I Love What You Do For Me, FEE-atchee!

I bought a car. Finally, after taking three hours to get to the doctor's office, or seven hours to do three things by bus in Brasília (which really means Orlando in Portuguese), I have my 2011 Fiat Palio Fire Economy. Fiat (pronounced FEE-atchee here) is an Italian car company that doesn't exactly make Ferraris, but keeps me from having to hoof it around the Brazilian capital. I financed the $18,000 thing for sixty months, which means my monthly payment is about 10% of my pre-tax salary, but I think I got a good deal, all things considered; cars are a luxury Brazil. Anyway, I would write more, but I gotta put some kilometers on my new baby. She's preto vulcão, which means volcanic black* (or, Black Like Me, as I like to say), but I need a name for her. Suggestions?

*Y'all know I'm taking it over to somebody's cousin's house in the hood to get a spoiler and that darkboy tint on the windows, right?



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An Afternoon in Brasília, Part Deux -or- Why I'm Gettin' A Car With the Paycheck I Just Got

I know the numbers are hard to read, but let's try and follow along anyway, shall we?

Mode of Transport
Green Line = Bus
Red Line = Foot

1. Spot where the bus dropped me off in the vaguely-named block, SHIS QI 15, for a doctor's appointment (Brasília's full of vaguely-named blocks. "SHIS" means South Sector of Individual Habitations in Portuguese. Don't know what the "QI" stands for). Time, 5:30pm. Appointment, 6:15pm.

2. Point where I realized that I was entering SHIS QI 13, and not headed towards Bloco "O" in QI 15, the location of the doctor's office. Decided to head towards the lone commercial strip in the block and ask for directions.

3. Point within the commercial strip where I encountered at least four people who either couldn't give me directions to where I was going, or gave me convoluted directions in a language I didn't understand. In addition, there was no ATM in this commercial strip and I had no cash; therefore, a cab was out of the question. My appointment was in 15 minutes. I found a lady who spoke rudimentary English who told me I could walk to the office in about 20 and pointed me in the right direction.

4. Point where got pissed at seeing the bus stop where I'd disembarked a mere 35 minutes before.

5. Point where I stopped and wondered if turning right would mean a short cut. I continued straight, of course.

6. I got to the gotdamn medical park and spent another 15 minutes running from building to building asking people in white coats where my doctor was located, only to have them tell me with pained faces, "You know what, honestly, I don't really know. Ask the doorman." Y'all don't know shit in Brazil, do ya? Time of arrival at doctor's office, 6:20pm. Appointment, 6:15pm. I wish somebody would have told me I had to reschedule.

Liked that? Read about another afternoon I had recently in Brasília.

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An Afternoon in Brasília -or- Why I'm Gettin' A Car With My Next Paycheck

Like Florida and California and any other sun-shiney place that boomed in the 50s and 60s, Brasília's spread way, way out. So an afternoon of running errands without your own private vehicle just might look like this:

12:00pm - You finish work early with the anticipation of making a deposit at the bank, stopping by the TAM office downtown to pay for a plane ticket that can't get paid through the website because of a glitch, and pick up tickets for Saturday's tango and milonga event at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (because if you wait until Friday, they'll be sold out...trust).

12:15pm - A kindly coworker whose waiting for her own lift to the airport offers you a ride to the bank, which is on the way. That's 3 reais (pronounced hay-ICE...as of May 25, 2010, USD 1 = BRL 1.85) and at least 30 minutes of walking/waiting/bus time saved.

12:30pm - The friend arrives to pick you and your coworker up. They chat about flying up to Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon, to work on a government project and return two days later.

12:50pm - You arrive at the bank, take a number, almost make it to the counter when some relatively-healthy-looking 50-year-old shows up and gets to skip you because he's "elderly," but aside from that, you make the deposit with relative ease.

1:15pm - You run out to the bus stop to make sure you catch the bus actually headed to where you're going. The first bus that passes is not one that's going where you're going.

1:35pm - Neither is the second.

1:50pm - Neither is the third.

