My goal here is to have as much fun with Adam as we can have without getting hit by a car, which is what happened the last time we tried to hang out.
Having never flown into JFK before, I had only one observation. The font they use on their internal signage makes the airport look very European.
A subtle experience: when taking the T from Harvard to MIT, it is best to wait at the end of the platform — getting on the train there lets you off in front of the turnstiles. When standing near the tunnel that comes from Porter Square, you can sometimes feel a gentle breeze generated by the train hurtling down the track before hearing the low rumble of the wheels on their track. We sometimes forget the nerves on our faces are so sensitive.
I’m in Monterey today and went down to the beach with my high school friend Zhenya. I wish I had brought my camera, because the beach was full of life:
The sun was warm and the ocean was cool. The beach rules.
I think I neglected to blog about this earlier, but one of the funniest things about Brazil to me was their obsession with Bingo. In the US, Bingo has been relegated to the church basment social and nursing home, and occasionally for little kids (I have fond memories of playing in the library on Fun Night at Yankee Ridge Elementary School). Bingo is not what you would call a sexy game, like baccarat, poker (that’s for you, Jeff), or to a lesser extent, craps
In Brazil Bingo is a big deal. They have a Bingo Association that publishes pamphlets extolling the virtues of playing Bingo, and how various celebrities financed their careers through the game. The parlors are as full of glitz as any Vegas casino, employees smartly dressed in white shirts and green vests. The room is dominated by a large board covered in numbers which are lit up when they are selected by the MC. Cocktail waitresses serve caipirinhas or whatever your heart may desire. You want to be part of that scene, you want to be one of those people having fun and making money by getting five in a row, column, or diagonal.
So naturally, when the goverment tries to cut down on corruption by stopping the gambling, 30,000 Brazilians take to the streets to protest. If they did the same thing in Vegas, would we have tens of thousands of strippers take to the streets in protest?
Apart from their abysmal food (or lack thereof), aging fleet, and poor track record of getting me places on time, American Airlines also proselytizes. Too bad they are almost the only way for me to get Urbana.
But now Jet Blue flies Oakland-Boston, for around $69 each way. If only they would add a route to Chicago…
And now some notes on fruits (mostly as juice) I tasted while in Brazil. I didn’t manage to try all of the ones I wanted, but it’s a start. Some of them can be found on this website. Describing the taste is almost impossible for me, but I’m working off of the notes I cribbed at the time.
Other fruits I wanted to try — siriguela, camu-camu, and anything else with a name that looked interesting. Next time I get a chance to go to the supermarket, I’m going to load up on new fruits — they are so exciting!
In Brazil, everyone has to vote — it’s a law. However, when you vote, you have two options to “not vote.” The first is to vote for no candidate, which means you don’t think any of the candidates are fit to hold the office. The other is to vote “white,” which means you give your vote to the candidate who gets the most votes numerically. In order to win, a candidate must obtain a certain percentage of the overall vote, including votes for no candidate. Thus in Brazil, “no candidate” an win the election, in which case the election has to be held again.
In the US, not voting is equivalent to voting “white” in a Brazilian election. Thus the act of not voting doesn’t make the statement that “I think this election is a joke.” Rather, it means “I cast my vote with the majority among people who care to vote.” In the Three Ring Circus that is California, you could vote for No Recall, but you could also vote for a candidate in case the recall passed. All those who didn’t vote for a candidate after voting No Recall just voted for Arnold. All those who didn’t vote in the 2000 Presidential Election voted for whoever won their state.
I’m not saying the Brazilian system is better, but comparison points out clearly the political significance of not going to the polls.
I did some more sightseeing in Rio — went and saw the big statue of Jesus Christ in at the Corcovado, which overlooks the city. He was big, and art déco. Enough said. I also went to the botanical garden, which was huge and trpoical. I saw many lizards and weird birds, but no monkeys. In fact, there has been a distinct lack of primate participation in my tropical adventures. I am going to have to write someone about this. Maybe the Brazilian Tourism Board.
I think I inadvertently walked through the background of several photos over the last few days, simply because at touristy places you can’t avoid being in someone’s picture. Perhaps years from now, when I am rich and famous, these people will look back though their photo albums and say “oh my god! There’s Anand Sarwate in my photo! I was so close to meeting him!” This brings up an interesting point about biography. In this age where we have so much documentation of things, will writing biography still be a form of detective work?
