 in taxes, I'm heading to San Fran from February 16th-23rd (Bay Area Fly Brother fans, make some noise!) with a raincoat and two lessons learned:

• Read the fine print in your frequent flier account.
• Be flexible with your plans (which is easier said than done, especially if you're going to a wedding or Carnival or to see that hot jump-off you've been chatting up on the Internet for the last few weeks).

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Two Weeks in Central America

Photo by youngrobv

Because of a bureaucratic bottleneck involving my Brazilian work papers, I'm not heading down to Brasilia for another month. So I decided to use the 40,000 Delta SkyMiles I had stashed in my account for an excursion to warmer climes. In my last post, I asked readers for suggestions on how to use the miles, mostly to get ideas but also to maybe get some lurkers to out themselves; that didn't work very well (thanks, Ali La Loca, for your input) but some of my friends did weigh-in via phone and email.

So, after many, many hours of checking and cross-checking dates and destinations, I snagged a round-trip to Guatemala City for 35,000 miles (plus $55 in taxes). I'll be gone for two weeks, making the circuit from Guate across the Honduran border to Tegucigalpa, the Caribbean beach town of La Ceiba, industrious San Pedro Sula, then back into Guatemala to check out the Mayan ruins of Tikal before heading back to the capital for my return flight.
I get to see stunning Mayan pyramids, experience the Garifuna culture of the Honduran coast (a mixture of African and indigenous flavors alongside crazy-gorgeous beaches), and spend about two-thirds less money than I'd be spending just chilling in the chilly—and expensive—US of A.

See, travel can help you save money!

If you're in the area during the first two weeks of February, know someone who is, or know of something I should experience while in Central America, definitely give me a shout!

And, of course, you're certainly invited to come with.

(By the way, I'm not going to the colonial city of Antigua because, well, after Saint Augustine, Santo Domingo, Havana, Cartagena, Bogotá, San Juan, Panama City, Popayán, Quito, Villa de Leyva, and Salvador da Bahia, I'm kind of colonial-ed out!)

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I've got 40,000 SkyMiles in my account...

...and I'm free the first week in February. Where should I go?

(I'm limited to the US, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America).

I ♥? LON

The comparison is overused, but with London and New York City being the pillars of global culture and finance, as well as the launchpad and rocket booster, respectively, of the new millennium's lingua franca, there's almost no way to avoid comparing the two cities. Even culture bible Time Out London had to ask if New York was the better, upgraded, 2.0 Beta version of the swingin' British capital.

Though New York isn't a national capital and was never the center of a colonial empire, it's always been a magnet for immigrants from overseas and transplants from the nether regions of the US. Still, London has a greater percentage of its population born outside of the UK and is home to much larger groups of various ethnic communities, whereas New York has a little bit of everyone, but certain groups have greater numerical dominance. London wins the diversity prize.

Speaking with some of my newly-minted black British friends in London, it's interesting to see the relative lack of a unified identity similar to that of black Americans (which, essentially functions as our ethnicity). Unlike black Americans, who've been an established part of the US since its very inception, the black British experience has essentially been one of immigration over the past five or six decades, so each different group, be it Nigerian, Kenyan, Jamaican, Belizean, has a different set of identity markers and occupies a different place vis-a-vis other immigrant groups on the path toward assimilation into "British" culture and society, a necessarily basic response to being an immigrant. Folks are too busy trying to survive in a new and sometimes hostile environment to focus on carving out a shared identity with other strivers. This means a less coherent sense of pan-African/"black" identity and therefore less organized efforts to fight discrimination or encourage community empowerment. My friends also tell me that the black professional class in London is comparatively miniscule. Score one for the NYC.

That being said, I certainly see more thorough interaction between people of various ethnicities in London than in New York. I once went to a hip-hop club in Manhattan where there was an even mix, numerically, of blacks and whites. But even though people danced in close proximity to one another, they remained clumped into their racial groups, the dancefloor from above looking like a Dalmation fur rug. In London, I saw countless racially-mixed friend groupings and a few black American expats in the city confirmed that day-to-day interaction in the UK is less yoked by racial baggage than in the States. London's up on this one.

Notting Hill Carnival was fun, but much more subdued than I expected. There has been recent violence, and a teenager was killed this year, so with ordinarily staid British society trying to deal with that, maybe some of the flavor was lost. We Americans are some violent, aggressive, gun-totin' brutes, so a shooting at a street festival doesn't faze us as much. Besides that, summer in Noo Yawk means West Indian Day, Puerto Rican Day, Brazilian Day, Dominican Day, the Irish Festival, concerts in Central Park, house music in Fort Greene Park. Seriously, can hottie watching get any hotter?

Tranportation: New York, all the way. 24-hour subway service. Stations every few blocks in Manhattan. One-way, undiscounted cash fare, US$2.25 (compared with £4.00 on the London Underground - thas almost $7). Though "This is the Piccadilly line for Cockfosters" does sound better cooed over the PA system in Received Pronunciation than "Stand clear of the closing doors (ding, ding)" in some random chicken-fried twang.

Overall, I found London to be exhilirating in some aspects (people-watching in the Circuses, space-age window displays, the accents, the history!), underwhelming in others (semi-wack nightlife, uninspiring pubs, very average-looking people). I had very high expectations of the city and was all set to have it sweep me off my feet as it has several of my good friends, to consider a move to "the centre of the world" and knock 'em dead as the Next Big Thing From Across The Pond (yeh right), but that just never happened, despite heavy lobbying by my London peeps, Lord love them. I liked it. I didn't ♥ it.

I'll be back, though.

(This video has nothing to do with the post, but the song rocks.)

