The Beginning of the End

People have been telling me for months that my time in Brazil is drawing to a close. I've laughed at the notion, but in the past few weeks, the next "generation" of IGERT students have been visiting Rio to plan for their research semesters next year and so the beginning of the end is now taking a more realistic form. 

As I showed the students around the university campus and parts of the city, I realized I know these areas better than I thought. Between walks on the beach, endless pay-by-the-kilo restaurants, and bizarre street-sign explanations, I realized that while I may still be an estrangeira, I still know Rio better than most tourists and I now have my own stories and soundtracks to supplement the typical city guide. And yes, I have thought to myself that if there weren't people to see and places to be back home, I could surely stay a while longer ...

In the next few days, I will have two final university meetings: one with each of my Brazilian advisors.  I didn't get nearly as far as I had laid out in my pre-semester research plan and I never did get to present my research progress to the department (my fault, not theirs), but I am still relatively content with what I did accomplish.  I learned how engineering research is conducted at a typical Brazilian university, I learned about the state of life cycle assessment and other sustainable engineering analyses in Brazil, and I learned more than I could have ever imagined about sugarcane ethanol production in Brazil. While I could have gathered much of this knowledge in the U.S. by poking around online and finding the pertinent contacts, one of the biggest advantages of working directly on a Brazilian unviersity campus proved to be my colleagues' desire to make sure I understood. Perhaps they didn't want me misrepresenting Brazil in the U.S., but for whatever reason, I am truly thankful. Several times, people started spewing forth as many names as I could possibly write down at once: "X is interesting, and so are Y and Z. In São Paulo, A worked with B, who then conducted multiple projects with C, D, and E [...]" and so on and so on. E-mail is a poor medium for such spontaneity.   

Today I am preparing my semester summary for my Brazilian advisors, detailing what I have accomplished while under their guidance and describing my plans for the next few months. (I intend to finish this PhD by April 2012!) After my final meeting Tuesday afternoon, I will leave the campus island of Fundão and set my sights on the greater South American continent. For the month of July, I have the distinct pleasure of being a nomad (of the graduate-student thesis-writing type). My only restriction is that I return to Rio by July 30 for my flight back to the U.S. There are so many possibilities, many of which pull me in completely different directions, so expect a travel calendar in one of my upcoming posts. Tchau for now! 

You never know where the path may lead. (Parque da Cidade)

Woman Travelling Alone

I was going through some things today and found this [hand]written snippet from my last trip to São Paulo. The theme is all too common; I’m just adding my own personal experience.

I often forget I am a woman travelling alone in a foreign country. That is, until some random guy on the street reminds me of it. “You’re by yourself?” (Excuse me?) This time his name was Ricardo:  “REE-chard in English.” He was a well-dressed businessman, as is common in the financial capital of Brazil. He did not impress me.

I had been walking down the Avenida Paulista and we both stopped at a traffic light. I think he was surprised to find a woman walking as quickly as he was. Everyone around us was walking exceedingly slowly. 

He asked me if I knew the city well and if I was a brasileira, the latter obviously just to be kind and/or to start a conversation. I told him I had a map of the city, and no, I was not a brasileira – I was an americana.

“Oh, California!” he exclaimed. “I took an English course in California once. There are no good English classes in São Paulo. Do you give English classes?”

Now São Paulo is a metropolitan city—comparable to a Brazilian New York—so I find it difficult to believe it would offer no good English classes.  But I continued. “No, I don’t give English classes. I study environmental engineering in Rio.”

“Oh really?” he asks, surprised.

It turns out that he is a naval engineer and lived in Rio for four years. I have no idea whether this is true or not, but I give him the benefit of the doubt.

We pause at another light. We’ve walked two blocks (with a lot of chit-chat in between) and are now standing in front of a subway station.  “Do you have a phone number?” he asks. “You know – just to talk or if I am ever in Rio …”

“Oh, I’m going to be travelling soon,” (which was true).

He looked at his watch and at the station stairs. “Okay, this is where I have to go. It was nice meeting you. Good luck in Rio.”

“It was nice meeting you, too,” I replied. “Good luck with your work.”

We shook hands and thus ended the conversation with Creepy Man # too-many-to-count. 

Don't misunderstand -- I love meeting people while travelling. However, I really wish the middle-aged men who can’t imagine a woman ever travelling alone would stop reminding me of the fact that I’m a woman in a foreign country, travelling alone. Luckily for both of us, I’m street smart, too.

Update

Hello everyone,

Sorry for the lack of entries lately. As many of you know, my grandfather (my mother's father) passed away two Sunday mornings ago. It's been a rough ten days, but I have been encouraged by all of your kind e-mails, offers, and Skype conversations. Thank you. As for the blog, I already have a backlog of photos, which means I have a backlog of entries to write, too. I'll be writing these in the next few days, so be sure to check back soon.

