Salvador Day 3

July 29th
     Today we decided to explore the old city of Salvador, called the Pelourinho, which is located higher up a plateau on the peninsula. We had a larger group today as three more of our friends arrived in town for a few days, Roxanne, Paul (her boyfriend) and Molly. We all met up at Olivia, Molly and Daniel’s hostel which is only a few blocks over from ours and then caught a bus going to the old city/ciudade alta.
      The entire historic center is a UNESCO world heritage site and is one of the largest collections of baroque buildings in the Americas. The area itself is absolutely gorgeous and full of history, but it is also a major tourist destination and is therefore somewhere that you need to be alert for pickpockets and swindlers. Right as we got off the bus one such person approached us to give us “free” ribbon bracelets (that he had taken from the igreja do Bonfim which gives them out for free…). Angelika had been looking for one so she made a “donation” to pay for the bracelet, Daniel also got one but when he tried to pay the guy went crazy and grabbed all his money and started fighting with him saying that they owed him more. They guy was a pro swindler and also ordered coconut waters for random people walking by and then said that they owed him way more than the waters were worth, even when the passers-by did not take them and tried to walk away. Daniel got his money back, but the experience (common to many areas where tourism is a central livelihood and one that is not evenly shared by the inhabitants) really opened our eyes to the realities of tourism in Salvador where the culture of the city is very commodified for tourists.
      The historic center is really very gorgeous and definetly worth the visit. It has multiple beautiful cathedrals, cobblestone streets, and rows and rows of brightly colored baroque homes and buildings that are now stores and galleries. We also visited the Praça da Se which was especially nice because they still had decorations up from the festa Juninas. While we were wandering around the streets we saw several women who were dressed up as baianas, a traditional costume for street vendors of African descent in the city. We also saw the crazy swindler from the bus stop trying to get money from other visitors by giving them directions (or yelling it at them whether they had asked for help or not) and then claiming that they owed him. Once we got to a street which had a larger security presence he scampered off...
       We toured a large and beautiful, but forgotten, cathedral and rectory from the 17th century on one of the side streets that was very interesting. It is one of the cathedrals which sponsors the holy festivals and the parades of religious icons through the streets. The church is in possession of some of very old and important religious icons for these festivals. The most important is a wood carving of Jesus at the crucifixion, which uses hundreds of rubies as blood drops and leads the religious parade on Good Friday as part of the Easter celebrations. The church also featured some amazing frescos and an original division of space within the rectory. It was an interesting building, but it had a sort of abandoned feel to it.
      After we toured the church we decided to get lunch together at a vegan restaurant we had passed on one of the side streets. For a country that does not seem to have many healthy options for people who eat out, they actually had really good vegan food! This restaurant was a little hole-in-the-wall place that had a set menu for every day with a few tables in a hippy back room overlooking the ciudade baixo and the ocean. It was a perfect place to eat lunch. It was calm, a great value (6 dollars for a ton of food and a fresh juice!) and it was cool on a hot and busy day. After lunch we decided that since it was so nice and sunny out we would head back towards our hostels and change into our swim suits to hit the beach.
       We decided to change and meet back up at three so we could walk to the second good beach near us called Porto da Barra (on the right side of the lighthouse). The beach was only a few blocks from our hostel and it was a nice place to spend the afternoon, but, honestly, I think I liked the beach, Forol da Barra (left side of the lighthouse), that we went to on Saturday better. Porto da Barra was dramatic in that it directly faced the sunset, but it was also smaller and a bit pushier than the other beach. However, we were there to enjoy it at sunset, its best time! We hung out on the beach and played in the waves until the sun went down and then we returned to our hostels to clean up for dinner.
      We decided to go to a different restaurant to get more moqueca. We ordered two moquecas of shrimp and one of fish as well as fried manioc and sangria! It was a delicious meal. As we were leaving we realized once again that the pattern here seems to be a long, late dinner and then straight home. Most of the restaurants and bars we passed along the way back were already shutting down at 10:00. It’s a very different beach atmosphere here than in Rio or Sao Paulo!

Houses in the Pelourhino

A cobblestone street (a baiana was peeking out!)

Leftover Festa Junina decorations

Frescos in the church

The Christ icon that is uses in the Good Friday celebrations

Salvador Day 2

July 28th

     Today everyone decided to sleep in a bit, but Angelika and I decided to make sure that we got up in time to go to breakfast. Our hostel, Open House Barra, has a really fabulous breakfast! We got two fruits each, mango and mamao, toast with guava jam, fresh juice, coffee and homemade oat pancakes. It was heaven after my São Paulo breakfast, and we spent time savoring it before meeting up with Olivia (Daniel slept in) to go to the beach. Since it was a Sunday, Porto da Barra, the smaller beach (on the right side of the point) was packed with locals trying to get some sun. We decided to go on the beach on the left side of the lighthouse, called Farol da Barra, which was really nice (minus the sunset views) and wider with hardly any people on it. We sat near the lighthouse and enjoyed the general splendor of the dramatic water color, rocky tide pools and historic surroundings while we lounged in the sun.

      We only changed spots once during the day and, as is typical of Brazil, we did not need to get to up to find anything, it all came to us. It was not in the same quantities and varieties as in Rio, but I was able to get a veggie avocado sandwich, chips and an agua de coco! In the afternoon Daniel wandered out to the beach and we were also able to meet up with Chelsea and Rebecca who are in our program at Vanderbilt with us! 

It was great to get together and exchange stories, as they have also been doing a summer language program here in Salvador, but with different experiences and results than we have had in São Paulo. I think Salvador is a much harder city to do a study abroad in because, although it is large, it is not very cosmopolitan and the central areas and beaches are extremely touristy. The tourism industry here has complicated their ability to be accepted and involved with Brazilian culture in Salvador (as parts of the culture here are produced for the tourism industry), and it has also led to more inter-cultural problems between them and the service industry (who is often frustrated by tourists). The city here also shuts down fairly early, by around 10 almost everyone has gone home. 

       As the sun started to go down Daniel, Angelika and I walked up to the light house and climbed up the grass hill to watch the sun set. After the sun went down we walked back to our hostels to take showers and then go to dinner at a nearby restaurant. Daniel and Angelika got a local shrimp moqueca (stew) and Olivia and I opted for the more simple beans, rice and meat option. However, we all decided to go in together on desert and we ordered a volcano cake, a flan, and ice cream and brownie to share between the four of us! 

Farol da Barra

Olivia and I 

The historic lighthouse on the point of Barra

The view overlooking the sea at sunset!