My photos:

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Chi-Town Surprise

From my unplanned, surprise weekend in Chicago—architectural gem and friendly metropolis:

Three Months, Six Continents, Three-Point-Five Grand

Through a combination of one-time tip-offs and dogged research, the universe (and the economy) conspired in my favor to send me traipsing round the Urf this fall with the following ticket prices:

Jacksonville → Baltimore - $88
New York → Dublin - $234
Dublin → London - $48
London → Stockholm - $90
Stockholm → Berlin - $13
Berlin → Istanbul - $68
Istanbul → Cairo - $248
Cairo → Abu Dhabi → Mumbai - $370
Delhi → Kuala Lumpur - $197
Kuala Lumpur ↔ Macau - $85
Kuala Lumpur → Los Angeles - $630 (business class)
Los Angeles ↔ Sydney - $651
Los Angeles → São Paulo → Orlando - $740

Plus several other bus and train trips and short flights = US$3500

Actually, you can get a cheaper round-the-world ticket from specialized agencies like Airtreks or Air Brokers, which allow changes in routing and scheduling for a year, or you could pay a bit more and have a slew of stops on multiple continents with an airline alliance such as oneworld, but a) I ain't have all the money at one time, b) I needed to add a wide-open Brazil flight to the end of the trip (I arrive in Sampa on November 20 and head back to Florida for my brother's wedding next April), and c) what got me on my way was that business class trans-Pacific flight.

Even if you don't have a month off from work or three grand to spend on some grandiose neo-Grand Tour, the ridiculous cost of airplane tickets these days prove that international travel is not a millionaire's game; there's no reason not to pop over for a weekend somewhere that requires a passport.

Check the websites I mentioned here and get packing.

Fly Brother's Revised RTW Itinerary and Confession

First, the itinerary:

The initial flight schedule I posted last month included some pre-round-the-world flights and some planned, but at that time unpurchased, segments. The current itinerary includes all but a couple of connections within India and Australia. New: Two days in Abu Dhabi!

Shout me if our paths will cross anytime this summer/fall:

And now the confession:

I'm an airline geek.

I read Today in the Sky, Airline Route Updates, and The Cranky Flier religiously. I know all the world's major airline hubs (and their three-letter codes) and can guess which airline someone took based on routing. I know which airline is in what alliance and play favorites like any sports fanatic. I get geet when Delta announces a new international route from the world's largest airline hub in that great Southern city of Atlanta, and I honestly wish American Airlines would shrivel up and die and release us all from its figure-four grip on Latin America. I track my own stats at FlightMemory.com (I've flown 0.0019 times the distance to the Sun) and I play around relentlessly with the Great Circle Mapper. I stare for hours at the photos on Airliners.net, sometimes saving them as my computer wallpaper, and sit on airplanes with the in-flight magazine opened devotedly to the route map. And in my dorky nerd solitude, I even created my own fictitious carrier (contingent, of course, upon me being the benevolent dictator of Venezuela and developing the place smartly as a Latin American emirate): Solair—Fly the New Fiesta Route from Europe to Australia, with a free stopover in (fictionally) fabulous Caracas or Tahiti! Naturally, Solair is a member of the SkyTeam alliance.

I've always been this way, inexplicably. In elementary school, I began to collect airline timetables, often holding on toll-free numbers for hours to get exotic-looking flight schedules from Sabena, Saudia, and Singapore (this was totally me). I would get my folks* to take me downtown to the main library to study the airport terminal maps in the phone book-sized OAG (international version, of course). I created my own version of Monopoly called Airopoly, in which players would purchase major airports and try to establish hubs. I collected die-cast and plastic snap-together model airplanes at only $20 a pop. I decorated my room with travel posters I ordered from airline marketing departments. I got a special tour of the airport that I arranged myself in the ninth grade, incidentally the year of my very first plane ride. I applied to the airport management undergraduate program at the Florida Institute of Technology (the very inadequate partial scholarship I received called for a major shift in plans).

*These same folks forced me to throw away all of my timetables and not-so-well-maintained model planes when I finished high school. They claim they had no idea any of it would be worth anything nowadays. Ain't that some shit? Parents.

At college, though, my interests swiveled more towards culture, history, and politics, and the one and only time I seriously applied for an airline job—as a US Airways gate agent in Tallahassee—was thwarted by my ridiculous adolescent driving record ("Heeeeellll naw, you ain't gettin near our planes," I'm sure the guy was thinking). Stupidly, it never occurred to me during the four years I lived in Washington to apply for some part-time gig at United for the flight benefits; my driving record had hardly improved. A couple years ago, I saw an opening with Delta for a corporate communications manager based in Buenos Aires, handling the media in fifteen Latin American and Caribbean countries; I would have been espectacular in that position. But in order to secure the interview that would have secured me the job, I had to first apply through the website, and there ain't nothing on my official CV that would give an airline head hunter pause to consider my professorial self (Shameless plug: I'm great at written/verbal communications, speak Spanish and Portuguese, love aviation, and I'm cute...hire me, somebody!!! American, I didn't mean what I said about dying, eheheh.).

So now, I'm a run-o-the-mill airline aficionado with no real ties to the industry and no big collection of paraphernalia to speak of. Just my mental flights of fancy on Solair, a crapload of aviation trivia in my head, a love of retro airline imagery, an appreciation for the theoretical (if not always financial) ability to jet in a single day from one major population center to another on the opposite side of the globe, and a hankering to lift off the Earth's surface every chance I get.

I've confessed.

Trying On America's Left Shoe

Yesterday, I wrapped up a two-week jaunt out to California, Washington State, and Oregon, for no particular reason other than to meet up with friends on their home turf and to experience a part of the country I'd never been to. Of course, as with most new and interesting places I encounter these days, my mind goes automatically into livability-evaluation mode and I start to assess various indicators (job availability, income potential, cost-of-living, social and cultural offerings) in a semi-conscious litmus test of whether or not I'd be inclined to move there sometime in the unspecified future. This most always happens when I'm basking in the warmth and attention of good friends, who work unintentionally as the best PR agents any city could hope for, and I often leave considering, temporarily at least, a potential home-base that I hadn't before. So it went as I ventured from the humid semi-tropics of my native Florida over to the green-and-gold splendor of America's (Upper) West Coast: San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland.

