Poços de Caldas in Pictures

Poços is a city in the state of Minas Gerais that borders the state of São Paulo. Last weekend, Ruth, her 6 roommates, and I set off to spend a weekend in Minas.

It might seem a little strange to take a trip as a house, but there some backstory. About a month ago, a bunch of old "problem" roommates moved out and new ones moved in. Three of the seven new roommates are gringos, two from Spain and one from Chile, and the other four are Brazilian. While the old roommates were nothing but trouble -- one of them actually refused to pay back rent until she was collectively bitched out by the others -- but the new ones get along really well. Since I spend a lot of time at Ruth's, I hang out with them a lot. They're a very silly and fun bunch, prone to spontaneous song and dance, chicken fights, and gymnastics.

Here it is, Poços in pictures:

Hitting the pavement Saturday morning.



Here I am.



This is a mental defective we picked up on the side of the highway outside of Campinas. Just kidding, this is Sophia from Chile.



Feeding the monkies at a rest stop. The rumors are true, Brazil has mad monkies.



This was the monkey with the best hairdo.



Here's me and the girls (minus Laura) after arriving in Poços. From left to right it's: Teresa, Ruth, Sofia, and me. What a handsome bunch we are.



Going up a mountain in a gondala in Poços.



This is me trying to offset Ruth's enthusiasm for this photo.



Cute.



Poços in all its glory.



This is the mini Christ the Redeemer keeping it real at the top of the mountain. As Ruth noted, this city has a Rio de Janeiro complex: a much smaller city with a much smaller Christ the Redeemer atop a much smaller mountain.


Ruth and I gazing into each other's eyes at the summit.



Human pyramid next to the Christ. From top to bottom, left to right it's: Ruth, Laura, David, Jaia, and Pintor. David's trying to lift up Ruth's skirt (and succeeding). Naturally I beat his ass to a bloody pulp after this.



Ruth defending herself against David's attacks and making everyone fall down in the process. I think that's my hand coming to the rescue.



Heading back down the mountain on foot.



David, Pintor, and Sofia chillin' back at Laura's parent's house.



Teresa playing "he loves me, he loves me not" (apparently "he wants me, he doesn't want me" in Spanish)



The whole crew (minus Ruth) in Poços. In the foreground are Laura's sister and her sister's huband whom we met up with on Sunday.

Word to your mother. Have a good Wednesday.

Update

Here goes.

Over the past month I've started to travel a lot more, hitting such notable destinations as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. I've actually been to São Paulo a bunch of times over the past two months or so for reasons that I will explain later.

Rio was really awesome. That city is much more Brazil to me than São Paulo is. From what I've seen, São Paulo is sort of like New York but with more of the bad stuff and less of the good stuff. While it is in many ways the cultural and financial epicenter of Brazil, it's got no style; sure you can go to museums and get a good job there, but it's big, ugly, dirty, polluted, and dangerous. (São Paulo is really big, enormous to the tune of 20 million people).

Rio, on the other hand, has charm and is a fantastic tourist city (minus the crime which is purportedly even worse than in São Paulo). Rio is warm and sunny and colorful. It has beautiful beaches and incredible sites to visit (Pão de Açúcar and Christ the Redeemer). It has samba and funk and parties in the streets. It's residents walk around in standard Rio attire: t-shirt, shorts, and flip flops. Like the country itself, Rio has beauty and glamour next door to wretched poverty and crime; its favelas literally stretch as far as the eye can see. Rio is Brazil.

My most important announcement isn't about travel and is the primary reason why I haven't been posting. Instead of my usual work-basketball-party routine, I've been in more of a spend-all-my-time-with-my-girlfriend routine. That's right, girlfriend. Her name is Ruth and she is awesome. We've been together for about 2 months now and pretty much all my time not spent working is spent with her. She's an anthropology student at UNICAMP (the big university I live near) in her second to last year. She's short, cute, funny, smart as a whip, and silly as a goose. Here's us together:

Here's us posing for the camera and laughing about some damn thing. Notice the tip toes -- so short!