Salvador Day 1

July 27th
       Today was the first day of our vacation in Salvador de Bahia! Angelika and I had a flight out of the smallest of São Paulo’s three airports at 3:15. We decided to get to the airport fairly early since we were not familiar with the Brazilian airport regulations and line wait times. Angelika took a cab over to my apartment where there was a regular city bus that left from Nove de Julho and went straight passed the airport. We left at 11:50 and had a short wait, 10 min, for the bus to arrive and it was a super easy ride to the airport (thank goodness…I was due some good transit luck!). The money taker on the bus was able to show us the right stop and all we had to do was walk on the pedestrian bridge to get to the right side of the road. From the outside the airport looks a bit Podunk. However, on the inside it had all the essentials and it was actually super efficient, with almost no lines to get our boarding passes and check our bags! Once we were in we still had plenty of time before our flight so we did a quick ATM run and then got lunch and a sweet snack at a bakery on the mini-concourse. Alessandra had sweetly made me a lunch before I left so I just invested in a treat that looked strikingly similar to the Arenal Lava cake that I loved in Costa Rica. It was not exactly the same but it was still pretty good!
       Once we passed through security (again no line!) we waited at our gate for another hour before our flight was ready to board. Since it was a small airport we actually took a bust to the plane and then walked on board. Our flight was only about 2 hours and I was able to nap most of the time. We arrived in Salvador at 5:15 and were able to collect our bags and get to the buses to head towards our hostel in Barra. It took us a min to find the bus stop as they were not listed on any of the signs in the airport, but we asked the nice police officers where they were and they pointed us in the right direction and said that they were across the road on the right. We took that to mean all the way across the road which put us in the parking deck. While we were walking around looking lost, a guy working in one of the food stands stopped us and put us back on the median between the two roads to catch the bus.
     Once we finally made it to the right place, we did not have too long of a wait before the local bus picked us up and we road down the coast for about 40 min to arrive (the airport is a good ways out of the main point)…near our hostel. We got off the bus at the right location but since it was getting dark and we had luggage we caught a cab with the help of a valet parker to go the remaining few blocks to our hostel. The hostel is located on a small street so that our cab driver did not recognize so we had to make a few circles looking for the road before we found it. Our hostel is a very interesting place. It is in an old house that has been converted into a small hostel that is run by a group of artists as a co-op to support their NGO which produces documentaries on cultural movements in Brazil.
      Once we were settled we met up with Olivia and Daniel, who were staying in a hostel two blocks away, for dinner at a local restaurant. We kept it simple and just had a late dinner and then came back to our hostel to chat with the other patrons and take advantage of the movie room before going to bed.

Transit Misadventures

July 26th
       Today I slept in since we did not have classes. I had originally planned on going to do a guided tour at the teatro municipal, but I realized that I really needed more time to pack and get my things in order for our trip to Salvador the following day.  In the afternoon I made plans to meet up with Mari and Molly at Shopping Bourbon to see Monsters University. To get there you take the 875H-10 bus from Paulista that goes down Sumare, there are also an 875P-10 and an 875M-10 that go down the same road but to different places. Normally, the 875H-10 comes by every 10-15 min, however, today I waited 45 min for the first bus to come. It turns out that the other bus was broken, so by the time is reached our stop it was already packed with people who had backed up the line waiting, but I was determined to get on the bus and make it to the movies! I teamed up with a nice guy who normally takes the route and asked him to help me find the right stop (since I got off at the wrong one the last time that I tried to get to Shopping Bourbon). I became fast friends with many people on the bus since we were in such close quarters. We had to gang up and fight with the bus driver to get him to quit stopping at all of the stops since there was no way that anyone else was going to fit.
       Once we were finally on our way and got on to Sumare, the nice guy, a girl and I all started to work our way through the people to get to the scanner/turnstile and get through to the back of the bus where the door to get off was. It took a good five stops to get the 10 feet from the front of the bus to the turnstile, and once I got there I got separated from my guides so I asked people on the back of the bus if they were going to shopping Bourbon and I was overwhelmed by four people all trying to give me direction at once. It basically became a team effort to get the lost American girl off at the right stop, but it was a success and I said goodbye to all my new friends from the steps of Shopping Bourbon!
      Once inside I was able to quickly meet up with Molly and Mari at the theater and we got tickets to the movie before it sold out. This time we got popcorn (the do not do buttered/salted popcorn here, you can do sweet or plain and then salt it yourself) and waited outside of our theater. The tickets this time were more affordable because we talked the ticket lady into accepting our US student IDs, even without expiration dates, (to get the half off the regular price!) and we only paid us 7.50 for a 3D movie. The movie itself was dubbed, but they got good voice actors who were able to fit the roles of the characters well and it was not much of an issue for me aesthetically. Granted it was a children’s movie, but Molly and I were both pleased with how well we understood all of the dialogue and jokes in the movie, it was so much easier than the comedy we watched a few weeks ago!
      After the movie we decided to get a quick dinner at the por quilo place (Mari was not sneezed on this time thank goodness!) and we experimented with McFlurries afterwards (we had to see if they were the same you know, for scientific reasons…) Mari and I got a simple soft serve cones in a normal portion/non-American size for .75 cents. Molly went all out and tried the McFlurry with minibis (Bis is a popular chocolate wafer candy here, so yummy!) which was also good and rationally sized. We called it an early night and Mari’s mom offered to drive us all home.
      We made it to Molly’s house fine but when we headed towards Paulista the traffic slowed to almost a stop. It took us almost an hour to get to MASP, and it is normally a 10 min drive at that time of night (9:30). It turns out that there was a small, but destructive protest on Paulista that was held by about 30 members of the radical anti-government anarchist group. They vandalized and almost destroyed about five of the banks on Paulista and the mobile police unit trailer. All the broken glass in the road was the reason that Paulista had been closed down, causing the traffic backups. Overall this type of demonstration has been very rare and there did not seem to be any clear objective to the events. On the bright side, I did finally get a picture of the armored truck of the Tropas de Choque!

Farewells and Forro

July 25th
Day three: (the worst) of the arctic chill. Today was our last day of classes. We spent our Portuguese class talking about different types of regional food in Brazil that we would be trying later that night as a part of our final PUC dinner at a restaurant called Minas, a Brazilian buffet that specialized in foods from the interior of Minas Gerais. After we were sufficiently hungry we broke early for lunch. Allison and I had decided that we would go back to the federal police today to pay our fines so that we would not have any future problems when we tried to come back into Brazil. So, during our long lunch break we went back to the bank in PUC to pay our fines. It was another quick trip (with unnecessary restrictions of space and security) to pay more money to the federal police, and in the bank we ran into Molly and Justin doing the same thing and we made plans to return together after our final culture class. For lunch we decided to do something different and went to a por quilo place that was on the same block as the campus which was very good, but like most buildings in São Paulo, does not have a strict division between the indoors and the outdoors (no insulation, windows that you do not close) so it was absolutely freezing in there…
In our final afternoon culture class we had a concluding discussion which wrapped up all of the things we had seen and discussed in the past six weeks. It was bitter sweet to be in the last class. It was really nice to have a last opportunity to talk with everyone and with Jeff, but it was also sad to think that I will not see most of these people in the future since we all live in different parts of the US.
After our final class Allison, Justin, Molly and I all got back on the bus and took another 30 min ride to the Federal Police headquarters to turn in our paperwork and have our fines removed from our passports. We were able to go directly up to the fourth floor after we checked in with the front desk. This time when we arrived in the little fines room it was packed with people who had been there for hours (the length of the process varies a lot depending on the day of the week). One of those trapped in the little bureaucratic torture room was Daniel. Yesterday Daniel had forgotten his original passport but went home to get it and then met back up with us at the police station. However, after he finally got into the interview he realized that he had lost his original form that the consulate in the US gave him to give to the federal police, and they do not accept copies, so he had to go home and come back the next day. When we ran in to him today he had been at the federal police for five hours…The immigration officer (king of the holding pen) remembered us and our dancing antics from the day before and seemed genuinely happy to help us. Since we were just paying the fine and not waiting to get anything processed we only had to wait 15 min and then we were able to leave. Unfortunately, we had to leave Daniel there to wait.
We took the same route back as we had yesterday, bus to metro to metro, and we tried to minimize the time we spent outside as it was cold and rainy, it was a triple layer day. To reward/cheer ourselves up after our second federal police visit Allison and I stopped by our local bakery and got éclairs then went home to bundle up more and take a nap before meeting our Portuguese professors for dinner at the restaurant Minas in Jardims.
Dinner was a really fun experience. The restaurant was really nice and had a wide variety of foods from different parts of Brazil. I attempted to try as many foods as possible so I only took a bite of each item. That was definitely the way to go since the foods were all delicious and so different from one another. The restaurant also had a selection of cachaças made in Minas for us to try, and really great deserts (dark chocolate fondue with Brazilian fruits!). At the end of the dinner the professors gave us certificates for completing our Portuguese classes and wished us well with our future studies.  The dinner was a really nice send off, but the only downside was that we were not all sitting together so we you could not really talk to everyone before people began to split up and head home. Most of our group was leaving the next day to go back to the US, although a few of us would be staying longer and traveling (yay Salvador!).
        As part of our last night out in São Paulo a group of us decided to go forro dancing again. We checked the website and it said that they would open at 10 and have the live band on at 11, so a group of us decided to go; Isaiah, Allison, Elliott, Molly, Roxanne and her boyfriend, Christa, Simon, Daniel, and I. It turns out that we do not have good luck with this place, last time we were late, and this time we were early. We got there about 10:30 and we were part of the first wave of entrants. We also found out once we were inside that the band would probably not go on till 12:30 or 1:00, but we decided to make the best of it and we got some tables and vinho quente and chatted. After some couples started to fill the floor we began to work on our dance skills. I have decided that in forro there is no standard or regularized dance steps, everyone has their own style, and once you think you have got a handle on the steps and rhythm you change partners and the next one dances with different steps.  However, I think that overall our group improved in their dancing skills, and it was also fun to watch the really good dancers float around the floor. The band came on about 1:00 and we stayed for another 40 min before sharing a taxi home.