San Francisco Bay
I got to San Francisco International at almost midnight on July 1st, and was whisked away into the city in a black Toyota Prius (that I promptly nicknamed "Kit") by Mike and Ana, a neo-California power-couple-in-the-making whom I met in Colombia over a year ago. We spent the first couple of days on both sides of the Bay Bridge whetting our collective appetite for Thai food and tribal house, and getting our intellectual grooves on at the stunning California Academy of Sciences (NightLife on Thursdays, featuring a DJ and an albino alligator) and the Oakland Museum of California (featuring a poignant exhibition on the African presence in Mexico and a live salsa orchestra - thanks to reader Keith for that tip). Independence Day meant a breezy barbecue (featuring Jenkins Barbecue sauce specially shipped from Jville) out at Fort Mason Park and accompanying fireworks, with fifteen cool peeps huddled under three blankets and swathed in hoodies, hats, and scarves to watch the show; Mark Twain wasn't lyin' about these San Fran summers. A couple days later, Mike dragged me with him for indoor rock climbing before we had a BBQ re-do under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge (there was sauce left, so...), and while M&A worked, I either hit the gym (Crunch Fitness in the Alhambra Theater - phenomenal - click for free pass), hit the streets (Black man taking snapshots of the mansions of Pacific Heights - talk about tempting fate), or hit the first season of "Mad Men" on DVD (the show's hot, y'all). I even got a chance to meet some West Coast cousins I'd only heard of, but had never seen, over some Burmese food that I'd only heard of, but had never tasted.

Frisco has two serious downsides: the weather (fog and frost in August!) and the expense. My friends' small-but-comfy studio rents for $1300 a month and no meal at any sit-down restaurant clocks in at under $8 (that includes breakfast)! The city is known as being the most expensive after New York, and for an aspiring writer without some type of independent wealth, you can hang San Fran up. That being said, the enormous natural and architectural beauty of the city—a 19th-century masterpiece perched atop commanding peaks over a turquoise bay—coupled with a cultural mix that truly does seem to get along better with each other than any other place in the country (even Oak-town represents with a large black middle class, thriving in spite of trigger-happy transit cops), the friendliness of service people (not one but two foreign convenience store owners welcomed me into their shops without a sign of resentment or bitterness...they clearly have never been robbed), the cult-like devotion to Obama (we started playing punch buggy with Obama t-shirts), and the urbane quirks (two skinny, butt-nekkit dudes walking hand-in-hand in the Castro in 50-degree weather; Asian girls jamming to Jade on their iPods; street names like Divisadero and Guerrero; super-futuristic-warp-speed-high-pressure bathroom hand driers; Bollyhood and Little Baobab and Escape from New York Pizza!) put SFO high up on the list of Fly Brother's hang-out spots. I just can't afford to live there.


Seattle
After my Golden State interlude, I carried it up the coast via plush Virgin America to the Emerald City. My grad school buddy Lisa scooped me from Sea-Tac and drove us on a gray, overcast afternoon through forests of dark and piney Christmas trees into downtown Seattle, named after a vanquished Indian chief and squeezed on a hilly isthmus between Lake Washington and Puget Sound. We dined on fish and grits (which they called polenta and charged $18 for) with views of the busy seaport, downed just-cool-enough-to-drink-immediately mugs of coffee, and caught up on life as the sun finally came out, then slid under the horizon just before 10 PM. Flannel was the order of the day, especially in Lisa's Scandinavian-inspired barrio of Ballard, and even though my few days in Seattle were sunny and warmer than San Francisco, a green, underlying coolness permeated the air and always seemed ready to pounce like an animal on the nascent daytime heat. I crashed the next day on free-wheeling, centrally-located Capitol Hill with mohawked Brazilian Couchsurfer Gabi, who invited me to a samba set at Cellars Belltown (free on Thursday nights) and got jiggy with the strong contingent of Brazilians, Dominicans, and other assorted black and brown youngins who came out of the woodwork (I was too busy dancing and trying to get laid to take photos, sorry). Friday, after hitting a hangar-sized 24 Hour Fitness, I spent the afternoon horsing around with Lisa and Dutch Couchsurfer Ozella in front of the Seattle Asian Art Museum (see me on camel below) and down by the Space Needle. The tower's twenty-dollar admission fee was enough to discourage me, but we took photos and rode the Seattle Monorail and the carnivalesque Windstorm roller coaster. In full-on daylight, the Space Needle does indeed look like a relic from the Jetsons Pavilion at EPCOT, but at night, against the boxy, sparkly rectangles of downtown Seattle, with dots of light gliding through the sky in succession towards the airport, the fluid, illuminated white structure stands cool and imposing, the embodiment of the future we're living.

With all the dot-coms based in the area, Seattle's also not the biggest budget destination. And while the short summer is pleasant, with lingering sunlight and lots of parks to play in, it's still damn short; wintry rain sounds even less appealing than snow. Garbage Nazis are everywhere: you can't just throw shit away out West...there's recycling, compost, then regular waste. The city's also more ethnically diverse than I had anticipated, though much of that mixture seems to occur among the homeless population. People in crowded clubs and bars are exceedingly polite, random skyline and water views pop out of nowhere, and the double happy hour menus (4-7pm, then 10-midnight)—La Isla, anyone?—mean a slew of late-nite eats. Despite other people's disparaging remarks about dullness, Sea-town's done right by me.


Portland
I took Amtrak's Cascades route from Seattle to Portland, a three-hour rail expedition alongside the vast Puget Sound, past hulking, forested islands like Chia-whales rising from the glassy water, and under trestled and suspended bridges painted in earthy colors. Adam, my old roommate from Bogota, now permanently bearded and managing a hostel, picked me up from red-bricked Union Station, gave me a quick tour of the surprisingly large and bouncing downtown area, and we grabbed brunch over at Genies Cafe (the crabmeat omelet was slammin'). Afterwards, he went to work and I met up with Erika, colombiana and one-half of a couple I met in Rio over the holidays, and we walked around and hit some of the famous food carts downtown. Then it was Tori Amos at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, a stupendously beautiful rococo theater with a gargantuan "Portland" spelled out on the marquee. We were eight rows back from the stage; Tori toe it up, focusing mostly on the new stuff, but sated us old heads with "Cornflake Girl" and "Little Earthquakes." Lots of things like, "Tori, you're my goddess," and "Tori, I wanna have your baby," were shouted from eager fans. I just said, "Woooo" a couple times. Sunday, after a stupid-big breakfast at a place called Gravy in the gentrified Mississippi neighborhood (guess why it's called that), I hooked up with the great Kate, 50-year-old native Portlander and hardened traveler (Philippines, Thailand, Colombia, Venezuela—on her own, ladies!) who's off to Abu Dhabi next month for a couple years, and we strolled through the Portland Saturday Market (open Sundays) before entering ginormous Powell's, the world's largest bookstore and nerd crack house. I escaped after an hour, having spent only $29 for four books and leaving most of my travel budget intact; another ten minutes and things would have been grim. Later, after a stop at too-ballyhooed Voodoo Doughnut, I caught up with Lance, the other half of the couple from Rio, and had meatballs and mac-n-cheese at Savoy Tavern before crashing from exhaustion and starting the 24-hour journey back to Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, and home.