1:53pm - A small car with three women and a male driver pulls up and yells, "Rodoviaria" (which means bus station, which is where you're going). You say, "sim" and one of the ladies squeezes in the back while you squeeze into the front seat with the broken seatbelt and hope to high heavens that homeboy doesn't wreck the car. Oh, and your knees are pressed into the dashboard, so really, you wouldn't go anywhere if there were to be an accident, you'd just have shattered kneecaps.

2:10pm - You arrive at the Rodoviaria, thank your driver and tup him the R$3 you would have paid the bus driver, then navigate the few blocks through the concrete ant farm that is downtown Brasília, dodging cars, soaking up sun, and feeling heady about the fact that you're navigating the few blocks through the concrete ant farm that is downtown Brasília.

2:22pm - You get to the TAM office, located at the once-grand Hotel Nacional, and take a number: 162. They're now serving number 148.

3:40pm - You leave TAM, ticket in hand, but got-damn if it wasn't like pulling teeth to get them to waive the R$30 "administrative fee" for processing a ticket that you should have been able to do yourself, if it hadna been for that glitch. Cute office manager, though.

3:42pm - The free "hourly" shuttle bus to CCBB, which is located way off in BFE, despite its rich and profound cultural programming doesn't come until 4:50pm. You say, "screw that," and walk back to the Rodoviaria. There's gotta be a bus heading that way.

3:58pm - You ask a couple of random, blue-shirted bus drivers which greenhound is headed for the CCBB until you score; the driver of your chariot agrees to drop you off as close to your final destination as possible.

4:16pm - The driver drops you off as close to your final destination as possible: on the side of a six-laned highway with traffic zooming by at, I don't know, 100 kilometers per hour and the CCBB squarely on the opposite side of that highway and a barbed wire fence. Lucky for you, the sun's starting to hide behind some clouds, so that should cool things down a bit.

4:19pm - You dash across three lanes, then straddle the middle divide.

4:21pm - You dash across the other three lanes.

4:36pm - You arrive at the ticket booth of the CCBB because it's located on the exact opposite side of the complex from where you crossed the highway and have to circle the entire thing on foot. Brasília really does hate pedestrians.

4:40pm - Tickets purchased! Next free shuttle bus departure back to downtown is at 5:50pm. The free wifi is out. You've got paperwork for your job to do while you wait, and eat an overpriced pancake wrapped around some chicken and cheese at the gallery cafe.

5:25pm - The shuttle bus arrives, but the driver says it isn't leaving for another 25 minutes. Real quick, snap some pictures of the twilight sky being covered over with rain clouds and some of those cool cosmic-clover streetlights they have all over Brazil.

5:50pm - It's actually pouring rain, uncharacteristically, since it's supposed to be the dry season. The bus departs. You can't see shit out the windows.

6:28pm - After fighting through a sea of flashing tail lights, the shuttle arrives at the drop-off point closest to your house: a taxi stand near the subway station at which there are no taxis standing. It's still raining, but not pouring. Some people are like, "screw that," and walk out into it. You do, too.

6:35pm - You're walking faster than the pack of cars inching along the road next to you and you're glad you didn't waste money just sitting in a cab. Your shirt's getting soaked, though.

6:49pm - You arrive home, your three goals accomplished.

Total elapsed time: 6 hours, 49 minutes.

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Brasília's Birthday Bash

With fighter jets, inflatable pools, Nigerian-Brazilian hip-hop artists, beach volleyball, politicized circus clowns, Daniela Mercury, and a Disney parade, the Brazilian capital celebrated its fiftieth birthday with a barrage of parades and concerts rivaling Carnival. Candangos (immigrants from the four corners of Brazil who came to build Brasília) and Brasilienses (successive generations born in the city) converged on the central axis of the Plano Piloto, bookended by the Eiffel-esque TV Tower and the bifurcated Brazilian Congress, to dance samba and forró, eat corn-on-the-cob and street meat, and, of course, drink gallons of Skol and Antárctica. A special free concert by electronica guru Moby served as a pre-show last weekend, but the official celebrations kicked off Tuesday night, with concerts by established and emerging pop, rock, hip-hop, and gospel acts (Tuesday, incidentally, was the not-widely-heralded Day of the Indian).

