next time you're thinking of inviting yourself ... don't

I was supposed to meet Vinny Saturday night to play soccer (futbol), but I realized about a half an hour before I left to wait for the bus that the whole plan was crap, or as they like to say here, chato.  I was getting on a bus, with a co-former-student of the Portuguese language school who is getting somewhat annoying in his propensity to invite himself along to stuff, to go meet Vinny in Pernambues and then go to Shopping Iguatemi (which is much easier to find than Pernambues) to play futbol.  So I was pissed.  And kept asking myself “Why don’t we just meet at Shopping Iguatemi?  This plan is chato.”  So by the time I’d been waiting along with my freeloading, self-inviting Portuguese language pal (who insists on speaking English all the time – NOT cool) at the bus stop for about 30 minutes with no sign of the Pernambues bus, and multiple buses for pretty much every other neighborhood from here to Recife, I was a little steamed.  

I just read that last paragraph again and realize that I write run-on sentences with too many and long dependent clauses.  For the both of you that read this blog, I apologize.  I would revise it if I had the time but recently I’ve had none.  I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing at this point, but hey, it’s reality.  Again, my apologies, and if you continue to read you have my utmost and most heartfelt thanks.

We waited for half an hour, with the other student speaking to me in English and me answering in short, choppy Portuguese sentences.  Finally I was so pissed that I gave up and started speaking English, and said we should find a phone.  I was inclined at this point to bail, but somehow when things go to shit transportation-wise it always seems to turn out OK, so I didn’t give up hope.  

To get to Vinny I had to find a public phone that was off the main road because you can’t hear anything on the phone near the bus stop since the buses are so freaking loud.  So I had to walk a good 5 minutes around the corner, out of sight of the bus stop.  This practically guaranteed that once I turned the corner, all 3 Pernambues buses were going to show up, but I was at the end of my rope as far as the waiting went.  Vinny has no phone and lives with Edilza, so I called her cell phone, not knowing if she was going to know what the hell I was talking about because I still have a tough time talking on the phone in Portuguese.  Fortunately I had no problem there, and got Vinny.  I told him the situation and he was like, “No, you still have time.”  I didn’t have the patience or vocabulary to explain to him that we probably already missed the bus and would have to wait at least another 30 minutes or so, by which time the futbol game would have already started.  I asked him if we could meet him at Shopping Iguatemi and he said it was way too complicated.  

I really hate to bail but in some situations it’s just better to cut your losses.  I did have a backup plan which was slightly more attractive – I’d read in A Tarde (local newspaper) that the Stephen Spielberg movie Munique (aka Munich) was playing at a few theaters in Salvador this weekend (ironically, one of them was Shopping Iguatemi) – and at this point it seemed like a much more realistic plan, even if I did have to endure going with the self-inviter.  So I gritted my teeth and told Vinny I thought it might be better if we just postponed until next week.  He, being perhaps the most laid back Brazilian I know (and that is freaking laid back) was like, “Sure, whatever.”  But I insisted on beating myself up about it and frantically apologizing at least 10 times on the phone and later the next day when I saw him at Adriana’s for a Spanish-food-party (more on that later I guess).  I’m sure he could have cared less.

I hung up the phone.  We walked to Shopping Barra, which is way closer, to see if it was playing there.  Unfortunately there’s only 2 theaters – one was the Jim Carrey movie and the other was a Brazilian comedy (which you wouldn’t even be able to begin to comprehend sucks so much worse than any American comedy) so we grabbed a bus to what we thought was Shopping Iguatemi.  Turns out it leaves from the neighborhood of Iguatemi.  So we (i.e., the self-inviter) had to ask someone on the bus how to get there, and found out that we’d have to get off and take another bus, basically in the opposite direction.  So after jumping off that bus in the middle of the most busy intersection in Salvador and sprinting across the street to beat the cabs coming down the road thirsty for tourist blood, we caught the right bus and arrived at our destination.  I was so freaking hungry at this point that I had just stopped talking altogether.  The movie started in 15 minutes so I decided to go the health food route dinner-wise, and bought a huge popcorn and a couple of candy bars.