When I got to Portland, I had no expectations of what the city might be like, other than a populated outpost in whitest Caucasia. Thanks to the urban growth boundary implemented in the 70s to combat sprawl, downtown's thriving and enjoyable, surrounded by walkable, quiet, compact neighborhoods with little eateries and shops in each one. I saw very little vacant commercial spaces (unlike my own hometown, a port city roughly the same size and with better weather) and lots of people riding absurdly tall bicycles. I also so lots of people wearing absurd-looking headgear, including lots of Robin Hood-style caps. Because of the economy, many young, hip liberal arts degree-holders are waiting tables or slinging coffee for a living, and that same many have an aloofness that borders on rudeness, for a Southern boy like me who is accustomed to expecting a level of service commensurate with the amount of the final check. A Waffle House waitress can fling my $2 waffle at me, but if I'm paying $8 for some eggs, we need to be clear about who's doing who the favor. I didn't like that air of hipster arrogance, and I think a nice spate of violent crime might serve to put those attitudes in check. Of the three cities I visited, Portland seems to be the fullest of strivers, good and bad, proud of their strides in urban planning, transportation development (convenient and quick), and environmental awareness, but just a little too caught up in their own specialness in a place where everyone's off one rocker or another, and in one-upping Seattle. Anyway, in spite of a couple of gloomy, drizzly days, and a shocking amount of homeless people in their 20s, Portland proved a chill conclusion to my western adventure.


Did the shoe fit? Let's see if I start to miss it after a little while back East.

Special shouts to the following people for making this trip memorable:
SFO: Mike, Ana, Jeff, Cousin Jackie, Michelle, B. Mason, Isaac, Sharif, and Keith
SEA: Lisa, Tom, Ramon, Gabi, Erik, Ozella, and Camille
PDX: Adam, Kate, Erika, Lance, and Mark

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Colombia Mia: Adios, me voy.

With the close of the school year two weeks ago came the close of four years in Colombia: an era of discovery and disappointment, growth and growing pains, experiences and memories. My relationship with the country has been like a romance that ended unexpectedly, but with mutual respect, increased maturity, and improved understanding. It was a necessary courtship, a necessary break-up, and a necessary chapter in my life.

Lessons Learned

I arrived in Barranquilla in 2005, thinking that I'd be embarking on a sensual Afro-Latino adventure in the Antilles, replete with easy friendships, easy sex, drum rhythms as constant as the Caribbean tides, and impromptu street salsa sets a la Washington Heights or Little Havana. I'd previously traveled through Latin America and had expected little order or organization, but I figured giving up these paragons of Anglo-American society was worth it in exchange for the daily hot-blooded passion of life in the tropics. I hate disagreeing with the Beloved and Most Royal Highness, Celia Cruz, Queen of Salsa, but life ain't no carnival, and my own illusions vanished within a month of my arrival.  The first lesson was that there is an ocean of difference between visiting a place and living there, between paying a hotel bill and paying a light bill.  I learned patience.

Then, I had to face the hard realization that I was living in a society that never had an American-style Civil Rights Movement, and therefore witness systemic injustice against a group of people with whom I identified racially and culturally as a, literally, foreign and seemingly powerless observer.  But as a professor, I wasn't powerless: there is always the space and necessity for cultural education in the language classroom.  I did, however, have to learn to tailor my message to my audience, because most places on Earth are not nearly as accustomed to political discourse framed by race and class as we are in the States (and even in the USA, those conversations are often limited to academic and intellectual circles or fraught with emotion and misinformation).   And, begrudgingly, I learned to appreciate the US for providing the tools for success, even if those tools are hidden in waist-deep scrub and not always clearly visible; they're there.  I learned pragmatism.

I learned about the give-and-take of platonic and romantic relationships, the unexpected logistical challenges of trans-cultural and bi-lingual relationships, and the absurdity of perceived differences in interracial relationships.  I learned how to keep expectations realistically low and hopes realistically high.  And I started initiating the nascent beginning of the first primary part of the process of knowing when to hold 'em, fold 'em, walk away, and run.  That applies to people, places, jobs, habits, behaviors, tastes, attitudes, ad infinitum: life's too short.  I learned prioritization.

Regret and Redemption

In spite of the oft-renewed resolution to take life by the horns and have no regrets, I inevitably have them.  I regret not focusing more on improving my Spanish.  I regret not taking more time to visit some of the more marginalized Afro-Colombian communities in rural areas of the Caribbean or on the Pacific coast.  I regret not doing more volunteer work while I was in the country, besides the occasional free English lesson.  I regret not maximizing my writing time, especially during my year-and-a-half in Bogota, the physical and cultural high point of my time in the country.  I regret hardly ever getting out of the upper-class social milieu I was employed around (prep schools and private unis are the only teaching gigs that pay) and opening my circle to folks with less empirical experience but more profound interests and insight than the vapid wannabe gringos I found myself around (admittedly a generalization, but nonetheless true).

But in the face of all these regrets, I realize that when I chose to do or not do something, it was the decision that felt the most circumstantially prudent at that particular moment.  And some of the mistakes or unfortunate choices I made in Colombia, I'll try not to repeat in Brazil; others, I will, and hope the consequences won't be too disastrous.  I can only do my best, which I believe is better for having lived in Colombia.  In the end, I've left the country a fuller person, with a hard-earned appreciation for a place that was my home for the last four years, for better or worse.  Was I ready to leave?  Yes.  Would I ever move back?  Not for a long while.  Do I encourage everyone to visit?  Abso-fkn-lutely.  I've met some incredible people, had once-in-a-lifetime experiences, and can say I've been to Colombia and brought back much more than a damn T-shirt.