Wednesday, a nationally-recognized holiday honoring independence hero “Tiradentes” and the official date fifty years ago when Brasília opened for business, saw a bona fide Disney parade thunder down the Esplanade, the reverence for good ol' Walter Elias Disney echoing that for the similarly visionary President Juscelino Kubitschek (affectionately known as “JK,” Jota-Ka), whose controversial dream of a modern and futuristic capital came true out of, literally, thin air. Crowds in Brazil's trademarked rainbow of browns—from coal to cream—poured in and out of the mile-long party space, laughing, yelling, flirting, fighting, and mixing under a constantly morphing sky. Uniformed police ambled through the masses, eyeing bare midriffs while keeping order; vendors hawked beer and mangoes and prayer tickets, while Rihanna's “Take A Bow” blared from the speakers at the central bus terminal anchoring the action. As dusk descended and the puppet shows and folkloric indigenous and Afro-Brazilian dance presentations turned into rock and samba and jazz and MPB concerts on various stages, families with curly-haired youngins headed home as teenie-boppers and hipsters in skin-tight everything flooded the area in anticipation of the headliners Daniela Mercury and Milton Nascimento, and a tsumani of lower-profile but popular bands who rocked BSB until 4AM. If nothing else, Brasília's birthday bash is a testament to making something out of nothing, and to a youthful, energetic city poised for another fifty years of planned disorder and chaotic progress.

Parabéns, Brasília!















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From the AV Room: Baby Brasília

Inaugurated in 1960 as Brazil's brand-spanking-new capital, Brasília was built on a high, semi-arid plateau in the mid-western region of the country to bring money and people into the vast and empty interior. The city has certainly filled-out since these images were filmed, but it's interesting to see life in my retro-futuristic home base during its first few years of existence.

Mostly what you see are government buildings and dormitory-style apartment blocks, punctuated by the twin towers of Congress, with the curved concrete spires of the unfinished cathedral shown toward the end. The soil here is the same red "Jawjah" clay many of us Southerners know well, though the film was recorded in the dry season (it's crazy wet these days, so the city's very much green), and you can see why Brasília's a bitch for pedestrians. Government salaries were tripled to get people to move with their families from the old capital, Rio, and there's a definite difference in dress and appearance between the stylish denizens of the new city proper and those at the bus terminal who came from other regions of the country to help build the place, but had to live in the poorer, far-flung satellite cities of the Federal District.

And it's not boring, folks. Really.


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On Fear, Frustration, and Freedom

It's been a month since I moved to Brasília. My apartment's set up (except for Internet) and I've already got a cleaning lady to spruce it up once a week. I've had my house-warming party, hung out at pool halls and nightclubs, done my first embassy event, developed a nascent group of friends, started Portuguese lessons. The job's going as jobs go—filled with meetings and paperwork and the counting of days until the next payday or holiday. And thirty days from the start, I look back on the journey thus far and ask myself if this is what I wanted.

After having lived in Latin America for four years already, I'm certainly not a novice to the concept of international relocation. But that doesn't make me immune to the fear and frustration that go hand-in-hand with sometimes unrealistic expectations. I mean, according to popular opinion, breathing the very air of Brazil is supposed to render all of life's woes trivial and moot, the closest thing to paradise on Earth, The Dream. But interminable bank lines don't factor into that paradisial opinion, or innumerable phone calls to get Internet hooked up at home, or having your name misspelled on important documents, or Subway charging twice as much for as sandwich as in the States and still running out of tuna. None of the frustrating aspects of establishing a life abroad factor into the romantic notion of moving abroad, of moving to Brazil. I'm even guilty of believing the hype a little bit, myself.