THE Policia Federal

July 24th
        Day two of the Arctic Chill…Today we finished up the last of our Portuguese presentations and reviewed our exams and answered any lingering grammatical questions we had as this was our last functional Portuguese class of the program. We only had a short break for lunch (I got yakisoba) since our final culture class was meeting at 1:00 in an attempt to get all of our 3 min paper presentations in before the majority of our group (me included) left to go to the Policia Federal. The presentations were fun and went by really fast as our professor was enforcing the 3 min rule to a T. I talked about my paper topic which is looking at nature in the city in the form of the city parks. I will be researching the history of the parks (why they were put in that location and designed by whom) to better understand who the intended users of these parks were and what forms and representations of nature and culture are acceptable in these spaces.
     We finished our presentations right on time and everyone (except Angelika and Naomi, who’s appointments were last week, and Aileisha and Roxanne who went rouge (with a better outcomes)) met up at the international office so that Herbert (our coordinator) and Joao (international office employee) could take us to the Federal Police department via bus to register as foreign students studying in the country; on the second to last day of our program…The police headquarters is in Lapa, about a 10 min walk to a 30 min bus ride from PUC. The building is tall, grey and modern in appearance. Inside a visitor must walk though security and then give their ids to the waiting receptionists to register who has entered the building and if they are a walk in or an appointment. Our whole group had appointments (arranged by Herbert) and we went straight up to the third floor where a bank of about 30 women at desks (I think they must only employ women there, except for the security guards and the two immigration officers we met, there were no men employees) were waiting to do our interviews to get our paperwork filed. The setup is very similar to the DMV, except that in Brazil personal relationships and the temperament of the person you work with have much stronger effects on the success of your petition.
      Since our entire group had appointments we were able to walk almost directly back to the interview desks to get our paperwork checked. This was the point where the situation got a little tense and frustrating…My lady was friendly, but once she in-put my information she told me that I had a multa, or a fine to pay, since I was over my 30 day grace period for registration with the police. I told her that my appointment had been made weeks ago and she said that it did not matter, and that their website noted that if your computer generated appointment is after your expiration date that you are supposed to do a walk in appointment, and that July is their busy season. She called Herbert over and told him the same thing and then he threw us all under the bus by saying, ‘I know, they all have fines.’ My lady’s supervisor then immediately located everyone in our group and gave everyone a fine (if we had not been identified together at least some of us might have gotten through like Angelika did when she and Naomi went last week, because it is all up to the mood and temperament of your person with regards to if the fine is enforced.
       However, once we had all been identified there was nothing we could do and we all got fines. Once we got out of the interview process we were all given a number and told to wait for that number to be called so that we could go get finger printed. While we waited resentment against Herbert grew, because he made our appointments past our 30 days and told us that it would be ok, even though he knew that it was a gamble and that we could have all done walk-in appointments weeks ago. (he also screwed over Aileisha who decided to come on her own (because her PUC appointment was set for the day she left town) by not telling her that he had some extra paperwork that she needed for the appointment, so when she got there they declined her interview and sent her to the bank to buy a new form for 30 dollars.)
     More confusion erupted when the finger printing process began and Olivia got her passport handed back to her while they kept the others. It turned out that somewhere in walking the passport over to the finger printing room her fine notation fell off so they forgot to charge her. At this point our group had caused enough trouble to get the immigration officer to come out of his office to see what the fuss was about and he began to argue with Herbert over the fees. Honestly, the people who worked there were relatively efficient and were just doing their job, the reason it took so long was because Herbert had caused problems and tried to mess with the system, and the immigration officer was very annoyed with Herbert’s behavior. One our group got moving again I finally got called to go into the finger printing room where they took my picture and got two finger prints of each finger, they were very thorough.
     After everyone had been finger printed we all went up to the fourth floor with the immigration officer, via their network of back doors and tunnels (normally for transporting the documents to the various offices), to the multas office where another immigration officer and two women were calculating our fines; 8.00 reais for each day we were over our 30 day limit. This room was another long wait as the calculated the fines and drew up the paperwork. The frustration with the whole process and anger at Herbert had worn us all out and we were acting pretty silly by this point, someone was playing music on their iphone and we were dancing around the little room. I am pretty sure that this endeared us to the, frankly jovial, immigration officer. By some stroke of luck my fine was the first one processed (by this point it is about 6:00 and we got there at 3:00) only I did not understand my name when he called it. Caitlin is a very hard name to pronounce her, and I had no idea that he was calling me until I heard ‘Rose-y Pat-to’ but he had to call it a good 3 or 4 times before I even thought it was me. My fee was 90.00 reais and it had to be paid by money order and brought back to the federal police the next day for them to remove the ‘fine’ stamp in my passport. I waited around for the next three people to get their passports (Allison, Elliott and Justin), and we decided to go ahead and leave as we were also having our Tulane final dinner that night at a Chinese restaurant (where they make their own noodles) as a conclusion for the Tulane portion of our program.
     We had originally intended to go back to the apartment and drop off our passport and backpacks before going to dinner in Liberdade, but by the time we had taken the bus to the metro it was already 7:00 (the time that the dinner was supposed to begin) so we just took our bags and went straight to dinner. Or tried to… it turns out that we could not remember the name of the restaurant (we had planned on looking it up from our email’s at our apartment when we dropped our bags off)  and we did not know the exact street, just that it was in the vicinity of the Chopperia Liberdade. After walking down two blocks on either side of the Chpoperia, we stopped at a Lunchonete to ask for directions, the only problem was we did not know the address or name of the restaurant (only that it started with an R) so we asked them if they knew of any Chinese resturants that made noodles nearby. As we were in the Japanese immigrant neighborhood they asked us if we were sure it was Chinese, we said yes and that it started with an ‘R’ they said the only one they knew of was called Massa Chinesa. We decided to walk by there anyways and it actually turned out to be the right restaurant! Our professor had given us the Chinese name, but all the Portuguese speakers call it Massa Chinesa (Chinese noodles).
      When we arrived we ended up being one of the first people there outside of our professor and Roxanne, even the other lucky people; Victoria, Isabel and Simon (who had gotten the cheaper and hassle free tourist visas) were not there yet. Sitting at a table behind us was a funny and talkative older Japanese immigrant lady who was convinced that we were all from the south of Brazil. As people began trickling in to the restaurant we began ordering food. I am not really sure what all of the dishes we got were but they were delicious! I think the dumplings were my favorite, this is a recent immigrant run restaurant and all the food is made in house and is very fresh. They even have a little window where you can watch the noodles (that you are about to eat) being made. It was so neat! And I immediately thought that it was ironic that I had seen this noodle making skill before in a video that Garrett had sent Devon from his study abroad in China!
After we were completely stuffed with Chinese food several of us decided to do a Karaoke repeat night as we were only a block and a half from the Chopperia Liberdade. Roxanne, Melissa, Elliott, Andrew, Allison, Molly, Naomi, Aileisha and I all sang/danced our hearts out for the rest of the night!