At this point you may find yourself asking the question:  Why would anyone not tell a self-inviting person to just go away.  It’s not like he’s your friend.  And he invited himself ... he’s asking to be told to go to hell.  

The answer is that I’ve unfortunately had a lot of experience with self-inviters.  I’m not sure if my experience is similar to others (there’s not a lot of data on the subject as far as I know, anecdotal or otherwise) or if I have some sort of quirk that attracts self-inviters.  I have gotten so annoyed at this type of person at least once or twice that I’ve flat-out told them to get the hell out of my face.  And although doing that can be mildly rewarding in the short-term, I always feel like a complete dick afterwards, usually for years.  In part this is because the phenomenon of the self-inviter is tragic.  The same kind of people are often described of as “clingy”.  They tend to have some sort of minor social problem.  In my co-student’s case I think it’s that he has an ultra-cynical sense of humor, which to him is funny but to humans is insulting, and he’s missing the gene makes him sense that last part.  And he usually does fine in social situations, with the exception of inviting himself places when it’s clear that he wouldn’t be otherwise.  Most people can’t say no.  You might say that he takes advantage of most people’s politeness and so deserves to be told to go to hell, but that’s a fine moral line and my experience tells me it’s better to be on the safe side and not do that.  Although I really would like to.  Unfortunately unless there’s some sort of lucky coincidence which results in the de-escalation of tension (i.e., my level of annoyance) the likely end to this scenario is that I will blow my top and lose it on the guy in a way that makes me look like an irrational maniac.  All I can do is hope that when this happens it won’t be in front of people I know.  Because then you get the “Hey man, you really freaked out back there.  You alright?”  And nobody needs that.

But back to the movie - I should mention that the popcorn had to be the goddam saltiest thing I’ve ever eaten in my life.  It made jerky taste like oatmeal.  And the only reason I bought 2 candy bars was because I was in a hurry at the food counter to get my stuff and get a seat, but the jackass selling the stuff, a kid in his early 20s, was exactly the kind of sweet-talker selling the same crap back in the States.  I couldn’t understand (and didn’t really care) a word of what he was saying, but I said I wanted a candy bar with my large popcorn and he said something like “Well, you can get 2 candy bars for 50 cents more” or whatever.  I said I just wanted one, and he gave me a look like I was crazy, and really just didn’t give me an opportunity to purchase the one candy bar, which of course is their goddamn business strategy.  I think that luckily for the both of us I wasn’t willing to get into an argument with him about it, because if he’d been an English speaker I think things might have gotten ugly.

HIM:  You don’t want the second candy bar?  It’s only 50 cents more ... It’s practically free.
ME:  Listen, dickfuck.  If you don’t give me what I ask for, I’m going to take this cup of colored straws from the counter and jam it down your throat, make my own shit back there, and then it will ALL be free.  So just give me what I want.

Like I said, it was probably better that I didn’t understand him and just caved in.  

The movie, by the way, was well worth the trouble.  In the sense that I was quite realistically horrified out of speech when it was over.  



At this point you may be saying to yourself.

let me give you a scenario of what my life is like

The following is nearly the entire contents of a note I wrote to my sister this morning. I think she will forgive me for cutting and pasting to here.

Although things here are going well, there of course are always snags. Let me take this opportunity to give you a bit of a scenario of what my life is like. The people at "work" I think are glad enough to have me there that the other day my "boss" told me he thought they (around 15 employees including him) had gotten so used to me being around that it would be strange when I left. This made me feel great. However ...

I've been working on totally revamping their web site, which when I got here would have been a D+ high school science project but which I've demonstrated can be made into a fully functional site that can accept credit cards, get updated daily by them with little or no pain (they were paying R$300 a page previously), do photo albums, search functionality, multiple languages, and freaking fry eggs even. It's all there, I just need the go-ahead from them to switch the page over to the new one (a process which takes around 0.5 seconds). I told them at the beginning of last week I'd like to switch over at the end of last week, and they were like, OK, cool, we just have to have it authorized by the people in Rio.