I brought back gratefulness.

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Mi Querida Caracas

Photos from my favorite city in the Spanish-speaking Americas, Caracas:



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It's the Weekeeeeeend, Baby! (Part 3)

This is the last installment of the Bogotá/Caracas trilogy. I'm now back home in Florida, and between getting settled, resting up, seeing friends and family, and fighting with Blogger over video uploads, I've slacked up on the blog. Sorry, y'all.

Here's video of Saturday night's Brazilian do, with Big G handling the ladies.

As I typically wake up every weekday morning at 6am for school, I woke up late on Sunday: 6:30. Bad idea. As typical of Latin America, even in a capital city of almost five million people, everything within walking distance of the Hotel Harmony was shuttered with metal roll-down barriers. Even McDonald's was closed; some pancakes would have hit the spot right then and possibly weighed the stomach and eyelids down enough for a quick pre-lunch nap. No dice. I ate a couple of stale ham and cheese pastries at a dusty li'l luncheonette on the corner and straggled back to the room under the increasing heat with day-old clothes, the desire but not the ability to sleep, and a vacuous hole in my social schedule, since no one in the whole damn city was sure to be up before noon.

Around ten, I caught the bus to Latin America's largest mall, Sambil, thinking that it'd be open, since shopping is Venezuela's most popular sport after baseball. Wrong. I headed back toward the hotel via Sabana Grande, another bargain basement retail district with bootleg DVDs and knock-off handbags. Some of the stores were just opening, and because of my tremendous shopping fubar in Bogota a few days before, I was in dire need of a couple more shirts and some jeans. All the stores featured t-shirts in Foreign English—"Look Me," "Red Knorth Crazy," "Nigth's Gangsta"—phrases that I couldn't even remotely pass off as intentionally ungrammatical or witty. For all my love of the varied permutations of vernacular English, I'm a purist when it comes to indecipherable gibberish and my wardrobe. Finally, the mall opened, I had lunch (Wendy's) and spoke to George on the phone, who was involucrado for most of the day, inspiring me to investigate the prospects for my own afternoon of being involucrado. Involucrado's how you want to spend an lazy afternoon in Caracas, trust me.

Later, I hooked up with G and Alaa and Alaa's brothers for little hookah (me, no) and some political convo: they look at Chavez pragmatically, saying that he's done many good things in addition to being a major fuck-up (and Alaa is a merchant and businessman, of a class directly opposed to the Venezuelan president) and are resigned to taking the bad with the good. They lamented the increase in street crime and ridiculous cost-of-living increases (renting a room in the capital now costs damn near US$700 a month!) and I lamented the near impossibility of living comfortably in Caracas as a foreign teacher who'd only make about $1400 a month at the most prestigious school. We compared the country to Colombia, their neighbor and my former home, and we acknowledged Colombia's superior system of education and (truly) stronger governmental institutions, while giving Venezuela the edge in social interaction and open-ness—with the odd exception of Cuba, no other country in Latin America comes as close to Brazil as Venezuela does in terms of genuine warmth and friendliness on all levels, regardless of skin-tone or nationality; I never, ever remember receiving shade of any kind after four trips to the country. After a late night street hot dog (which in Venezuela means keeling over with ketchup, mustard, mayo, lettuce, onions, potato chips, and pineapple sauce), I crashed from the fatigue of two relatively sleepless nights.

Monday meant scrambling for last-minute souvenirs and t-shirts emblazoned with symbols of the city (Indiani, baby), and I had lunch with the fellas before Alaa's brother, Jamal, offered to take me on his scooter to catch the airport shuttle bus. On the way, we were stopped by CCSPD for riding without helmets. I went "gringo," pretending that I didn't understand Spanish and speaking only English (luckily, Jamal had lived in Chicago for a while, so the bit worked). He did get a $200 ticket (sorry, dude), then they let us head on off to the shuttle stop, helmet-free, suitcase, and all. Ghetto fabuloso.

Here's some raggedy raw footage of the getaway, including some typical tropical driving techniques and my own Spanish commentary (still don't know how to add music to my movies yet; the theme song would have been "Guaio a Caracas" by Paul and Mark...can anyone help with this?). More photos forthcoming.

Escape from Caracas from Fly Brother on Vimeo.

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It's the Weekeeeeeend, Baby! (Part 1)

So, I was blind-sided by a ridiculous amount of paperwork and test grading over the last couple of weeks, which reduced my reading time to nil (my Google Reader account has hit 1,000 unread posts since I last checked it) and my writing time to even less. I'm finishing up four years in Colombia with a mixture of excitement, trepidation, anxiety, regret, relief, and pragmatism, but I'll explain all that in a later post.

This weekend, I jetted off to Bogotá and Caracas to see and say goodbye to friends that I've made in both cities, since it'll probably be a while before I'm in the region again. Having booked an award ticket on Avianca, I only had 23 hours to spend in Bogotá before popping over to Venezuela for two nights. I'd say out of 72 hours, I only slept about fifteen; had lots of whoring to catch up on.

Here's the run-down of last Friday:

The perpetual blanket of gray, rainy clouds lifted over the Colombian capital as soon as my plane touched down, as if I had brought the sun with me from the coast. Still, the high-altitude air was chilly to my thinned blood and I had to wrap up as the cab sailed past the new glass mid-rises popping up like mushrooms on the grassy savanna of Bogotá. The place is growing like mad and I was reminded that Colombia is not a poor country, it just has shit-loads of poor people. Still, Bogotá truly does get better each time around...y'all should visit.

