Putting the L in Brasil

Brazil?

Olá! I am 6,700 miles from home, currently in São Paulo, Brazil. Why Brazil?? I got laid off from my company after 7 and-a-half years in December, and received a severance payout at the beginning of February. I told myself I wanted to use this time (and some of the payout) to travel the world. During January, I asked friends whether it was a good idea or not, and about 80% of them essentially said “go for it, you may not get the opportunity to do something like this later.”

I began thinking of where I wanted to go, and somewhere warm and sunny (and not in the US) was calling my little name after a winter in Portland. That led me to the southern hemisphere. I wanted to go somewhere I didn’t know the language in order to challenge me, as I firmly believe that growth more easily happens when you are put outside of your comfort zone. I’ve went to only two countries abroad before this, Spain (2019) and Costa Rica (2024). Both times I had a decent grasp on Spanish and felt comfortable enough getting by, even spending two weeks solo in Spain.

The signs were pointing me towards Brazil, especially since I know someone who lives here that I met 15 years ago in East Texas, and the timeframe that I would visit would be during Carnival. That person is named Randy, the brother of one of my college friends, but the one I ended up staying in infrequent contact over all these years. After a few phone calls we had in 2023, he told me to hit him up if I ever came this way. Along with the passionate recommendations of Brazil by one of my old colleagues, I had enough word-of-mouth to satisfy me.

São Paulo: Day 1

I first had a 4 hour flight to Houston where the woman next to me asked if I was “going to Brazil to serve, or for vacation”. I am much more likely to serve looks than serve the Lord, sorry lady. I finished a book on how algorithms are changing the world and how we interact with it, which felt like a good read after choosing to delete my Instagram and Facebook profiles last week.

Next was the 10 hour flight to São Paulo, the biggest city in the Southern Hemisphere. Combine New York City and Los Angeles’ populations, and you more-or-less end up with the amount of people who live here. We had a meal on the first flight, cheese enchiladas, that one of the flight attendants kept calling a “cheese pancake” for some reason. The so-called cheese pancake meal was surprisingly good. After dinner, I watched an old horror movie, wrote a poem about it, then listened to a Big Thief album on repeat to try to sleep. I didn’t succeed at more than an uncomfortable couple of hours, and it was soon plane-breakfast time shortly before we landed, five time zones ahead of Portland.

Uber is very much a thing here, and it is very much a cheap thing here. The conversion rate between Brazilian currency and US dollars is pretty heavily in our favor, so that’s how I ended up taking a 75 minute ride from the airport to my hostel for 24 dollars. I’ve had more expensive rides at home for fifteen minutes! I did say hostel above, but I chose the 32-year-old version of doing a hostel, with a private room and private bathroom. I think I’m too old to be woken up by drunk people in my room while I’m on vacation.

Zen Hostel Brasil Courtyard

After arriving before check-in and nearly falling asleep in the courtyard waiting for my room to become ready, I was able to get into my room to shower and nap a couple hours. I woke up to the soothing sounds of an afternoon thunderstorm hitting the tin roof outside my window.

I went out for a stroll of the neighborhood I’m staying in to hit up tourist attraction #1, Beco de Batman. This is essentially an alley full of murals, graffiti, and some street vendors. The name is based on one of the first murals there, that featured the (bat)man himself, Batman. It was nice to go right after the storm, the lush smell of trees and sopping flowers heavy in the air.

At this point, the lack of sleep combined with being alone started heightening my anxiety, exacerbated by my realization of what a challenge a vacation like this would be for me without drinking. I quit about 3 years ago, but had a couple drunk nights in Costa Rica last year, and thought “maybe I can do this just on vacation”. That hopeful thought was unfortunately not true for me, and led to some tough moments back home in the US before I decided to give it up again.

I wanted to do something that would ground me in reality and let me feel the feelings I needed to feel, so I went in search of a spot to watch the sunset from. I found a park on the map that seemed like it would be a good fit, and I strolled there listening to an old school Portugese rock album. I like to find albums in the language of the country I’m visiting to make it feel more like my personal movie :) I especially realized how little Portuguese I understood after listening to others talk and trying to order a snack and water at the little shop at the park. I felt especially awkward, considering how much being able to express myself eloquently and confidently is important to me. This trip will be a big helping of humble pie and I won’t take my ability to chat with basically anyone back home for granted!

After the anxiety and embarrassment nearly brought me to tears sitting there in public, I was rewarded for letting myself feel instead of numbing by a beautiful sunset and cute dogs running around. My advice is that the best sunsets often happen shortly after a storm. I’m talking about sunsets and I’m also not talking about sunsets, ya dig? I’m also glad to be blogging instead of using Instagram because my inclination would have been to upload the selfie below, and also a picture of the sunset. The context would be missing and the importance could not be contained!