And of course I've been bugging the shit out of the boss daily: "did you talk to so-and-so ... blah blah blah" and he's always just like, "i still have to talk to him today." I've told them that given the amount of work I've put into it (easily 40-80 hours) I have to get a go-ahead from them before I invest any more, since I don't want to do a crapload more work if they're just going to decide not to do it. And they're like ... OK. But I'm getting the feeling that they're stalling. Which is fine, so I asked multiple times "please tell me what I can change to make it better or more like what you want." And so far nothing from that end.

The work I've done for them so far is something on the order of $5000-$20000 US, which is close to the entire net worth of their operation.

Basically at the end of this week I'm inclined to tell them that I'm going to stop coming in until they decide what to do. Which would just be silly because of all the friends I have there now. And when I listen to that voice that encourages me to do vindictive things, I usually end up doing something really stupid.

I don't think there is any easy way to deal with this. My approach right now is to step lightly, since I did already kind of come in and tell them what we're going to do with the web pages. And I'm sure I'm close to stepping on someone's (or many people's) toes by taking over the whole thing myself. But ... hopefully you can understand my aggravation. Ah, what the hell do I know - based on past experience I'm probably letting all this crap get to my head too easily.

my backyard just happens to be a helipad

For a couple of mornings in a row I got really annoyed because I was quite rudely interrupted by the sound of a freaking HELICOPTER outside my window. In New York you kind of get used to this kind of thing, but you also get used to it going away. On one of the mornings in question, the helicopter sound seemed to persist for an inordinate amount of time, as if the guy was hovering right out the window. So once the sound started to move away I felt somewhat relieved and went back to reading The War of the End of the Worldby Mario Vargas Llosa (it’s awesome). But then the sound freaking came back, and that’s when I started thinking, well it’s about time the CIA decided to recruit me out here but I thought they were supposed to be a little more subtle than that. Of course this would explain a lot regarding the war and pretty much everything else they were supposed to be doing and apparently, um, weren't.

So at this point I was thoroughly ticked off, and was just like “What the f*?” to the point of where I must have blacked out from being so annoyed and forgot about it until the next morning. But then it happened again and I started to think, “maybe there is a pattern here … “ I’m pretty slow so sometimes you really have to drive something through my brain before it takes hold. Anyway, the morning after that I heard it again, but this time noticed that the sound was coming from the back of my apartment building rather than the front (where it had sounded like it was coming from before but because of the acoustic mayhem caused by the loud noise of a helicopter I couldn’t properly identify). I stuck my head all the way out of the back window of my apartment to mitigate the acoustic effect somewhat, and it turns out the sound was coming from what would be my backyard if I didn’t live in a 9th story studio. There’s a hill out back that’s covered mostly with thick palm trees, and the sound of a helicopter starting up came right from there. After staring for a good 10 minutes I actually saw a guy in a yellow signaling jacket and a rotating helicopter blade.

So it only took me 2 months to notice. Maybe since vacation season is in full swing people are taking the helicopter out for a spin with more regularity, hence me noticing finally.

While this kind of thing may be only mildly interesting to you (not that the rest of any of this crap, i.e., my blog, should be of interest to anyone) it’s of particular interest to me because there was a recent image in a Brazil travel book I read of something like “the rich traveling above the fray of impoverished millions in helicopters, etc., etc.” which to me is a pretty revolting image but I’m finding that a lot of the things that are either joked about or thought to be true by would-be conspiracy theorists here have more truth to them than anyone would want to think.