I met up with Roberto, my ace boon in Colombia, for some shopping, and being some supastah soap opera actor and model, he was supposed to be hookin' a brother up with some style tips for my big trip. After a two hours, he had purchased three shirts; I, none. Anyway, after lunch at Gaira Cumbia House, a little bit of the Caribbean in Bogotá, owned by the brother of tropi-pop legend Carlos Vives, I met up with my friend Indira (actress/model) and her Venezuelan husband, Noé (not an actor/model), who just had a little teeny-tiny, expressive, very-well-mannered baby named Maximiliano a few months ago. The lil punkin, whom they said never approaches people, crawled over to me, sat on my lap, and started drinking water out of a cup I was holding, bless 'is lil ol hart. I was so proud.Then, after my last granizado de café at Juan Valdez for the foreseeable future, I met up with the whole gang at Gaira again for some kick-ass salsa and some kick-ass sandwiches til 2am.
A couple of restless hours later (the altitude plus the cold air and no heat killed any teensy iota of sleep that I may have liked to have obtained), I was headed back to the airport for my jaunt across the border into Chavezlandia, aka la República Bolivariana de Venezuela.

Gracias Róvel, Indira/Noé/Max/Bruno, PPCCS, Mike, Guillo, Kathy and John, and Super Ratón for helping to wrap up mi Colombian sueño 8500 feet up in the nosebleed section of the Andes.

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Fly Brother Departures - Summer/Fall 2009

All the pieces of the puzzle.

Behold the itinerary* for my upcoming round-the-world jaunt (click image to enlarge), touching six continents and ending this November in Brazil. In the coming weeks, I'll delve into the details of the planning, including ticket costs, accommodations, and activities. If you're in any of the scheduled destinations during the schedule dates, let a Fly Brother know:

*subject to change.

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Ghetto Fabuloso -or- Where I've Been: Caracas

They say Caracas es Caracas, lo resto es montes y culebras—Caracas is Caracas, the rest is just shrubs and snakes. With serpentine highways jack-knifing, double-backing, and clinging to mountainsides before plunging through tunnels that connect the country with the Valley of Caracas, that statement is beautifully obvious. The capital of Venezuela, at once cosmopolitan and ghetto, sits at the northern edge of South America, separated from the Caribbean Sea by the looming green wall of Avila Mountain and ringed by red-bricked, ever-expanding shanties that drape the hillsides.

As the principal city of the largest oil-exporting country outside the Middle East, Caracas combined the flavor and openness of the tropics with the verve and sophistication of a cosmopolis; in the 70s, Air France even ran the Concorde regularly between Caracas and Paris. Its glory days clearly over, I was last in Caracas in 2005, when Hugo Chavez still seemed harmless and funny, with his "Bush, joo are a donkay," and the comfortable controlled chaos typical of large Latin American cities still seemed intact.



Within the conglomeration of 4.5 million people, freeways course through the valley bordered by countless billboards and high-rises sprout indiscriminately like a real-live version of Sim City. Boisterous, loud, dirty, crowded, and hot, Caracas ain't pretty. But it's sexy. And what struck me most about the place was the swift friendliness (and attractiveness...hotties everywhere) of the people; how you can go up to random folks on the street doing random things, and they take you into their world for a few hours, showing you their hobbies and houses, introducing you to their friends and trying to get you drunk, their diverse interests and tastes spanning place and time. One of my friends does flatland x-treme biking while listening to Lou Rawls on MP3!

Politically speaking, I haven't seen any of the so-called reforms Chavez has put into action to nationalize major corporations and entire industries, fight labor groups (who should be his natural allies), and essentially destroy the middle class, but from what I hear from my friends in the country, things are not going well. I had intended to return over Spring Break to compare the changes I saw, but logistics made that impossible. As much as I love Cuba, I do not believe changing Venezuela into the 2.0 Beta version is the right way to achieve social equality.

Caracas is straight hood, and besides Rio de Janeiro, it's the only city where I actually felt nervous about my safety; stray bullets are common and crime has exploded. The city, it pains me to say, is on the type of downward slant that takes a place decades to rectify. But on the flip side, you got tan chulos in wifebeaters rolling through the city blasting the latest reggaeton or hip-hop in heavy '83 Chevy Malibus with their brick-house chicas smacking gum in the passenger seat. The nightspots go crazy with house or salsa til sun-up. There's ice skating on top of Avila Mountain (outdoor ice skating in the Caribbean!) and baseball outshines soccer as the nation's pastime. Afro-Latino syncretic religion is strong, as is the obvious African cultural element to the city, from the swagger and slang of Venezuelan Spanish to the proliferation of brown faces on the streets. It's like Harlem in the early 80s or DC in the 90s, not just ghetto, but also fabulous. There's something appealing about having your name engraved on your belt buckle when everyone else has, too.

I think the cosmos saved me from a great life disappointment by not allowing me to find a suitable job in the city when I was searching back in 2004. I do love Caracas and would have hated to be forced out of the country when Chavez siezes all foreign-held bank accounts.

To catch some of the true rawness of CCS, look at the first few scenes from the crime drama, Secuestro Express; very much in the vein of New Jack City and City of God. Any time I see images of the city, I remember the rush of being on the edge of anarchy. And I like it, at least in short doses.



And here's an excellent, admittedly anti-Chavez blog about the goings-on in Caracas.

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The Middle of the World

Originally published in the Orlando Sentinel, May 2007.

The Middle of the World is a dusty place. And actually, there are three Middles of the World in Ecuador.

The sun beats down ferociously on the equatorial line less than an hour north of this country's capital, Quito. A bus from the city dropped me off at a rough-and-tumble traffic circle near a couple of very off-priced eateries and the entrance to the official middle-of-the-world attraction, Mitad del Mundo.

For two U.S. dollars, I entered the site, which straddles the line charted as the equator beginning in 1736. At the center of the complex sits a stone tower topped, cherry-style, by a metal globe. Inside the tower, I found the comprehensive Ethnological Museum, highlighting Ecuador's many indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian communities with traditionally dressed wax figures and reproductions of houses and fishing vessels.

A pilgrimage to the top grants a panoramic view of exhibition pavilions and souvenir shops surrounding the tower on either side of the red stripe that indicates the equator. I took a picture behind the yellow sign that read "Equator," each sneaker planted in a different hemisphere.

The second, less official Middle of the World is a few hundred yards to the north along the rough-and-tumble roadway. Entering involves traipsing up a dry, gravel driveway with the hope that no cars pass by and coat you in chalky powder.