The Pinacoteca and the Memorial da Resistencia

July 23rd
Today our Portuguese class continued our presentations. I did mine today, and I think it went pretty well, although it is hard to say since we never got a rubric or syllabus. Afterwards we did some more advanced work with the future subjunctive which was pretty frustrating for most people in the class (since the whole concept is strictly Portuguese and does not really have an equivalent in Spanish or English). For lunch we ate at the street feira by the school, today has been the coldest day that we have had in São Paulo thus far and rainy, but the pastel vendors were out and having a warm savory pastry to eat really made up for the chill! After lunch Aileisha, Angelika and I walked to the Barra Funda metro/train station to make our way to Luz and the front of the Museu da Lingua Portuguesa to begin our walk through the immigrant neighborhood of Bom Retiro which was where the movie we saw yesterday was filmed. We stopped by several of the landmarks in the film, Parque da Luz, the Yiddish theater, and an old Hungarian Jewish synagogue. The neighborhood has passed though many phases of immigration, Arab, Jewish, Korean, and now Bolivian and Peruvian and it was interesting to see the physical evidence of these groups on the landscapes and names of buildings. Today, the area is known for its small clothing factories and fabric stores, and the area is where most stores in other areas of São Paulo and Brazil come to buy stock for their stores (marking up prices along the way). For example, I saw dresses and blouses in the shop windows that I have seen on Paulista for three times as much.
      At the end of our walk we went to the Memorial da Resistencia de São Paulo which is partially located in the old secret police detention center where leftists and anti-government organizers were brought during the dictatorship. However, we discussed how the use of the building (only half is the memorial, the other part is a regular art museum) and the presentation of the information really reflects the Brazilian attitude towards the military period and the abuses committed under it; that it is better left forgotten. Brazil has only in the last five years set up a truth commission to really address the political violence and oppression that occurred, and this has been an unpopular move in some areas of the political arena.
       The museum itself is bright open and refurbished. You feel as if you are walking into a chic apartment building or office space. The memorial is also small, with two information rooms about the building’s history and technological surveillance and another with a timeline of ‘memory’ (not history) of repression and resistance from the 1890s on wards. Then you can walk into three brightly lit and refurbished cells (with more of a boutique hostel feel) that fail to give the viewer an accurate sense of what it would be like to be living in a dark cell for months with maybe 10 other people, and to have people coming and going from interrogation and torture sessions. We also learned that due to issues of formalized/official space and the functioning military justice system (in which if a person got their case before the military courts and proved that they had been tortured they would be let go since torture was illegal in Brazil), most of the violent tortures took place across the street from the headquarters in what is today a residential apartment building.
     After we left the Memorial, we walked back towards the Luz train station where most of our group left to return home, while a few of us (Andrew, Jenike, Molly, Genevieve and I) stayed to go to the Pinacoteca which is a really neat, large art museum. The museum houses a wide range of art, from historical portraits and landscapes to modern sculpture and installations all in a really neat old building. We spent about two hours wandering around the museum before it closed and saw a lot of really great work by Brazilian artists and a visiting exposition of 16th century Chinese paintings. The museum really was eclectic and had something for every type of art lover. After the museum closed our group split up and went home to warm up from the cold rain, as the museum did not have heating so we were a bit chilled!

The cell in the Memorial da Resistencia

This is a picture of arrests from the invasion of PUC by the military police for housing leftist professors and student organizations

A sculpture from the museum

A contemporary Brazilian artist

The Luz train station at night

Movie Mondays

July 22nd
Today in our Portuguese class we found out, yet again, that there had been a communication failure between our program and PUC when our professor informed us that we would be starting our final 10 min presentations since there were three days left in class. Now, we knew about the presentation days, but we had been counting from a different day than the professors (our Tulane syllabus said that the final lunch would be on Friday, while the Portuguese professors had it scheduled for Thursday). Needless to say we were a bit surprised…but the presentations were very informal (no power point or standing up in front of the class) and four brave souls volunteered to go yesterday, Jenike, Roxanne, Andrew, and Elliott each talking about their research interests. After the presentations we worked on our understanding of the Future Subjunctive (a grammatical beast in my opinion) and then went to lunch. At lunch I learned about more of the potential hassles to get our paperwork with the federal police straightened out…Naomi had done hers last week and was charged an extra fine of 8.00 reais a day that she was over her 30 day limit (the registration grace period) even though her appointment for that day (made by PUC) was set several weeks ago.  However, Angelika was not charged the fine; apparently it is completely up to the interviewer’s mood to decide if they charge the fine or not. A fun Brazilian bureaucratic experience to look forward to on Wednesday when the rest of our group descends on the federal police.
After lunch our afternoon cultural class met up in the small library auditorium room to watch a 2006 Brazilian movie, nominated for best foreign film, called “O Ano em que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias” or “The Year my Parents Went on Vacation.” Under the military dictatorship in Brazil ‘going on vacation’ was a euphemism for members of the left or anti-military movements who were forced underground. In the story, the parents who are anti-government organizers, are forced underground, but first they drop their eight year old son off at his grandfather’s building in São Paulo. However, the parents do not know that just that day the grandfather has had a heart attack and died, so their son is left to be cared for by the grandfather’s Jewish immigrant community until his parents return. I will not say anymore and spoil the story, but it is really good and not just a depressing (but usually rightfully so) Latin American dictatorship movie.
After the movie ended, Allison and I rushed right next door to get to the bank before it closed at 4:00 so that we could get our money orders for our federal police visit on Wednesday. We were lucky and made it in just before the bank doors were closed to new customers. It was a somewhat complicated effort to get into the bank as you are not allowed to carry in bags of any kind and must stow them in a locker outside the bank (you even have to put your electronics and papers or keys into a little clear double sided box in the wall before you can go into the revolving security door. However, there was only one locker left and I was actually able to successfully negotiate with the security guards to let me bring my bag through the revolving security doors and leave it in a corner while I went to the clerk. Luckily, since it was so late in the day, there was no line, and I was able to get my money orders quickly and pleasantly I was even able to make bank small-talk with the teller! (literally the ‘money order’ was the clerk taking my money and printing some numbers on the paper for my request for the police and returning it to me). To celebrate our Brazilian banking success, Allison and I stopped by our acai/vitamina place on the way home, for one last cold treat before the cold front moved in later on in the evening.