Through some fluke which I’ll explain elsewhere I met and was invited to visit the ultra-ritzy high-rise apartment of an *extremely* well to do family here in Salvador. I didn’t see a sniper eyeing me through his scope from the top of the building as I rang the front gate buzzer, but I knew he was there. The apartment was the entire floor of a highrise (which had a pool, was immaculately clean, etc.) and would have made David Bowie feel like his Manhattan apartment was a bachelor crash pad in Queens (sorry Queens, but it’s true). None of this would have bothered me so much if the mother of the family hadn’t been an employee of, yup, the local government. Maybe it’s just coincidence but not likely, since government corruption around here (this state, and this country) is well known to be rampant. You wouldn’t expect a clueless idiot like me to come into contact with this kind of reality, but there you have it. Hopefully I’m wrong.

Bahians (even men) sing when they talk

Bahians sing their words, even the men.  I’ve heard that said about Italians, and it sort of gives you the gist of what the Italian voice sounds like, but here they really do sing, not just talk in a musical way.  It may sound like an exaggeration, but it’s not.  It may even sound a bit effeminate on the part of the men, especially in the context of a machismo culture, and to us it definitely is.  But there are a lot of apparent contradictions regarding the machismo and what is and is not considered manly.

The difference between an English speaker like me and a Bahian (as distinguished from a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, who doesn’t necessarily sing Portuguese) is that the allowed tonal range of the Bahian is much larger than the American’s.  When I speak (and I never noticed this until now) I keep the tonal or range of pitch pretty steady, meaning it doesn’t detract often from a certain pitch which people call my “voice”.  I may change the volume up or down depending on my mood – quiet for sad or tired and loud for laughing or yelling – but the pitch stays pretty even.  

Not so with Bahians.  I’ve noticed that when they get angry (I’m thinking of men here) or start making jokes, their voices get almost as high as if they were imitating the way a woman talked.  Not shrill, because that brings to mind a dissonant quality, and because it’s not necessarily unpleasant to hear, but it’s definitely high, much higher than any American or most European men would allow their voices to go.

Brazilian motto: The immediate need is the only need.

The other day I watched my pirated copy (they call them “roubado” here – “robbed”) of the most recent Star Wars movie, and spent a few minutes after I’d shut my laptop off basking in awe of how sucky all of Lucas’ new movies are.  I see now why he did episodes 4-6 and then 1-3; if he released The Phantom Menace in ’77 there would have been a bunch of geeky little kids coming out of the theater, pushing up their glasses and saying, “That was like, garbage.”

And speaking of garbage, we got a new (new to us – I think it’s ‘refurbished’) air conditioner in the office today.  Previously our air conditioner was a table fan, so anything is a step up.  The level of incompetence demonstrated by the AC installers was trumped only by the level of incompetence demonstrated by Ivanildo when he tried to put back all the wall and trim installation that the AC guys had taken down.  

As he started doing this I asked him “Shouldn’t the AC guys do that, since they took it down?”  He shook his head and gave the international sign for “I’m not waiting around for those morons to come and try to put it all back.”  

The lesson for today was that the Brazilian motto for getting work done is “The immediate need is all that matters.”  This is demonstrated in a number of places other than my work area.  The plumbing, for example – you can’t flush toilet paper down the toilet (that’s right, welcome to my world … although it’s not as bad as it sounds) anywhere in Salvador because the pipes are too small.  And why are the pipes too small?  Because the attitude when they were installed was, If no one is going to see it, why bother doing a good job?

I was able to see Ivanildo use this philosophy in action as well, for example when he had to move some piles of books over to shove the crappiest, most unstable and rusty ladder I’ve ever seen against a wall to nail up the ceiling trim.  Rather than just pick the stack of books up and place it elsewhere on the floor, he picked them up 3 or 4 at a time (since he had something else in his other hand and didn’t feel like putting it down) and stacked them on some other precariously balanced stacks of books, not even trying to even them up to stabilize things.  And just because by some miracle they didn’t fall didn’t mean that it would take anything more than a cricket running across the top of them (a distinct possibility) to make the whole thing start to (quite annoyingly) slide into the middle of the office.  But who cares if it doesn’t happen when you’re around, right?