At the Inti Ñan Solar Museum, where the equator is "calculated by GPS," I saw traditional indigenous living quarters, shrunken heads and plastic life-sized natives. There was a seemingly-convincing water test in which water spiraled out of a basin in opposite directions in the different hemispheres, which were marked by a red stripe. I took a picture behind a yellow-and-white sign that read "Greetings From the Middle of the World — Calculated by GPS," each of my tennis shoes on a different half of the Earth.

The third Middle of the World, according to Google Earth, crosses an empty gravel lot, the same rough-and-tumble roadway and a warehouse a few hundred feet north of the Inti Ñan Solar Museum. I wasn't able to take a picture on this equator. I found it after I had returned home — while trying to figure out which of the first two was the real Middle of the World.

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Where I've Been: Mexico City

The title “Third Largest City* in the World” never moved beyond the abstract until I found myself circling over the Valley of Mexico on the descent into the Mexican capital back in 2004, when I actually had hair and the associated hairline (and before I caught a whiff of that very special mega-city further south). Golden brown fields gave way to barren mountain peaks that seemed to reach for the underside of the jet. Those gave way to the sprawling mass of Mexico City, nestled on the floor of the ancient Lake Tenochtitlán, and smothered by a cloud of smoke and exhaust trapped by the ring of mountains. It was like flying over the über-expanse of Los Angeles, but three times bigger. Mexico City is big, huge, gargantuan, as in big-ass biscuit big.

On my final approach to Benito Juárez International Airport, I caught glimpses of expressways, tree-lined streets, apartment towers, and skyscrapers which lent a surprising sense of modernity to a place Americans in their cultural isolation typically have no thoughts about whatsoever. Just before I landed over the densely-packed shotgun shacks the surround the airport—the “real” Mexico—I spotted signs that the country is indeed tied economically to the US: Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and the ubiquitous Golden Arches. Don’t think you can get away that easily.

Once I arrived, I hopped on the retro Mexico City Metro, designed in the 1960s and apparently not refurbished since, so it's become stylish again. During rush hour, the trains were packed, the A/C was often broken, and peddlers pushed through the cars loudly offering everything from pens and notebooks to bootleg CDs and DVDs for 10 pesos each. Yes, they were selling Barbershop 2 in the Mexico City subway the week it had been released in US theaters.

With a population of 8.6 million in the Distrito Federal, and another 23 million in the metro area*, I found the streets of Mexico City to be surprisingly clean. The air was dirty, though having already traveled to other Latin American cities, I had previously been introduced to swallowing black clouds of exhaust while walking down the street. Also, being 7,300 feet in altitude, the air is much thinner than that of the low-lying East Coast. So, climbing the stairs from the Metro, doing any cardio in the gym, and getting my merengue on in the club became a spectacle of gasping for air and having to sit down for a hot second before I had a heart attack. The girl in the gym said it takes about four days for coastal folk to become accustomed to the mountain air.

During my five days in town, I hit the Frida Kahlo house in Coyoacán, a poignant arrangement of the artist’s life and work, with colorful statuary and paintings on display no where else in the world. The humungous Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology) has the world's largest collection of indigenous artifacts from Central and South America. There is a great crafts market in the Cuidadela, where I got all kinds of Mexican knick-knacks that my pops put in storage the day after I presented them to my parents. One afternoon, I rode out to the 2000-plus-year-old pyramids at Teotihuacán, built by folks that predated both the Toltecs and the Aztecs.

I wrapped up my days of exploring with a $3 all-you-can-eat buffet around the corner from my hotel, where I met three African dudes on vacation. They were originally from Cameroon, but lived in France, where they sold gold jewelry at a flea market in Marseilles. They were traipsing around Mexico for three months. Play on, players. Then, my last night, I was adopted by a group of youngins who liked hip-hop and took me out for a night of, hell, everything: reggae, house, hip-hop, salsa, norteño, mariachi, swing...they could dance it all; I was very impressed.

Mexico City, you are indeed the cradle of a great civilization!

Check my photos, check Frida and Amores Perros, check these interesting websites (AfroMexico and Africa's Legacy), and check the US State Department travel warnings for a heads-up before heading south of the border (along which most of the trouble is, not in Mexico City).





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I♥SP

The last post of a 4-part series on my year-end jaunt through the Promised Land, aka Brazil.

After an early-morning flight back from Rio to São Paulo, then traipsing from one end of town to the other by bus and subway and car, with two suitcases, I finally said goodbye to my best buddy, Roberto, as he headed back to Colombia the night of January 3 for work the following Monday. Ro is my dog, my bro, my ace, and I'm glad and even blessed to have rocked the holidays with him in Brazil.
And then there was just me, for another week, settling into a city that has begun to claim me the way Washington did nine years ago, when I was just a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Senate intern first sampling the delectables and delights of Chocolate City. I won't go into the details of who I stayed with or partied with or even interviewed with in São Paulo; but I want to impart, with probably as much futility as fitting the essence of New York into a snow globe of the Empire State Building, my love affair with Sampa.

Saudade (prounounced saoo-dah-jee) is a concept famous for lacking a literal translation in English, or even Spanish (soledad is it’s cousin, but not the same). Longing, desire, yearning, waiting, nostalgia, melancholy, wishful thinking, remembering, missing, solitude—all of these verbs and nouns approximate saudade, but in Portuguese, it’s all delivered in one word. It’s appropriate, given Brazil’s history. The founding populations of Brazil included Africans, torn from their homeland with the permanent desire of having that homeland and all its freedoms returned; Amerindians, who yearned for the time before the white man’s invasion; and the Portuguese, already themselves a complex ethnic mixture, longing for European ways and values in this vast, untamed Southern land. Add to the mix migration from the far corners of the country, and immigrants from Japan, the Mediterranean and Middle East, and Lusophone Africa, all searching for opportunities and better lives, and you have a society built on saudade. Brazilian music is the single most profound example of this sentiment: the driving urgency of samba, the wistful reflection of bossa nova, the raw romanticism of forro.