I read a biography of Jean-Paul Marat last week, and came across the odd phenomenon in which the biographer could not account for some two months of Marat’s life, during his revolutionary phase. Perhaps he went to England, perhaps not. But it is impossible to say for certain. The novel Possession, by A.S. Byatt, revolves around the filling in of this kind of historical hole, using lost correspondence. The students of literature and biography are detectives unraveling a mystery. In Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine series, we are only given the correspondence between two people, and we get to unravel the mystery ourselves, and generate our own stories for these two people.
But in the future, a biographer could reconstruct my trajectory using credit card histories — I bought my ticket to Rio using a Citibank card, I made ATM withdrawals at certain times. A biography made up of merchantile activities would be mundane indeed, but then there will be hundreds of tourist photos, correspondence (email of course, who writes letters these days?), home videos. Will there be real mysteries left? Or will the nature of the mystery just change from being “what happened on the night of…?”
I also saw Return of the King, subtitled in Portuguese. There was lots of chatting towards the end of the movie in the crowd, obnoxious guys insinuating that Frodo and Sam were gay lovers, giggling, etc. Homophobia knows no language barrier. But the medium popcorn/soda combo was R$6.50, which is about US$2.50. Hell, a can of lager here is less than a dollar, as was the caipirinha I had on the beach at 1 AM.
One thing that separates the US from all other countries that I’ve been to is that in the US they rarely name streets after a musicians/artists/authors/architects. And when they do, it’s always some tiny street like Mies Van Der Rohe in Chicago. When Antonio Carlos Jobim died, the city of Rio renamed various streets after him, eventually settling on a park. I’m still waiting for Jimi Hendrix Boulevard…
I looked through the comments on this excuse for a blog, and noticed that spammers have taken to auto-spamming blog entries. For the example on mine, see the entry I want to axé you a question. I guess Radiohead inspires penis growth advertisements. I would delete them, but it is awfully amusing that there are two comments made in December on a post from June. Who is going to read that far back? Me, I guess.
Yesterday afternoon I went to the hippy-feira, a sort of artisan street fair that happens every Sunday in Ipanema. Apparently it used to be real hippies, but now it’s hippies with cellphones and distribution systems. Ram’s sister Lakshmi helped me negotiate some good deals, since the rule there is to haggle, and as I noted before, I should have learned more Portuguese.
Later we went to a free concert on the Copacabana beach — the first act was Maria Rita, and she was three shades of enh. The second act was Lenini, which makes one thing of some sort of opera guy, but in fact was more rockin’ out. Hard to place him in terms of American music, but he veered near Blues Traveler, Spacehog, and RHCP at times. Not too close, but in a nebulous middle ground between the three. The metropolitan bus systems in Brazil are cooler than the US. There’s a second guy who sits in the bus and gives change (within reason), so the driver doesn’t have to be responsible for fare collection as well. Much smarter than in Boston, where they used to get pissed off at you for not having exact change all the time.
So my inability to detect racism in Brazil was explained by Ram, who said that discrimination here is based on economic grounds, and less on skin color. But there is a correlation between the two. Some of the complexities of 19th century race are exemplified by the author Machado de Assis. Thanks to Dan Good for introducing me to him. The hosting site of that previous link is pretty cool in its own right. The Library of Latin America series has a wide range of information about 19th century Brazil, from history to literature to essays and commentary. All of Machado de Assis’s novels have a very informative essay at the front to put the novel in context. Well worth reading!
Yes, I have arrived in Rio! When I return, there will be pictures. I have even tanned a bit. Actually, people here assume I speak Portuguese, and I have managed to gain a rudimentary grasp of 3-4 phrases, including “I don’t speak Portuguese” (não falo portugues) and “one caipirinha please” (uma caipirinha, por favor). I think it’s that people here are all different colors, and the society seems much more homogenized than in the US. This is just my naïve interpretation though — perhaps racial divisions are still strong here, but it just doesn’t seem possible, given the physical appearance of the population.
I am here with my friend Ram (warning: in Portuguese), and staying with his family. It’s been a blast so far, and there’s still a whole week left. I’ve discovered a new kind of music that I like, called forró, but I can’t dance to it. Maybe I will take some classes while I’m here, or learn how to samba or something. I’m too much of a chicken when it comes to dancing.
On a side note, green coral is pretty awesome looking. And the ocean is really salty, a fact that I had somehow forgotten in the many years that have passed since I last went for a dip.
I am chickening out on the “hang gliding tour of Rio,” because (a) it’s kind of pricey, (b) I’m not sure I could handle it, and (c) my parents would probably freak out. I already run enough of a risk walking around Rio, given the insanity of the drivers here. And here I don’t have as many friends to take care of me. Or land on top of me. But no more morbid thoughts, I’m off to enjoy the sun.
An Ergodic Walk 