Feiras and Forro

July 21st
This morning Allison and I slept in before packing up and heading out for our shopping morning/lunch, the Sunday special. We met up with Angelika and Olivia under the MASP museum to explore the antique fair there as well as the artisan fair across the street and another local market further down in Brigadeiro. I had much more luck at this feira than at last weekends! The vendors had such cool things, and I am continually surprised that such valuable watches, jewelry, art and figurines are out in the open in booths! After hourly checking out the vendors we crossed the street to look at the more kitschy market that consisted of a lot of handmade goods and food stalls. I had to stop a the sweets vendor and get some chocolate covered strawberries! I’m really going to miss the easy access to chocolate covered strawberries once I am back in the US.
      Storm clouds rolled in about 3:00 and we decided to get some late lunch at a lanchonete and wait to see if it passed over (we did not want to repeat Friday’s rain soaked excursion up Paulista on our way to the next market). I got a simple chicken/egg sandwich and a vitamina. I am not entirely sure what the vitamina is, but it’s tasty! I’m pretty sure that it consists of fruit, milk, vitamin powders, and ice all blended together. It is most likely not healthy, but leave it to the Brazilians to name what is essentially a smoothie/shake into a healthy sounding beverage. After lunch we decided to skip out on the third market since we had all cleaned up so good and we had work to do for our final projects that we would be presenting this week. I decided to walk around for a bit more and check out the Marisa store (brazil’s version of Forever 21) that we pass everyday on Paulista (it is interesting to note that there are about 4 on Paulista alone..). The store turned out to be somewhat bland and still too expensive to be tempting. I also decided to walk around the Parque Trianon to get some pictures and experiences recorded for my final paper for my Brazilian culture class which will examine city parks and representations of nature in the city. While I was walking around the park I began to hear music and sure enough as I turned the corner I stumbled upon one a group of wandering troubadours of the catholic church (part of the celebrations for world youth day this week). The group was very interesting (the were international visitors with the event’s Brazilian guides) and the music/singers were really pretty good, they attracted the attention of lots of people in the park, one woman commented to me that it was nice to see young people so dedicated to something important.
        After I arrived back at the apartment I worked on research for my final paper for several hours before Allsion and I left to meet Daniel and Isaiah for Forro dancing! Forro, pronounced fo-ho, is a type of country dance (like zydeco) that is popular in the northeast of Brazil. The last time that I was in Brazil, in the northeast in Recife, we danced forro a lot, and it was super fun so I was looking forward to this night. We arrived a bit late, thank you google maps, but we jumped right in…and I quickly found out that my forro skills had been significantly dependent on the fact that my partners were all experts. Although we really did not know what we were doing Daniel and I decided to watch dancers and just attempt to copy what they were doing, and with the help of a sympathetic bystander, we were actually doing pretty well! The live music was good and it was fun to act ridiculous and just try to dance the best we could without caring how silly we looked. Since it was a Sunday the place closed early, and since the evening rains had come back, Allison, Daniel and I split a cab home.

On the bridge between the two preserved sections of the Atlantic forest in Parque Trianon

The European styled gardens on the corner of Parque Trianon

The Catholic troubadours singing in the park.

Samba Saturdays and Catholic Cemeteries

July 20th
       Today both Allison and I slept in till about 10:30. We decided not to rush the morning and set our first plans of the day for getting lunch with some of the Perdizes group (Isaiah, Olivia, Angelika and Tanya) at a Samba restaurant that had an all-day Saturday feijoada and live samba special. We planned to meet there at one, as their website advertised a special price to people who came before 2 which included food, the music cover and a drink. However, once we arrived we realized that there had been a bit of misinformation on the website because the restaurant did not open till 1:30 and the live music did not begin until 3:00 but since we were all there and hungry we decided to try it anyways, and the buffet was pretty good, although we were the only people in the restaurant until about 3:00. We made it fun and it worked for our group, but it was a bit of a disappointment. Close to 3:00 Christa and Simon joined us and we decided to wait and see if the music would begin soon. Unfortunately, the band still had to put all of their instruments together and do the sound checks, so the music did not begin until around 3:40. At this point there were several other groups in the restaurant and it became livelier. There was one really cute little girl at the table next to us who was dancing her version of a little samba the entire time. She also came over to our table and hammed it up, trying to get our attention. Around 5:00 our group decided to head back to our apartments.
      Since there was still light out I decided to stop by one of the old Catholic cemeteries (Cemitario Municipal) that we pass on our way to school every day on the bus. The light was perfect and I got some really cool pictures of the extremely ornate mausoleums and monuments in the cemetery. It was a very peaceful place, once you were though the gates the noises from the street just faded away and allowed for peace of mind. There were a lot of people in the cemetery visiting family plots, strolling and enjoying the beautiful sunset. The cemetery closed at 6:00 and I got back on the bus headed toward Paulista, and my apartment, with a pit stop at the Pão de Azucar to get some groceries. Later on tonight our group is meeting up in Vila Madalena to bar hop though the hipster neighborhood.
     Our group, Angelika, Isaiah, Olivia, Victoria, Isabel, Allison and I met up at a bar called Salve Jorge which has a cool atmosphere with great food. The only downside of the night was that the rains had rolled in so it was just messy. From Salve Jorge we walked to a place called the Matrix that specialized in alternative music. Allison and I decided to keep it an earlier night and we left the group to continue their bar hop.

A view of the cemetery down the hill

One of the gorgeous family mausoleums 

Excursion to Paulista?

July 19th
      Allison and I started our day off right by stopping into the Italian bakery right next to the bus stop to get coffee and split and éclair. While there we met up with several other members of our class, Elliott, Molly, Roxanne, and Tanya before walking down to PUC. Today we had our final written exam in Portuguese. So far we have taken three tests relating to our Portuguese class and all of them have been somewhat confusing and vague. Apparently, this is common in Brazilian teaching styles, the exams lack directions and are subjective in the types of answers that are considered correct. Mary, our Brazilian TA, said that our sections with directions such as ‘say this in another way’ or ‘answer like a Brazilian’ are not atypical and that multiple answers are considered acceptable based on the grader. I find this to be extremely frustrating coming from the American style of educational testing where the directions are all very clear and the answers are standardized or at least the question typically has a set right answer (and the only subjective answers are in short answer or essay form so that you have room to make your case). Anyways…after the exam we went to get a quick lunch before meeting up with our professor in Paraiso at the beginning of Paulista for our planned excursion walking up the Avenida. Aileisha, Mary and I all ate together and talked about how the program has gone and the interesting nature of being in a study abroad program with a group as large as ours is.
        Aileisha and I walked up to the bus stop on Cardoso to take the 175P all the way down to the beginning of Paulista to meet up with our group at the Catedral Ortodoxo. As the name implies, this is an Eastern Orthodox church which was founded by Syrian-Lebanese immigrants to Brazil after they began to have success in the growing business sector of São Paulo and relocated their neighborhood from the 25 de Março area in the Centro, towards Paulista. The church itself was gorgeous, the iconography and frescoes were so detailed and bright! The ceilings were triple domed and had beautiful ornate crystal chandeliers. We had a lot of time to explore the church and we were actually able to walk up to the choir loft and all the way up the bell tower since the doors were left open! The only downside was that there was not a great view from the tower. When we came back down (Daniel and I were exploring the roof) we spoke with our professor about immigration, relocation of immigrant communities once they become settled and begin to do well, and the perceptions of Arab and Jewish identities in Brazilian culture and politics.
      We left the church about 2:45, and it was starting to get chilly. Gone was the sunny heat wave of yesterday and this morning which had tricked me into wearing a light sweater and sandals, and in to not carrying and umbrella! The clouds were rolling in fast and I knew we would not make it back up Paulista before the sky opened up. And open up it did right as we arrived at our second stop, the Casa das Rosas, which was an old Coffee Barron’s house leftover from the era when Avenida Paulista was mansion row for the coffee and industrial elite. Today it is a cultural center and small art gallery that is free to the public. We went inside and explored (hoping that the rain might let up a bit) and looked at their current exhibit on modernist experimental art (Velocity, Beba Coca). We were also able to see some of the original rooms in the mansion that were preserved. The original bathroom was gorgeous; it was large and bright with beautiful period details in the marble and wood work. It is interesting to note that this house was built about the same time as the Casa Modernista. They are both paragons of drastically different aesthetics and use of space. The Casa das Rosas is much more traditional in its use of space, it is less utilitarian than the Casa Modernista, das Rosas had compartmentalized spaces on the first floor for entertaining guests, while space in the Casa Modernista was set up to be almost exclusively a private space for the family.
      The rain had refused to let up by the time we were leaving so we paired up with umbrella owners and walked out into the rain to get a few blocks down to our next stop which was the Itau Cultural center on the lower floors of their bank (like the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil). Since the tax laws here (re-written in the post-dictator era) encourage the sponsorship of public space and cultural activities as a tax break for businesses, many of the large Brazilian companies sponsor/own movie theaters, art galleries, and libraries. This Itau cultural center had several exhibits going on; the primary one was of the life and times of Mario de Andrade (one of the important Brazilian Modernists in the 1920s). I spent most of our time in the exhibit watching a 1920s period newsreel-type movie about ‘Parques Infantil’ which were a sort of a scientific type daycare/afterschool care that was supposed to improves children’s physical fitness, intelligence and moral behavior.
      It was still raining as we left the cultural center so we quickly set off down the Avenida to get to our final stop which was parquet Trinon (coincidentally located right next to everyone’s favorite Charme and my house!). We did not spend much time talking about the park, but discussed public monuments and the particular monument there to the image of the Bandeirante (or the pioneer hero) of the São Paulo interior that we had read about previously in class. Since our professor ‘conveniently’ ended our tour at his favorite bar only two blocks from his house, most of our group sat down to share beers and fried mandioca while waiting for the rain to stop. We only stayed for a little while, as we were all pretty damp, my sandals in particular took a beating and I felt like I was walking home in a permanent puddle.
       As soon as I got back I took a hot shower to warm up and rested before getting ready to meet back up with our group (at Charme again) so that we could walk down to a balada, called Sarajeva, on Rua Agusta that was going to have live music. I was a bit disappointed with how slow the music was to start, but the band was pretty good even though we did not really know any of the songs. At the end of the evening Daniel and I were able to actually walk back to our apartments since we only lived a few blocks further back down Paulista.