I walked through neighborhoods, stopping to say hi to street cats on cobblestone driveways, then went out for dinner at Lobozó and had a very yummy seafood soup/stew thing! The little touch that felt unique here was that they served cornmeal with the soup, so that you could put it in at the end and soak up the juices with it. I went back to the hostel and called it a night after walking 15,000 steps (7 miles) somehow my first day.

São Paulo: Day 2

If you’ve read this far, I applaud you and also appreciate you. Attention spans ain’t what they used to be, so you must really love me <3

Randy text me this morning, ready to meet up for coffee after coming in from his nearby city of Campinas (pronounced cum-penis) the night before and getting a hotel. I intended to take the metro but ran into issues! The ticket machines don’t take foreign cards, and I didn’t yet have cash to buy a ticket from the cashiers. I tried the ATM at the airport the day before and it literally rebooted as I did so, so I didn’t feel great using that one. I took the easy, non-caffeinated way out after walking back and forth to my hostel to grab different cards in the humid morning, and called an Uber. I got a sense of the city’s size from a human perspective as we went towards the cafe and the skyscrapers towered around the car.

I hopped out, hopped into the restaurant and gave Randy a hug for the first time ever?? The cafe owner spoke English and told a little tale of where he was from (Minas Gerais), and how the name of the cafe, Gorinhamêz, was slang based on the tendency to shorten/combine words and make them more diminutive in his region of Brazil. It essentially boiled down to the meaning “take in every moment, live in the now with the people you are with, because we will never have the moment again and the people will never be the same.”

That felt especially poignant after the stresses of yesterday, and I appreciated the emotional appetizer before we sat outside and had catch-up conversation, pour-over coffee, and one of Brazil’s most common breakfast foods, Pão de queijo. No offense to Brazil, and all respect to the Midwest gas station chain Kwik Trip, but it definitely reminded me of one of the stuffed cheese breads I used to get from there on road trips. In a good way!

We walked from the cafe over to the Museum of Art, and had some dude practice his English with us while simultaneously trying to hustle his book to help us practice our Portuguese. We said “Não, obrigado” and went on inside to see some neato exhibits. I try to visit art museums wherever I go in the world if possible, and this one was so interesting, both in current exhibits as well as the general layout.

There were two large exhibits that focused around queer culture, along with the “standard collection” of art from renowned artists like Monet, Picasso, and Bosch. What I really loved about this area was that you get off the elevator and can see all the way back to the other side of the room thanks to the way the setup is designed. The pieces are set on clear glass panels, with the information placard and artist name on the back. This is such a clever way for people to interact with the art first and draw their own interpretations. We talked about what art we each resonated with, went through all the exhibits, and also watched a short film on a Brazilian urban legend, a ghost with a flaming head and backwards facing legs who lives in the Amazon. I think the queer exhibitions really impacted me in a few ways. First, seeing how courageous it is to even exist in a world that has wanted people like my friends to not exist or even die. I was also thinking about how both Randy and I are queer, and how that similarity probably kept us in touch over all these years, since not many people in East Texas were. That shared experience, although unique to each of us, might have been the reason we were both standing in front of art that validated our existence, thousands of miles away from where we both grew up.

After a few hours in the museum, Randy had to finish his day out with some work meetings, so I went off alone on Paulista Avenue. It’s kind of like Michigan Ave in Chicago if you’re familiar, an important hub of business, finance, and shopping. I was able to get to an ATM and then enjoyed meandering around a grocery store. I love grocery stores anywhere in the world, and will probably have to write a whole separate blog on why.

I stopped at a bench to enjoy my little snacks, and got curious at what beautiful glass building was looming above me. It happened to be another type of museum, this one focused around photography and videography. I spent some time here taking in more queer art, about black lesbians in South Africa, as well as a 2 floor exhibit on a photographer/videographer, Thomaz Farkaz who captured a lot of Brazil’s history from 1940 to 1990, as well as revolutionized Brazilian photography with the camera companies he ran.

I began the walk back to my hostel and came across a giant cemetery and decided to wander around it to take pictures and reflect on the life I’ve been fortunate enough to live so far despite my depression telling me otherwise. The soundtrack I played was perfect as orchid trees with vibrant purple flowers dropped their leaves in the wind and no one else was around besides the entry guard. I am fascinated at the intersection of death and beauty and this cemetery was great for that, especially with a number of tombs being considered abandoned or in vandalized disrepair.

I smelled the flower stands outside of the cemetery to remind me I was alive and not a ghost wandering around, and went into the subway, taking a journey back, witnessing small beautiful displays of humanity all around me. This is already long so I won’t bore you with too many details of dinner, but it was a nice vegetarian restaurant and I had Acarajé com vatapá (a Brazilian national dish that was like an elevated hush puppy) and some fancy mushrooms and breaded eggplant in pasta sauce.

Okay okay, this is so long. Obrigado for reading and boa noite!!! zzzzzzz