And along with that frustration comes the fear that I might not be making wise decisions, that I have less than a decade of “youth” left to make mistakes and figure things out, that pre-existing friendships and relationships with people in other places are in jeopardy due to my physical absence, that anything I've worked for up to this point in terms of building a life could disappear in an instant, or that everything I've worked for up to this point in terms of building a life doesn't amount to a real life at all. The fear of having nothing to give and everything to lose. The fear of insecurity and misunderstanding; that if I fuck this up—this grand, elusive, esoteric exercise—things are bound to consistently and irrevocably remain fucked up. There's nothing like the isolation of living in a foreign country by yourself, no matter how friendly the people or how open the society, to bring out neurotic introspection. It's an inextricable part of the process. Because moving to another country isn't just a corporal endeavor.

So for those random Tuesday nights when the weather sucks, friends are occupied, foolishness is on television, and frustration and fear begin to work on my mental and emotional well-being, I have this bit of literary inspiration that I copied down ages ago in Washington to pull it all back together:

When nothing in the world matters, when you've lost everything, there is perhaps a moment when the only thing that can count, the only thing you have left is choosing your own direction; looking your demons in the eye and proving to yourself that you are more than they. If only for a second, an hour, a day. That you are a man, that you have will, that there is something in you that they can not destroy, something that remains even if it is buried so deep you'll never see it again. That you can save something, even if it isn't yourself. And knowing, for the rest of your life, even as what you have is not a life, even as they reclaim you and send you back into their hell—knowing that, perhaps only for that one shining instant, you were free.

-Alan Howard
"Theseus"

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Photo Essay: The Ass-Crack of Dawn in Brasilia (Coincidentally, the exact time I have to be up for work).

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A House-Warming in Brasília -or- Why CouchSurfing is the Greatest Thing on Earth

You're new to a city. You're like Bo...you'own know Diddly. What do you do? You log onto CouchSurfing.org, that's what you do.

A social networking site that's actually built around facilitating live-and-in-the-flesh human connection, The CouchSurfing Project puts world travelers and other worldly folk in contact with one another for interaction as benign as a coffee and a chat, up to and including the more intimate use of floor space, couch space, or bed space. You set up a profile, look for like-minded individuals in your immediate area or in a place that you'll be visiting forthwith, and voilá, you're on your way to eye-opening experiences with some of the world's friendliest, most interesting, genuine people. All communication is recorded in the system for safety purposes, and testimonials for both hosts and guests help paint a picture of what kind of nut-job you've got on your hands. Interest groups let you hook-up with other single female travelers, backpacking epicureans, beach bums, parasailers, or last-minute-couch-having Berliners, and it was in one such city group─the Brasília CS group─that I subtly mentioned that I'd just moved to town and was having a little welcome get-together at my place on Saturday. Forty people showed up.

See, CouchSurfing fits almost too well with a gregarious society like Brazil's. People here really do look for any excuse to party and welcoming a new foreigner in their midst offers the perfect reason. And with Brasília being the national capital, and therefore a very transient city, many of my guests were recently-relocated Brazilians who've been in town only a bit longer than I have. I had students and teachers and journalists and civil servants and federal police officers and future novelists and regular vagabonds conversing on the pull-out sofas, sipping caipirinhas, dancing to Beija-Flor de Nilópolis and Madonna and Hector Lavoe.

My neighbor came home at 11:30 (official party start time: 5pm) and, with smiling politeness, informed me that party cut-off in the building is 10pm. By midnight, the revelers─my new-found friends, acquaintances, and running buddies─had moved the party over to a nearby park, each one thanking me as they left in customary receiving line fashion. No, thank you.

This evening, the security guard on-duty from last night gave me a thumbs-up, shook his head, and chuckled as he handed me a copy of the building rules.

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Photo Essay: Crossing the Amazon by Air

Word.

A work of art.

Yes, the current local time was indeed 5:34AM.

Dawn in Dade County.


Fatigue setting in.

Uma garotinha...awwwwww.

Ole Man River.

The Mis'sippi ain't got nuthin on this.

Not exactly ATL.

The river runs through it (the dark water on the left is from a separate tributary that merges with the Amazon at Manaus).

Oooooooooooooooooooo!

Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!

Ooohhhhhhhhhhhh.

Thunderous dusk over the capital (yes, it took that long to get there).

Arriving at BSB.

Can't get any more Brazilian than that.

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