Me at the top of the bell tower

Part of the beautiful ceiling in the church

The main alter

Casa das Rosas

The Modernist Art exhibit inside das Rosas

Memorial de America Latina

July 18th
       Today was another scheduled double Portuguese class and we were set to do a make up for our missed trip to the Memorial de America Latina two weeks ago. In the morning we discussed the Memorial and reviewed for our test the next day. We got out of class a bit early so that we could grab a quick lunch before walking over to the Memorial at 1:00. Lunch was a quiet affair as I think our group is getting slowly drained since we know that we only have one week more in Brazil. We have also now seen the arrival of two newer groups; the other American CIEE group from two weeks ago and a new French group this week.
       At the end of lunch we all met on the back steps of PUC to walk down towards the Barra Funda metro station which is adjacent to the Memorial. The memorial was designed by Oscar Niemeyer and was envisioned as a place where the countries of Latin America could come together for meetings and conferences, as well as to commemorate and remember their shared Latin and Iberian heritage. It was very interesting to look at Latin American thought the eyes and of the Brazilian architect and current curators of the space. You enter the memorial by descending several steps into a lit tunnel which houses brass reliefs and carvings of the Indigenous people and the Contact experience. It was fascinating to me that the carvings were done by an Italian-Brazilian immigrant artist who was attempting to incorporate the Indigenous perspective, although he was not himself Indigenous. I found this a bit ironic, but when I asked the professor about it she gave a very Brazilian and illuminating response which reflects a deeply ingrained cultural idea. She said that it did not matter so much that he was not Indigenous since Brazil is made from mixed Indigenous and European blood, and therefore has a mixed culture which is presumably what the artist accessed to create his Indigenous perspective/interpretation of the contact. There was also writing on the steps which reinforced the idea that the Indigenous societies have been incorporated into modern Brazil, as the back of each step descending and ascending are covered with words and phrases that have passed from an Indigenous language to be incorporated into Brazilian Portuguese.
      Once you come out of the tunnel you are in the middle of a modern concrete plaza which houses the Memorial Library and meeting hall, as well as an archive and the memorial to Latin Americans who have lost their lives in the pursuit of liberty. The monument is in the form of a giant hand which has a red trail of blood from the palm that is in the loose shape of Latin America. Just beyond the memorial is the meeting hall which houses the great granite table envisioned for conferences of Latin American leaders. The large open building also is home to six floor-to-ceiling panels which document historical and social realities in Latin America, and a large mural behind the table which tells the story of one of the first martyrs for Latin American liberty. After we discussed the paintings we walked on the pedestrian bridge to the cultural center on the other side of the road (all part of the same memorial).There we took a tour which led us though the official story of Latin American mixed heritage. Interestingly the museum did not attempt to include all of the nations of Latin America, and actually made a choice to showcase the nations with large Indigenous populations (Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Guatemala) with a nod to Paraguay and Argentina.
        Our group had two tour guides take us through the exhibit and they both explain a bit about each country, they were particularly excited to find out that we had two people in our group who were actually born and raised in Mexico and they were eager to hear from Miguel an Naomi in that section relating to Day of the Dead. The museum had an interesting array of artifacts that really emphasized mestiçagem (or the mythic mixture) that created the unique Latin America. They also highlighted similarities between the regions in a very general way; there was an important attempt to promote regional unity and allegiance.
       After we finished the tour at the cultural center we were released for the rest of the afternoon. Since I did not have enough time to go and get my papers authorized at the bank for my appointment with the federal police next week I decided to join some of my fellow grad students (Jenike, Justin, Molly, Elliott, and Roxanne) at a local restaurant on Avenida Sumare to sit outside and enjoy the rest of our nice, and unseasonably warm day.