While he was doing this I was standing behind him with his nephew Vinny, and I started laughing because it was so blatantly rediculous.  Vinny joined in too, but I get the feeling he was just taking a cue from me, since this sort of activity seemed to be pretty routine judging by the nonchalant way everyone seemed to be just watching and staring while Ivanildo went on a Home Depot Anti-Christ rampage.

Getting back to the ladder – I got on it first, since I way less than Ivanildo and he’s smart enough not to be the first to get on a ladder that looks like it was made during the Depression and barely survived.  And it started to break, so to fix this he took a length of network cable that I told him to throw away since it was defective and used it to tie the faulty ladder step to the ladder so that it wouldn’t fall off while one of us was on it.  “Better than falling off,” he said, referring to the granny knot he used to tie the network cable together.  

Ivanildo used this same ladder to tape up a piece of styrofoam he used to block the space above the air conditioner where the wall used to be (and which I guess the AC guys sawed off).  He had his niece, age 13, use the measurements he took by marking a piece of plastic to mark the piece of styrofoam.  So it was no surprise that it was an inch longer than necessary.  But rather than take the 3 seconds or so to chop off the extra inch, he just taped it (packing, not duct) to the wall with the rest of the garbage that was already up there.  Again, it was all going to get covered by part of the trim that overhangs, so unless some drug dealer or squatter is watching from one of the adjacent (abandoned) buildings, no one’s going to see it anyway.

But imagine if you were that squatter.  Would you have the decency to yell across the courtyard something like: “Hey man, that piece of styrofoam’s not flush!  It looks awful from this angle!”  Or would you be one of those antisocial squatters whom all the other squatters say is a dick because you take some sort of secret joy in NOT pointing out your neighbors aesthetic screwups?  God!  You’re such a … dick.

Edilza's BD party continued

(…somewhat continued from last post) Ivanildo and I headed back to his apartment for Edilza’s birthday / fejoada party last Thursday, after first stopping at the most enormous supermarket in Salvador.  Even by American standards it was huge.  You could buy lingerie and a wide-screen TV in there, even though the focus was on food.  

I asked him what should I bring in the form of a quasi-present and he directed me over to a bottle of cheap Merlot, which I put in the fridge when we got to the apartment and never saw it again (I guarantee it’s still there).  For me I also bought some Argentinian maté tea, which if I’d bought in the States I’m sure would have had some sort of elaborate packaging emphasizing the ethnicity of the whole thing, but in this case it was wrapped just like a box of generic tea at home.  That box, too, is now sitting on top of Ivanildo’s fridge and I doubt it’s going anywhere (including to me) anytime soon as well, since I forgot it when I left.

When we got there Ivanildo’s neices were sitting on the couch watching TV, and Edilza was at the kitchen table drinking a beer.  I noticed that she and Ivanildo drank steadily throughout the afternoon and into the evening, and while he was clearly affected to the point of laying down on his back and going to sleep, Edilza’s demeanor didn’t change a whit as far as I could see.  Later on she did lie on the couch with her head on Ivanildo’s neice Lara’s lap (Lara and her cousin live with Edilza while away from home in Central for school vacation), during which time she did smile and talk a little more.  I think she’s at least a little sad, though, and lonely.  All of she and her friends seem to want boyfriends but don’t have them as far as I can tell.  I don’t understand why because Brazilian men are notoriously aggressive and these women are always going out dancing.  

Most of the women have grown up either lower-middle-class or just plain poor, and my guess is that it’s tough to for them to find someone they’d consider husband material.  But I should stop before I say something insensitive (if I haven’t already) because I really don’t know why.

No one made any sort of mention of it being Edilza’s birthday, to the point of me wondering if I’d understood right.  But later on an older woman from the neighborhood came by and brought her a small steel dish (looked sort of like an ashtray but she doesn’t smoke) wrapped in green tissue paper.

When she finally got up to go I made a special point to wish Edilza a happy birthday (I probably didn’t even say it correctly) and she seemed surprised (in a good way) and smiled and blushed when I hugged her goodbye.  