There is a song I love about Sampa’s sister/nemesis, Rio, called “Samba do Avião” (see me sing part of it, here):

Minha alma canta
Vejo o Rio de Janeiro
Estou morrendo de saudade
Rio, seu mar, praias sem fim
Rio, você que foi feito pra mim

My soul sings
I see Rio de Janeiro
I'm dying of saudade
Rio, your sea, beaches without end
Rio, you who were made for me

Rio was made for many people, Tom Jobim included, but not for me. São Paulo is my city: walking hurriedly with the crushing masses changing trains at the Estação da Luz, sure enough of my destination and bearings to maintain pace with the everyday commuters. Cruising in the shadow of the glass and concrete boxes that hem in Avenida Paulista like fat dominos, each crowned by a television or telephone antenna, helicopters buzzing around them in decreasingly concentric circles. Squeezed up against thousands of Paulistanos bouncing to near-religious rhythms under skyscrapers, stars, and freeway at the outdoor Vai-Vai samba school practices. Attending an art gallery opening, the cast party of Miss Saigon, and a tribal house music session all in the same evening, ringing in the dawn with hot chocolate and tomato-orange soup at Bela Paulista bakery before hitting the sack for some mid-morning shut-eye. I long to live there, yearn to add my own rhythm to the constant motion, noise, sway of South America's largest city. Wishing to be another one in twenty million. And as I wrapped up my last week among the hum buzz din of unbridled urbanism, I was morrendo de saudade. I think it’s wired within me, this saudade. It’s what keeps me traveling—"the untold want" as Whitman put it.

But it's also what makes me think that Sampa's "The One." Because my friends tell me I constantly talk about her. Because I always smile when I think about her. Because she understands my needs and wants and fulfills both. And we'll be together when it's time.

I♥SP

Carioca Goodbyes

Part 3 of a 4-part series on my year-end jaunt through the Promised Land, aka Brazil.

Slightly sore from having crammed seven people, plus driver, into an overpriced taxicab from Copacabana to our truck parked uptown the night before, we stretched out at the beach in Barra for January 1. All day, January 1: we got there before noon and it was dark when we left the beach. Got some good dancing in, too (observe, Exhibits 1, 2, and 3 from our in-house paparazzo...guess which one's me!).

Now, if you've read this interview of me at Travellious (wink, nudge), you'd know that one of my most memorable meals was having sushi in São Paulo and sipping on guaraná soda (a fruity, almost ginger ale-ish flavor made from an energetic berry which grows in the Amazon...or at least, the original formula was made from that berry), while my girl Sade was playing over the sound system. Well, the night of January 1, we went to a sushi place in Rio and damn it if they weren't playing Janet Jackson. I mean, my man rollin' up the salmon-rice-and-seaweed was jammin' to the Janet. album. I told y'all Brazil was the lick. And yes, I had the guaraná.

The next day, I let the crew handle themselves on their own while I made some fundraising calls to the United States. I had a serious cash flow problem and was needing something like an advance on the next paycheck. It was also Roberto's last day of enjoyment in Brazil, as we were heading back to Sampa the next morning and he back to Colombia that evening, so they went hang-gliding over the beach while I caught up on some much-needed sleep. Sounds boring, I know, but as I've said before, I usually travel solo, and groups can be a lil too much. I hit the pool and the gym before heading into Ipanema for some reeeallly cheap postcards to take back as gifts (I said there was a cash flow problem*) and then to meet the group and the Colombian couple for dinner and samba at a downtown hotspot called Rio Scenarium.

Historic downtown Rio looks more French Quarter than City of God, with its packed sidewalk bars and its tipsy revelers draped over second-floor balustrades like clinging ivy. The thumps and plinks of competing drums and guitars emanated from each locale, serenaded by its own in-house samba band. As should have been indicated by the interminable line extending from the front door and guarded by a troop of besuited black men (I don't think there's a brother over six feet tall in Brazil who isn't a bouncer), Rio Scenarium was the main attraction of the neighborhood. The three-story warehouse-turned-dinner-and-dance hall sat lording over Rua do Lavradio like a dowager madame running a plush brothel: red velvet and fringe and cut-glass decorated the interiors, along with watercolor landscapes, oil portraits of society ladies, black-and-white prints of 1940s Brazilian pinup girls, scores of antique clocks, radios, and other random antique doodads. The mixture of heat and history and color and sound conjured up the energy of New Orleans, Havana, Kingston, Cartagena, of course Rio, and all the other tropical port cities in the hemisphere all at once, and at only 9pm, it was evident that our rather large group of seven would be standing for most of the night.


Photo by Overmundo.

Three bands played live samba that evening and the dancefloor bounced with a good cross-section of ages, if not economic levels. The crowd was clearly upscale Cariocas (as folk from Rio are called) and a smattering of foreigners, and most of the brown in the place was on stage, but watching older couples or groups of middle-aged women having a girls' night out getting their samba on was refreshing. And as the rhythm picked up, the drummers kicked out more energy, and the crowd swelled, Roberto and I got lost on the dance floor, dancing alternately with the tall and tan hotties our own age, as well as with some of the older ladies whose step might no longer have as much pep, but who were determined to be out there stepping anyway. At one point, as the entire place was singing along to an upbeat tune that I had never heard before, the woman I had been dancing with asked me, in Portuguese, why I wasn't singing. I responded that I wasn't Brazilian and didn't know the song. After a moment of vocal disbelief, she said, in Portuguese, "Well, you're here now, and you can samba, so...you're Brazilian to me." I'm sure I blushed.

Finally, at the end of the night (at least, before we left, soaked, wilted, beat, and ever-so-lightly toasted), the band played a samba with a refrain that everyone, including the non-Portuguese-talkin' furreners, could wave their hands in the air and sing along with:

La laaa la
La la la LAAA, la laaa la
La la la LAAA, la laaa la
La la la laaa, la laaa...

And that, capped off by some sweet Carioca Goodbyes (see "Brazilian Hello" in previous posts), was our last night in Rio.

--------------------------------------------

*Part of this cash flow problem was caused because I had to buy a new pair of frames for my glasses. One night, at the club, tryna look sexy, I slipped the glasses into my jeans pocket and lost one of the arms. Somewhere. In the club. And new, plastic, rectangular frames in Brazil ranged in upwards of US$100 every place I checked. And I'm cheap enough to check a lot of places first.