Its a bit hard to see but this is an example of the reliefs in the tunnel

The futuristic conference hall on the main plaza

The memorial 

One of the panels inside the conference hall

One of the outfits displayed in the cultural center

This display that highlights the patron Virgin of the nations of Latin America

Skye Bar

July 17th
Today was Angleika’s birthday.  Angelika had decided to spend the day in Vila Madalena with her roommate visiting the Beco de Batman and the Museu de Choque Cultural which are both non-traditional art museums. Meanwhile in Portuguese class we continued our work with pronouns and Brazilian short stories. In our afternoon culture class we had a guest speaker, another professor from Emory, a literature specialist who researches crime fiction in Latin America (mainly Brazil and Argentina). In preparation for her visit we read a short crime fiction story about the police finding and dealing with four decapitated bodies in an apartment building, it is called Cabecas de Seguna-Feira. After the police fail to solve the crime the story switches perspectives to that of the killer who is the elevator operator who sees these residents every day and becomes fed up with being ignored (or his dislikes particular bodily things about these people who he sees as disrespectful intruders into his space, aka the elevator). Our class discussion was very interesting and the story really got a lot of the students thinking about physical space, class, the importance of names (as the killer is never named) and power.
      At the end of our class Alison, Daniel and I went to a local Italian owned bakery to get a cake for Angelika’s birthday dinner that was going to take place that evening at a Rodizio de Pizza (endless pizza place) in Jardims. The Elite Bakery had many delicious looking cakes but we settled on one that was chocolate and strawberry with chocolate mousse layers! The hardest part of getting the cake was transporting it, as we had to take it on the bus all the way home to Paulista. We were quite the spectacle on the bus since we broke all of the normal Brazilian rules. 1. We ran after the bus (carrying the cake) to make it stop so we could get on, 2. Alison was out of money on her Bilhete and had to look around in her purse for change holding up the line, 3. We spoke loudly and in English as we discussed our excitement for the evening activities (while holding a cake and signing the box). We were ready to get off once the bus arrived at our stop! However, Alison had to make a pit stop in the Metro station to refill her Bilhete so that she would have money to get to dinner.
       Once we got back to the apartment and the cake was safely stowed in the refrigerator, we were able to take a 45 min break before we needed to get ready for dinner. Alison and I had a fun time getting dressed up since after dinner at the pizza place we were going to the chic Skye Bar which is located in Ibirapuera on top of the Hotel Unique. Running on Brazilian time we met up with a group coming from Perdizes (Molly, Justin, Olivia) and then walked the eight blocks to the restaurant where we were meeting Angelika and Isaiah. It was a bit of a long walk, but the pizza was worth it. The restaurant had a great selection of pizzas (rodizio style, where you just order whatever you want) for only 27,00Reais/15.00dollars! Our table ordered our drinks and then went to town on the pizza list! We got my favorite Portuguesa; as well as Veggie, Four Cheese, Supreme, Viennese, Margarita, and Broccoli; they were all so good! Post-Pizza we broke out the cake and sang happy birthday to Angelika. After we were finally stuffed we decided to cab over the few blocks to the Hotel Unique.
The hotel is gorgeous and ultra-modern. The building itself is in the shape of a giant U or a boat. Our taxis pulled right up to the front door where the doormen held the door for us to get our and directed us towards a waiting elevator. We all walked in as chic-ly as we could and the operator sent us up to the top floor. I think the Skye Bar is probably the chic-est place that I have ever gone out too. It is part restaurant and part lounge-bar with and open terrace and a reflecting pool. Since we were just there for birthday drinks we walked through the restaurant and spent most of our time on the terrace enjoying the view. And what a view it was! Unlike the Edificio Copan, the Skye Bra is lower and out of the center of São Paulo, so you are looking back onto the downtown and Paulista skyline at night. The lights were so beautiful and we even saw about seven stars (one of which was a shooting one!) which is pretty miraculous for São Paulo. We acted like tourists for the first 20 min we were there taking every photo combination possible (thanks to Molly’s amazing camera, which could actually capture the nightscape and people) before settling into a lounge bench as more of our friends arrived. Since there was no cover to get in, all of the drinks were very pricey, but it was a very chill scene and it was a one drink kind of place. I splurged and got a specialty caipirinha which had ginger, basil and pineapple in it (and for some reason, an asparagus garnish). The drink was delicious and perfect for sipping on a roof-top bar! Everything about the location was perfect, the music, the atmosphere, the view and the friends. It was definitely a night to remember!

Museu da Lingua Portuguesa

July 16th
Today we had a double session of Portuguese, but we only had morning classes. In the afternoon we had a scheduled excursion with our Portuguese professors to the Museu Da Lingua Portuguesa. Our morning classes progressed normally; we worked on the use of direct and indirect pronouns and read more Brazilian poetry in preparation for our museum visit. We had a quick lunch on campus before meeting up and starting our 1.5 hour trek to the museum. We first walked 20 min to get to the nearest metro station, then waited for everyone to recharge their billets then boarded a train (not a metro) to go the Estação da Luz (the largest transit station in South America) and then walked over a block to the Museu da Lingua Portuguesa.
To frame the day, this week and next are part of the celebrations for the Dia Mundial de Joventude (Catholic World Youth Day), which is happening in Rio. However, there are a lot of groups that are starting their tours in São Paulo; you often see large groups of them wearing the event t-shirts walking around town looking lost, much like we did a few weeks ago, but now we are wiser and city savvy, not to be lumped in with the tourists. However, due to our schedules and relative location, we have run into a lot of these visiting groups and the Museu da Lingua Portuguesa was not an exception. We happened to arrive at the same time as the Spanish invasion (about a hundred literally came there, most wrapped in the Spanish flag). Once our whole group got inside (we had long waits for the elevator/only way into the exhibit level) we began to explore the first room which houses the museums temporary exhibit room. This particular exhibit was dedicated to Brazilian foreign correspondents during WWII. The museum clearly wanted to be seen as technologically modern and interactive and they had several of the articles linked to old typewriters with touch screens instead of paper and a bank of old style telephones which read the daily headlines to the listener. The room was not that big, and once we regrouped the professors made an attempt to spilt us up into two groups; half to go to the third floor to watch the museum video and poetry exhibition and the other half to go to the second floor to explore the permanent exhibit on the timeline of the Portuguese language development.
This plan had mixed results since there was not a clear leader and most people wandered around and then went upstairs on their own. I was in one of the first groups to go upstairs and watch the video on the importance of language and Portuguese in particular. The video itself was pretty interesting and again the museum curators were clearly trying to appeal to a young and technologically savvy visitor with their dramatic visual portrayal of the Portuguese language history. Unfortunately, for me this emphasis on making the 10 min movie fun and exciting (which it was) left a bit to be desired in the teaching and informative sections. After the brief video the front screen flipped up and allowed us passage into the next room directly behind which featured Portuguese poetry and the spoken word as an art form. This part of the museum was my favorite! It was about 20 min of poetry readings in Portuguese which had corresponding light projector displays that reinforced important words and lines, as well as providing abstract images which matched the theme of the poems. This room had the most meaning for me because we had studied almost all the poetry that we heard in our Portuguese class over the last two weeks in preparation. The only downside to this exhibit was that the Spanish group that was next to me was not really into the museum and they were determined to talk throughout the performance.
After we finished the poetry exhibition we walked back down a level to visit the permanent exhibit on the history of the Portuguese language. I really liked the timeline on this floor which documented historical and contemporary changes in the development of the Portuguese language. However, the two hallways of videos which attempted to incorporate the viewer into these influences on Portuguese were well conceived, but perhaps not best visited on a busy day, so I really did not get much out of it. After we finished the floor we went back down to the meeting place on the first level to meet the rest of our group. We then found out that they were still in the movie and would not be out for a while. Since there were no other exhibits (or areas inside the museum) we just had to wait in the first floor journalism exhibit for the other group to finish and work their way out. Once the other half of the group met up with us after another 20 min we were able to get our bags out of the checked lockers and head out into rush hour traffic.
Allison and I both decided to go with our professor Jeff and several of the other graduate students to the Charme (our local Paulista Bar near the MASP) to chat about the day over a few beers and some fried mandioca! Charme is also a great place to people watch as all the commuters from the office towers work their way home. After the rush died down Alison and I decided to take the metro to Santa Rosa to meet up with some of her Brazilian roller derby friends at a place they promised made the best Coxinhas (fried chicken dumplings) in town! I had to admit that they were very good, and it was fun to get together and hang out with regular Brazilians outside of our program! We decided to call it an early night and headed back home around 9:15.

Part of the old train station at Luz

The temporary exhibit on Brazilian WWII corespondents 

Listening to the news reports from the front

More on Race in Brazil

July 15th

        Today was an ordinary Monday in São Paulo. We had Portuguese class in the morning where we further discussed and practiced the usage of the imperfect subjunctive and read more poems by Brazilian authors. In the afternoon we had our last class with both of our American professors as one of them, Chris, is going back to the US with his family today as he has to move into his new house before the start of the semester. We spent all of our culture class discussing contemporary race identity in Brazil and how it related to what we had seen in the Museu Afro Brasil. It is absolutely fascinating to most North Americans how transmutable race is in Brazil, here it is class that is thought of as the major societal division. For example, people that we would clearly classify as ‘black’ in the US here might identify as ‘morena’ or even ‘white.’ There is also a prevailing consensus that people are discriminated against here based on their social class and not based on their racial appearance.

