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.
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.
posted by n10471 at 12:29 PM
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