In Memoriam:

Philip J. Kuznick, Jr. (11/15/1931-06/12/2011)

Dia dos Namorados

Today is the Brazilian version of Valentine's Day, "Dia dos Namorados." On Friday, I saw this piece of artwork on a wall in Ipanema. [Cue "Girl from Ipanema" theme song.]

Someone probably just put it up in commemoration of the holiday, but I think they should keep it up all year round. It's so pretty!

Virtual Refinery Tour

It's in Portuguese, but it's still so cool: a virtual [click-and-play video] tour of a typical sugarcane ethanol plant in Brazil. The tour is sponsored by UNICA, Brazil's sugarcane industry assocation.

Click here to play.

Rua do Lavradio

My friend Dani and I trekked out to Lapa on Saturday afternoon to visit the street fair, "Feira da Rua do Lavradio." Lapa is not far from Santa Teresa and is better known for its music scene -- street bands and music shops during the day and nightclubs and live music in bars at night.
The street fair at Rua do Lavradio is known for its antiques, and indeed, we did find cast-iron irons and old Singer sewing machines. There were also more Brazilian crafts, like colorful clothing and paintings from the Northeastern part of the country and various musical instruments. I saw a t-shirt with this design and it took me a moment to figure out what it said:

When I figured it out (asking Dani for the keyword "madeireiro"), both she and the vendor burst out laughing: "Save the Amazon: Burn a logger." They weren't laughing because the message was that funny, but because my expression changed the second I understood. "Aha!" (In case you were wondering, I didn't buy the shirt.) 

After we wandered the fair a few times and Dani bought a maraca-like instrument made from a small gourd, we went in search of food. The restaurant we found served mediocre gnocchi (logically spelled "nhoque" in Portuguese) and great fruit juices (mango for me, lime "lemonade" for Dani -- discussion ensued as to why Brazilian lemonade is made from limes!). What was really excellent was dessert. On a whim, I ordered what Dani ordered, which I was assured would be delicious. It was. It was a little bunt-shaped chocolate cake, filled with chocolate cream, served with vanilla bean ice cream, and drizzled with chocolate syrup for good measure (below, with Dani). We both agreed we won't need any more chocolate anytime soon! I also stand by my opinion that the cake resembles a volcano, and given the name of the street "Lavradio", it's an appropriate comparison, too!

So after devouring our chocolate volcanoes, we walked back to the subway and each took our respective trains home. It was an exhausting day, but absolutely worth it!   

City Park

Friday afternoon I visited Rio's City Park (Parque da Cidade), which is only ten minutes by foot from where I'm living in Gávea. I had heard that there was a park "at the end of the road" in Gávea, so I just followed the road and there was the park! (I had seen it before, but from a distance, it looks like private property, so I didn't venture in.) 

The park turned out to be a typical Brazilian park: lush, green vegetation with lots of bamboo. There is also a stream that divides the front of the park into two halves. Occasionally, I found some wildlife. The butterfly below let me get close enough to it to get a picture, but the monkeys, which were swinging from tree limb to tree limb, had no such intention. I'll just have to return soon to get a good picture of them.

As I was walking down the hill from the park, I had a chance to see the city from a new perspsective. In the picture below, you can see some brightly painted houses, protected by a stone wall, and in the background one of Rio's favelas, which is the conglomeration of makeshift houses all stacked on top of one another. Many favelas have no running water, no electricity, and have open sewer systems, if they have any at all. The water is even more contaminated than typical Rio city water, and where there is electricty, the wires hang in tangled bundles that can easily catch on fire. Rio's favelas used to be run entirely by druglords. Now that the police have entered all of the favelas and set up security stations, the favelas are safer than they used to be, but they are still far from safe. Today, Brazil is working on various government plans to improve the state of the favelas. It is a long, arduous process, but the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, both to be hosted in Rio, give the government incentive to work as quickly and efficiently as possible.

To end on a lighter note: as I was walking back down the hill, there was a woman sitting inside the doorway to one of these houses, selling what looked like baked goods. As I approached, I saw exactly what she was selling: chocolate-covered brigadeiros! Of course I bought one. I need to find the recipe for these little balls of deliciousness before I leave Brazil.

...And She's Back!

Sorry for the silence, everyone. I caught a cold-sinus-feverish flu last week and wasn't doing much of anything. At least it wasn't malaria or dengue!

While I was sick, Rio had some heavy rainstorms. It's basically the wet season here now, which means there's a good chance of a serious rainstorm happening at least once or twice a week. One difference between coastal storms and inland city storms is that along the coast (i.e. beach), the storms create sand-mud, which gets washed up along the paved surfaces that line the beach. All of that sand has to be shoveled--just like snow!--back onto the beach. The sand didn't stop people from enjoying a Sunday morning stroll along the edge of the beach, where I took the pictures below. The beach itself, however, was deserted except for the surfers that were searching out the post-storm, high-tide waves. There certainly were a few!