         One current example of this is attempting to explain to Brazilians the central racism issue in the Trayvon Martin case, most Brazilians understand discrimination and violence in class terms and they ask if he looked poor, and if Zimmerman was rich. The news here has also been confused over the questions that since both parties in the case were minorities could there be racism between minorities. This is in no way to say that there is not racism in Brazil or classism in the US, just that the consensus from the people in the US is that discourse of ‘class’ are a cover up for issues of ‘race’ in Brazil, and Brazilians think that in the US discourse of ‘race’ is a cover up for issues of ‘class.’ It is very interesting to try and rethink the fundamental (and ridged) understandings of what race is in the US once you realize that concepts of race are not the same in different countries with different histories. 

Vila Madalena and the Movies

July 14

            Happy Bastille Day! Today began with another leisurely morning. I had not made distinct plans with anyone, so I decided to just go to two nearby markets and shop around. However, right as I was crossing Paulista I was fortunate enough to run into Naomi, Miguel, and Aileisha, they were also hitting the Sunday feiras so I joined their group and went to a feira that was actually located inside of a shopping mall called Shopping 3 (there is not a Shopping 1 or 2, I checked). The market was full of neo-artisans selling jewelry, clothing and handicrafts. We spent about an hour and a half wandering around the feira before we got hungry and decided to look for some food. Since Paulista is my area I was able to make a recommendation! I suggested that we try the PicNic, the Brazilian Panera, for something that was quick and not fried. It was a good choice, and I got a veggie quiche and a fresh strawberry-orange juice drink. Afterwards we broke up into groups, Aileisha had an appointment to do laundry with her host mom and Naomi and Miguel were going to a coffee shop. As we were going out separate ways we bumped into another pair from our group, Andrew and Elliott, who were taking advantage of the open bike lane and free bikes on Paulista, which are a part of the city’s initiative to promote bike transportation for those who live short distances. After we split up I decided to catch up with Roxanne, Jenike and Molly in Vila Madalena to look at the famous street art area called Beco do Batman. Since they were already in Vila Madalena getting lunch I told them I would meet them on the corner near their restaurant. This turned out to be harder than expected.

            Since I did not have directions on how to get to the specific streets (and all the maps here seem to skip streets..) I went into an internet café to look up the metro and walking directions. According to google maps the restaurant should have been a 15 min walk from the metro station with only two real turns. I should mention that this is the same metro station location where Angelika and I got sort of lost the first day we were in São Paulo, but I thought that by now I was wiser and more city savvy and that this tricky station would not be a problem…I was proved wrong. Getting to the station was easy and I had complete faith in the pictures I had taken of the google map on my phone and I even took a picture of the map in the metro station just to be safe.

It turned out to be a moot point as I still ended up getting lost. I think that the problem is that when you walk out of the station there are several angled roads that you can take, and the angles of the roads on the map and in person do not entirely match up, which means that you end up walking off at a slightly wrong angle and miss your cross streets. This is the second time that this station has fooled me into walking down the wrong angled road (and let it be known that these angled roads do no connect) and, therefore, missed my cross street. After about 15 min of walking and not finding the correct street I gave up and decided to hail a taxi. I knew that I was really close to the corner but not exactly where it was. Unfortunately, neither did the taxi driver…or he just wanted to drive around in circles and stop to ask for directions, either way, we drove way out of the way but eventually did get to the street corner where the girls were waiting.

            Once I finally made it there we had a great time walking around the little hipster boutique stores and bars and looking at all of the street art. The Beco do Batman is a little winding ally way that is tucked into one of the residential streets of the neighborhood and it is famous for its ever changing art from local graffiti artists. The street art there was absolutely amazing! There was so much detail and thought put into how the designs fit to the wall and made use of the whole ally space. While we were there we saw two artists putting up a new design, and a family and couple doing professional photo shoots there. It was such a cool location to have engagement photos done! After we had spent plenty of time and film taking silly pictures together we decided to walk down one of the central streets in Vila Madalena to sit on the bar patios and enjoy the last rays of weekend sunshine.

            While we sat together we settled our plans for the evening. Roxanne and Jenike decided to head back home to Paulista, while Molly and I decided to meet up with Aileisha and our Brazilian friend Mari to see a popular Brazilian comedy at the movie theater in Shopping Bourbon. We both walked down to the bus stop together and one of the first buses that came by said that it went down Avenida Sumare where the shopping center was located. I checked with the bus driver and he said that he would go nearby, so we said bye to Roxanne and Jenike and got on the bus. It was a bit of a ride and since we did not know the exact stop where we needed to get off I asked Molly if she could asked the bus pass clerk if he would let us know the stop we needed since she was closer. Unfortunately, she got confused about where we needed to get off and instead of asking for Shopping Borbon she asked for Barra Funda which is a metro station in the area we have used several times. So we ended getting off at the wrong stop and since we did not trust our map when it told us that we were not far from the shopping center we asked for directions in a local lanchonete. They recommended that we hail a cab since it would be a long walk, luckily since we were right next to the Barra Funda metro/bus station it was easy to get a cab driver. We were able to get back on track and arrived at the Shopping Bourbon at 6:50, just in time to meet up with Mari and Aileisha.

On our way to the cinema we ran into Isaiah and his host mom who were doing some grocery shopping on the lower level, and she was able to give us direction to the movie theater which was very helpful considering the size of the shopping center (5 floors!!). We found Mari and Aileisha already in line to get tickets. We joined them and were almost to the front of the line when the manager came out and made an announcement that all of the 8:00 movies were sold out except for the first row in Minha Mãe e uma Peça, which was the comedy that we were going to see. Given the options we decided to get better tickets to a later showing and get some dinner and wander around the mall first. So after we bought our tickets, not as cheap/awesome as Costa Rica sadly, we walked to the food court and decided to eat at a por quilo place.

As we walked back to the table Aileisha was saving a man rushing right through the crowds ran in to Mari full on and sneezed all over her and then ran off!! Everyone on that half of the food court saw it happen and could not believe their eyes!! It was the rudest and most hilarious thing that had happened all week, and we could not stop laughing over the sheer audacity of it all, we even had people coming up and asking if it was a prank for a camera. After dinner we explored the mall for about an hour checking out the clothing stores and the Livraria Cultural which is a really neat bookstore chain here in São Paulo, before going to the café in the movie theater.

The movie itself was actually very funny. It is a story that a man wrote about his overbearing, blunt, and interfering real-life mom (they had some home video of her at the end of the movie) that satirizes the traditional mother-child relationship in Brazil. The son actually dressed in drag and played his mother and he was perfect for the part as he had all the mannerisms down pat! The movie takes place in Rio and centers on the mother finding out that her kids are frustrated with her crazy behavior so she runs away to her older aunt’s house. The (adult) children then have to fend for themselves and realize that she really has been a good mom. It ends happily with the mother and children overcoming their differences and the mom getting a job hosting a tell-it-like-it-is parenting show on local tv. The movie was overall a good experience, except that, since it was a comedy the actors all spoke really fast so it was hard to understand the actual lines and we mostly just had to follow the vibe of the movie.

The movie ended a bit late, at 11:30, but Mari’s mom has a car and she was able to drive us all home. It was a long, fun day and one that really demonstrated the benefits of being flexible and going with the flow. It was also really interesting to note how many people from our group that I randomly ran into today, granted we all live relatively in nearby areas but it was still a lucky break in my mind that I was always able to meet back up with friends. Our group is taking over São Paulo!

**since I took the pictures with my phone I do not have a way to upload them to the blog yet so I will redirect you to my facebook page where several of them are!**