And since then, she’s gotten a little warmer to me although almost imperceptibly – she now says “Good Morning Matheus” (in Portuguese) every morning, which is a huge step in our relationship.  I of course made sure to subvert the whole thing yesterday when I just happened to be reading The Onion online when she walked in and looked at my laptop screen.  And hey, that’s no big deal, since I don’t get paid and plenty of people goof off here, with or without the internet.  The only caveat was that at the top of The Onion page was a questionnaire / ad that said “Which Man-Thong is the Funniest” (or something like that) with a row of male crotches all wearing different colored thongs.  I didn’t notice this until the door opened and I looked out of the corner of my eye at Edilza, who was in the process of doing the not-so-subtle turn to the left in disgust at the new volunteer who is now clearly extremely gay.

Bonfim festival, fejoada, and chicks with crooked teeth

I've been really lax in writing to the blog lately, and so out of nothing more than sheer terror I started to write just now. There's been a ton of things going on recently, some of which I've documented elsewhere but which I haven't really posted anywhere public. Anyway, maybe I'll talk a little about those things.

I think partly it's because I don't know exactly how to make all of it funny. Not that it's sad or anything. Maybe I should lower my (already quite low, most people would say) standards of funniness.

Two friends from New York, one Brazilian woman and her husband, coworkers of mine, left yesterday to go back to New York (and work, ha ha) after being here for a week. I love the idea of me, a foreigner, guiding someone around their own country, so I was more than happy to help them out with things to do while they were here. And luckily I think there was much more to do here than they even had time for, which I'm really happy about.

The Bonfim festival was on Thursday. This starts in the morning around 9 am, and something like 1 million people from outside Salvador come to see it. I could tell on the bus to the city center that the tourist index was way up, since there were clueless white Brazilians choking the standing area of the buses and making me late.

(Small aside: this reminds me that Friday morning I got on the bus and an older woman tourist, presumably a holdover from Bonfim, sat down with her friend next to me. I had to sort of shuffle over and put the book down that I was reading, and she was like "Oh, no, don't move because of me." I didn't really care one way or the other but I kept the book down ... until she started talking in my direction. I don't know for sure if she was talking to me or to her friend, but I think she was one of those people who has to fill up every living second by spewing garbage out of her mouth, and this is the kind of person that I truly cannot stand. So I pretended to read my book which was clearly not Portuguese. It is somewhat of a comfort and very useful to not be able to understand, or at least to pretend not to understand what people are saying. I think if I really tried to understand I could have gotten the gist of what she was saying. But I was mercifully able to pretend that wasn't the case.)

So the Bonfim festival parade starts near work, and ends up 8 or so miles (or is it kilometers? I don't remember) later at the Bonfim church which is the most famous of Salvador's 100 or so (I'm not exaggerating) churches. I was told that it is, or once was, very religious in nature, or more so than things like Carnival which I would term as more "drinking" in nature. But from what I saw it was all pretty commercial and in some cases political. There was a group marching that was holding up red communist flags with a yellow hammer and sickle and presumably some other Brazilian mark. And there was the group of "give the land back to the native farmers" people who were essentially protesting - I was told that the government really does not like these folks but has no choice but to tolerate them. Seems like a pretty tough gig to be a poor farmer AND on the government's shit list.

The parade is a bunch of floats and groups, and also just visitors who want to do the 8-mile/kilometer walk, and that's a lot of people (potentially 1 million or more, I guess). I was told it was covered on TV like the NYC Thanksgiving Day parade. And to be honest it was just as repetitive and boring. There's not a whole lot of available variation on the theme of "walking in a huge group in a parade." There were some guys doing what looked like pretty authentic Capoeira, and some guys playing drums that was also pretty cool, but not much else that was noteworthy, and for this reason I watched for maybe 30-45 minutes and then headed over, with the Chefe (boss, aka Ivanildo) to his place for something far more worthwhile, which was our coworker Edilza's (ay-DIW-za's) birthday and fejoada party.