I wish I had some sillier pictures but alas my mother f-ing camera was stolen. When I get some better ones I'll throw them up here. I think you get the idea though.

We're toeing the line on this being truly serious business. I've met the family a few times (they live in São Paulo and that's why I've been there so much) and she's coming to the U.S. in December and is going to spend Christmas at my house. My plan is to come back next summer after graduation and do a Master's degree at UNICAMP in linguistics. Our travel plans were already prearranged (or at least preconceived) before meeting each other, so this isn't just young love naïvité, but that is a good part of it.

That's enough for today. I'll see you around the next tube of the Internet. Bye bye.

Some Not So Good News

I was planning on blogging next about the trips I took to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, but instead I'm writing about our house being robbed on Monday night.

Around 8:00 pm, four young, masked black dudes came into the house with knives while three of my roommates were home (luckily for me, I was not home when this happened). Two of my roommates tried to fight back and got roughed up a little, but not too bad; one guy got a lightly bruised eye and a fat lip, and the other has a swollen ankle. They tied up my roommates and stole all the laptops and desktop computers in the house as well as various other electronic devices, including my camera, my USB stick MP3 player, and my OLPC laptop.

The laptop isn't such a huge deal since it wasn't all that useful and contained no personal data, but my camera was a nice one and had all my pictures on it; I had downloaded them to Pedro's computer, but that was stolen too. They also stole my damn flip flops (Ipanemas, nice ones) that I bought in Rio and some other trivial stuff. Thankfully my passport and all my important documents are still there. Curiously, they didn't steal my DVDs.

Apparently this kind of thing is common and it isn't. You hear about people getting mugged or robbed or made to withdrawl money by street thug types, but my roommate Thomas said he's lived in Barão Geraldo for 7 years and this is the first time this has happened to him. My roommates said robbers like to target student houses because students are relatively rich and relatively lax about security; with so many people living together (in our case 8), friends come and go and you don't necessarily know everyone. Consequently, the door is usually unlocked when we're there. There's nothing we could have done much differently to prevent this; the robbers jumped our gate and came in through the front door which was unlocked since people were home.

According to my roommates, it's usually young black guys who do this kind of thing; while Brazilians themselves may be less racist, it is still unfortunately the case that in Brazilian society the darker you are, the poorer you tend to be.

Fuckin' social and economic stratification breeding crime. I want my camera and my sandals back...

Gringos

As I'm sure you know, our neighbors to the south have their own special name for us Americans: gringo. It may come as news to you (it did to me) that the word "gringo" in Brazilian Portuguese doesn't have a negative connotation. "Gringo" is used throughout Latin America to designate Americans or more generally "whities," and it may or may not be derogatory depending on how and when it's used. In Brazil, "gringo" has an even broader meaning than in Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, being an informal way to refer to anyone who is foreign:

"Gringo" is thus used today in Brazil in a manner remarkably similar to the way it was used two centuries ago in the Iberian Peninsula. Though it's not meant as an open insult it certainly is not a compliment. It is a euphemism for "funny speaking/looking/acting outsider"; a way of signifying that which is not Brazilian and which has little hope of ever being so. In fact, the term comes awfully close to the original Greek barbaros, a foreign babbler. The term's current preferential association with Americans, Canadians and Northern Europeans is thus perhaps more historically connected to the fact that these groups speak non-Latin based languages ("...foreigners who have a certain kind of accent...") than any physiognomic qualities per se.

The quote comes from an interesting article written by a guy writing his master's dissertation about the term, appropriately entitled "Gringos." He talks about degrees of "gringoness"; one can simply be foreign and thus a gringo, or one can be stereotypically gringo-ish (light eyes/skin/hair, from an imperialist nation, non-Latin language speaker) and very gringo. As a tall, blue-eyed, brown-haired, English speaking American, I am pretty much the epitome of a gringo. My Taiwanese friend, Sphinx, is also a gringa here, but she's less gringo than I am. Even my Columbian exchange student friend Enrique is a gringo in Brazil, a term which, in Columbia, is reserved for Americans.

A Level 5 Gringo