Day 233 Pizza Party

My idea of a pizza party with my coworkers is a little different than what happened last night at the apartment building of Patrícia's coworker.

Were we crowded in a little apartment with plates perched in our laps and no place to set our wine glasses? No. Were we helping ourselves to mediocre pies out of cardboard boxes? No.

We were seated under the stars next to the rooftop terrace pool. The tables were elegantly set and had custom printed menus for the event. We were to get two foccacia appetizers, six kinds of pizza, and two dessert pizzas. The pizza company set up their own high temperature gas fired pizza oven in the terrace kitchen and provided staff that circled the tables offering up slices of delicious ultra thin crust pizzas. Olive oil, wine and conversation flowed freely, and of course, I had my share of all three. At the end, as I finished my banana pizza topped with ice cream and drizzled with copious amounts of chocolate, I still wanted more, but I was already past the too much food point. And it wasn't until this morning that I realized that I went beyond the too much wine point too. Oh well, you only live once so make it count. Life is good if you do it right.

Day 232 Brazilian Work Culture

The difference between the Brasilian work culture and America's is most striking in how much importance they place on building personal relationships. I have been to a number of lunches with Patrícia's coworkers and I am constantly amazed at how close people are, physically and personally. First there is lots of kissing on cheeks and hugging, and then there is a lot of personal interaction outside of the work place. For instance, at lunch the other day, they all planned evening get-togethers, rotating between each others homes. Tonight's event is going to be catered by a pizza company that brings its own pizza oven to your home and cooks to order. We will all split the cost, about $10/person plus wine. Luckily for me, almost all of her coworkers at this company speak English. It should be a loud, rowdy, good time.

The downside of this kind of interaction is that at her last job, she even was obligated to go to her boss's son's birthday party, despite the fact that her boss was a jerk. I guess a little sacrifice to improve workplace harmony is not a terrible thing.

I am also amazed at the quantity of sales people in the shops. In one small shoe store, I counted 8 sales clerks. Lower wages allow for more service, maybe not always good service, but lots of it. For most Americans this would seem like overkill, but Patrícia's reaction in another store perfectly illustrated the Brasilian opinion: we were browsing for a few minutes and no one came over to help us. She said, "I guess they don't want to sell us anything," and we went to another store with more outwardly helpful people. Where Americans expect to be able to browse alone until they ask for help, Brasilians expect the sales person to be right by their side to answer any question. It is weird for me to have someone watching me browse, but I am getting used to it.

Day 223 Catching up with France

I am finally caught up with the galleries! France is up! It was about 5 hours of work to pick pictures, resize them, write the code, build the templates, debug the code, and upload all the pictures. Whew!

I have gotten lazy lately, I apologize. I won't do it again. Really. No really. I mean it. After all, this trip isn't about relaxing and having fun, it is about work, work, work.

Now I have to go take my normal afternoon nap while the cook cleans up the lunch mess.

Tchau!

Day 212 Playing With Fire

We headed to the little town of Goiás Velho to see the Procissão de Fogeréu. This colonial town has a very different character than other cities in Brasil and still has the (seemingly unrepaired) original stone streets laid by slaves from long ago. The streets are so rough that walking on them is dangerous if you are not watching your feet. Cars go very very slow. Speeding is definitely not an issue.

Most of the colonial houses have been preserved and are now shops or restaurants. We were lucky enough to stay in the house of a former Governor of the state of Bahia (Patrícia’s Uncle’s Grandfather) right on the main square across from the palace and the cathedral. It is a lovely spacious and high ceilinged house with courtyards and it could not have been a better base to watch the action.

News crews sporadically interviewed people, getting surplus footage and killing time along the procession route until midnight. The streets and main square started really filling up as the darkness and temperature fell. By 10:00 pm people were positioning themselves. We set up chairs in front of the house, drank beer, and watched people, and waited for the city workers to come by with a ladder and turn off the street lights. Then there was a kids mini-procession, which was a bizarre mix of Halloween and Easter. At this point I took my camera and headed up the now very dark street to watch the drummers signaling the start of the real procession. Fighting the masses of TV crews and photojournalists I wedged myself into position and the streets suddenly got much lighter and smokier as they handed out a few hundred torches to the crowd. The torches were black painted pop cans on sticks, filled with kerosene and a wick. I cannot imagine something this cool happening in the USA.

Then came the procession of Roman soldiers looking for Christ. Dressed in Klu Klux Klan like robes, but in much more flamboyant colors, they marched through the streets with torches, a sense of purpose, and an amazing disregard for their own ankle safety. They looked like a homosexual version of the KKK, or as I like to call them, the GayKK. I caught up with them at the church at the far side of town and watched as Christ (they found him) said something in Portuguese and then they were off again to somewhere else. It was brief, weird, and very interesting. There was a nice black and white t-shirt of the event, but it would have gotten me killed in the USA so I wisely decided to buy one with a view of the colonial streets.

Day 210 Eating and Being Eaten

I was in the busy downtown of sweltering Goiania, a couple hours from Brasilia. It was a Greek restaurant, or so the sign said. The décor of the restaurant did indeed give a slight passing impression of the Mediterranean, although, the reality was pure Brasilian. It was exactly like the many “Brasilian” restaurants I saw in Spain that had nothing to do with Brasilian food. Maybe it is an American expectation that a themed restaurant should have the corresponding food. Regardless, the selection of food was wide-ranging and amazingly high quality for a buffet. The most amazing part was the price. My loaded plate had a large assortment of seafood, meats, salads, and fruits. I grabbed a Coke and it came out to a whole $4.50, including coffee afterward. That readily explained the other hundred or so people in the restaurant. I love how cheap food is here. I can even get my fill of sushi for $12.

I had gone traveling with Patrícia’s parents for a few days while she worked. The plan was that we would go ahead, making a few stops on the way to visit relatives, and she would meet us at the family’s farm for the weekend. I knew I was in for a lot of sitting around smiling and listening to conversations I could not understand. I was right, but it was better than it sounds. When I get fatigued trying to understand the discussion, I pay attention to nonverbal cultural details and surroundings. And to be fair, a few of her relatives speak English so I was able to talk quite a bit.

The stop in the religious town of Trindade was interesting. The town is dominated by a giant box-like cathedral on a hill, replete with long, twisting, freeway-style, elevated drive ramps to the font door. It is the site of a yearly pilgrimage and was sized to accommodate the occasional surging throngs of the devoted. The rest of the year, the under-decorated, voluminous box seems ridiculously out of place with its setting in the little lower-income town. The interesting part of the cathedral was the Room of Miracles underneath. First, there was an inexplicable display of general antiques ranging from old tv’s and typewriters to farming equipment. Second, there were tens of thousands of photographs of people, in various states of health, mounted on panels throughout the room. Some were before and after photos, others were only before shots. It looked as if some represented miracles and others were prayer for them. Lastly, two walls were covered with amateur paintings of violent accidents. There were machinery accidents, landslides, horse falls, fires, dog attacks…all violent and frequently bloody. Unfortunately, no one could explain the purpose of these “works of art” to me. I especially was baffled by the mural by the door in which a man in a normal looking religious scene is unperturbed by having his leg eaten by a dog. Weird.