(Another aside: Ivanildo has taken to calling me "Newton" rather than "Matheus", which when you hear him say it is hilarious because he mispronounces it worse than most Brazilians do with Matt (Match). My coworker, when she came by the office with her husband, was taken aback when people were calling me Matheus, saying that my name was Matt. I explained that I'd given up on using Matt here because no one can pronounce it, including most of the women I've gone out with, so like, what's the point. Later Ivanildo and I got to talking about name order and how different cultures derive family and maiden names, etc., and he said that he was confused when on official documents US and/or Europeans put their last name first. I showed him my drivers license, which has things this way. Either this just confused him more, or he likes Newton better than Matheus, but anyway, he's now at least four or five times a day yelling from his office which is adjacent to my (the receptionist's, which I am, essentially, since I'm always getting the goddamn door) office, the following: "NEWTON? POR FAVOR? (i.e., "please come here for a minute so I can ask some trivial question which I know the answer to but will ask anyway because I want to smile when you come in because I think your last name sounds funny")"

Edilza is hands down the coolest chick I know. In Brazil. If the place I work were in any way organized or carried on with the pretense of any sort of legitimate business she would be the office manager. She's very serious and diligent about all of her work, and is extremely dependable, which around here is quite, quite noteworthy. She's also shy as hell and has a bunch of dead teeth. She's like most people around here - grew up without any money to speak of but has the kind of life which I don't think is bad. The word that comes to mind is integrity.

I think she wants a boyfriend, and her shyness betrays a sort of underlying sadness. But when she smiles, and for a moment you get to see those discolored, crooked teeth, it makes my week.

Itapúa praia

I went to the beach yesterday, for the first time in a while, with some folks from work. And I remembered why I don't go to the beach that much: it's boring. I might be being a bit harsh here because I had as good a time as could possibly have been had talking, making fun of and being made fun of by the people from work. We went to Itapúa beach, which, judging by the amount ot people there, has to be one of the most popular beaches in this hemisphere. All along the beach (and there are miles and miles of it) there are restaurants and cafés, the tables and chairs of which are placed right in the sand only a few yards from the water. Itapúa is particularly narrow so the water is right there, but at the same time it would be nice if there was a little more room between you and the screaming kids and other people splashing around in the water. There are a few much larger, much nicer in my opinion beaches near the airport, which have names like Flamingo and Ipitanga, but they're a 20-30 minute drive away, which is part of the reason they're so much nicer because fewer people have access to them.

Ivanildo picked me up in front of my building around 10am. I wasn't sure if he was going to show because it had rained hard a little bit earlier in the morning, and for an hour or so was completely overcast. The big difference in Bahian weather and someplace like, say, New York, is that in NY you know that if it rains a lot in the morning it's a good bet that it's going to be raining for the rest of the day. In Bahia it can pour for two hours in the morning, and there's still a 90% chance you'll have sunny weather for the rest of the day. Yesterday was a mix - it rained a couple times in the afternoon while we were sitting on the beach, which wasn't a problem as far as getting wet is concerned. We were under a big umbrella and in bathing suits anyways, and it didn't do much more than sprinkle a couple of times. The downside, for me anyway, was that it was tough getting any steady exposure to sun to get some of that desperately needed skin color. I sat in the partial sun for a good two hours, sweating my brains out for a good part of it, and this morning I still look like the whitest Whitey McWhiteguy you've seen anywhere.

I must admit that although I like to swim I am in no way a fan of the seaweed or whatever other plants it was that were choking the water when I went in. There must have been some offshore storm or something because there were washed-up plants lining the beach and underfoot when you stood in the water. I could only stand it for maybe 10 minutes before I felt something wrap around my ankle and decided I was too skeeved out to stay. And then when I went into my pockets looking for my keys, etc., (which I'd forgotten I'd put in the bag I'd brought with me) I got a couple of handfuls of seaweed instead of what I'd been looking for. The folks in the car ride back weren't really impressed, either, when I put my sunglasses on after taking them out of my pockets; it took me a minute to realize that the reason I couldn't see anything was because the lenses were splotched with broken spinach-looking-like pieces of seaweed from my pockets.

One highlight of the beach was our waiter, who sprinted everywhere he went. This looked particularly dangerous when he came sprinting from the food shack and jumped off the 3 or so steps that divide the restaurants' cooking areas with the part of the beach that people sit on. He got at least 3 feet of air one time. And many times he was balancing a tray of drinks or whatever, and was somehow able to take the impact of landing in the hard sand without dropping anything major. I really wanted to stop him at some point and make some wisecrack like, "Pick it up, will you?", since this is one of the few complete sentences I'm able to formulate. In my recent experience, however, it's sure-thing jokes like these which always bomb terribly due to some unknown by me cultural difference, or just as likely, extremely poor timing on my part.

always keep the doorman happy

I just saw my (off-duty) doorman, Jorge, in the lobby. He was stinking drunk, and I’m quite proud to say that at it was at least partly because of me.

This morning, when I finally got my ass out of the apartment and headed downstairs to try to find a place to make a cheap international phone call to my New York Brazilian friend’s São Paulo cell phone, he was suited up and sitting on duty at the front desk. He gave me this trademark ultra-wide smile shows his exposed rear gums where he had some teeth pulled. I know its not his fault but this makes him look even goofier than he already is, which is a lot. He stuck his hand out with the thumbs up sign (the Brazilian substitute for a wave) and yelled something unintelligible as I passed by. I stopped and turned around and answered him with the word that I know best and use most in Portuguese, which is “What?"

He repeated what he said, but this time it was faster. I managed to glean that he was asking me if I had a good time last night. I said I did and I thought there was about 10k people out there but he said the TV said it was more like 9 or 13k (I didn’t understand which) or whatever. Then he said a bunch of other stuff and I made the executive decision at that point that we were going to go with the “smiling and nodding” strategy with the thumbs up for emphasis.

As I walked out the door I realized that I had agreed to drink beer with him tonight which is a bit of a problem since I don’t drink. So I got all stressed out about how I was going to explain the deal to him. It’s a tough situation, obviously, because I really want to be on good terms with the guy, and for him to ask me to come drink some beers with him is a pretty big step in our relationship, and I wasn’t sure that explaining to him that I couldn’t drink after I already said I would drink with him wouldn’t be offensive to him.

So when I got back he gave me the gummy smile and the thumbs up again, and made some reference to beer drinking, and I explained to him that I didn’t drink. His face sort of fell, and I guess mine must have too, because he took the opportunity to say something like, “In that case, why don’t you buy me some beers?” I felt a tinge of being taken advantage of but I was willing to do anything to smooth things over, so I rushed outside and got him 2 Skol tall boys. Skol is the [insert the shittiest brand of beer you know here] of Bahia, and therefore the most popular. When I came back and handed them to him, I wasn’t sure he’d been serious because he was speechless. Maybe by now he just knows it’s not worth saying anything since I understand around 30% of what he says.

I left one more time and as I passed the desk again he had a grave, near-tears expression on his face and put his hand over his heart to show how much all this meant to him. I got a little teary myself.

Then when I came in about 5 hours later after the Daniela Mercury show a block away (another huge crowd of ~10000) I felt someone following me right after I walked in. After pushing the buttons for the elevator I turned around and there was Jorge, his shirt untucked, bloodshot eyes nearly too shut to see, and swaying back and forth like he might do a face plant into the lobby floor at any minute. He put his hand over his heart again and this time said something that was intelligible not just because of me but because he couldn’t talk, and he hugged me and called me his amigo 2 or 3 times. I almost had to pry him off me and say something like, “OK, Jorge, I have to go in the elevator now so I can go upstairs and sit in my room and stare.”

I should note that while I was writing this and listening to “Feels So Good” by Van Halen (yes, with Sammy Hagar – I like it, OK? Jesus) with my shirt off, I did a headbanging, dancing half twirl towards my kitchenette area and fell over on an empty 20 liter water cooler bottle. Those things jump right out at you if you’re not careful. And no, after that I didn’t Feel So Good.