Joints and joy.

I´m taking off today from Sao Paulo. I could use another few days here at least, but I will be back next Thursday or Friday. I finally found a coupla places that I feel at home with. I spent all day Friday in Villa Madelena, a sort of bohemian section of town that´s part Silverlake and part East Village. At night the restaurants fill up and people drink into the light of the early morning hours. I did some shopping in Villa Madelena during the daytime -- my backpack is really about to burst and I´ve resorted to standing on it in order to get the zipper closed -- and met up with Aysha and Rhys for our goodbye dinner and drinks soiree; they were taking off to Salvador the next day and I do feel sad to see them go because we got along ridiculously well. I dont remember much of the night because we had two bottles of wine and earlier I had gone into a street art gallery and gotten beer from the curator and then had two glasses of coffee. It did involve stumbling around from bar to bar and craving chocolate brownies. Yea, lightweight, I know. But yea, the gallery was really cool, it featured a ton of graphic designers by day turned experimental artists at night kind of thing, quite the same type of stuff I try to turn the kids onto for my various magazine articles. I got a bunch of tips from the curator on where to go and how to find out about things going on... too bad I couldnt have gotten this information earlier! People here are so friendly and always eager to help out. You know how in some cities in the states, you´re held responsible if you witness an incident and blatantly ignore it? That´s not how it is here. Brazilians are never too cool for school.

The next day I took a long walk and ended up back in Villa Madelena, but what a lucky trip that ended up being: I stumbled across a small plaza leading to a long alleyway of graffiti. In the plaza a dub/dancehall party was beginning to bump and the orange flare of joints looked like fireflies floating in between the crowd. And down the street I also found another street party, this one funk and soul and hip-hop. Someone had organized a DJ setup right in front of a lanchonette, a common Brazilian fast food type place that specializes in burgers, Brazilian fried food of a variety and beer. Beautiful. So I danced for five hours -- hell, they were playing Quasimoto next to Aretha Franklin and James Brown and bossa nova, samba and more Brazilian music -- and met a bunch of cool Brazilian cats at the soul event; I drank so much beer and had half a cup of cachaca, straight... agh... so slight headache today. We´d get a little bored and then head to the other event, and back again when we felt like it. You could never find anything like this in the states, if not alone the no-no of drinking on the street.
I finally noticed no one speaks English here, even the young people. I think the public schools here dont emphasize English too much. Yan, please correct me if I am wrong but the group I met pointed it out.


LATER
I am in Sao Jaio del Rei, a town with a colonial center that I cant really observe well because it~s the evening now. But so far, so quaint. The ride here was different than what I´ve been getting used to seeing in Brazil -- instead of coconut and palm trees though, it´s all hilly. Occasionally scarlet red gashes of earth interrupt the green carpet of pastures, and there´s a distinctly more relaxed feel here. Even the bus itself, they left all the windows open, much to my relief. Usually they turn on the air conditioning till it´s a freezer box and they dont provide any blankets. But the winner of the worst bus rides ever has to be Bolivia. I dont remember if I´ve really gone into how bad they are, but yea, you´d think you were in Antartica when you closed your eyes. No bathrooms on the busses either even for the long distance rides, and I´ve heard countless stories of Bolivians pissing on the floor, etc. And the smell on the Bolivian busses... humanity is all I can say. I smelled humanity, every inch of its putrid body, in Bolivia many times.
Speaking of bodies, I learned yesterday that the OK sign that I´ve been steadily relying on as a way to communicate since I cant speak Portuguese -- thumb and index finger touching in a shape of a circle, with the rest of the fingers pointed upward -- also means asshole. Great. Thumbs up it is then.

I was thinking on the bus ride if I ever cant find a job, my last resort may be professional mimeing (miming? mimisim?). I have gotten so good at using body language to get something I need or to ask important questions. You should see me, arms and legs in motion, face turned into a mode of query. I would never do this shit at home, but I when you travel, you rely on your primal instincts.
I was also thinking, on the same bus ride, that I have changed as a person. I am not sure how, but because I have put myself into new situations in a new place, I am new. I always used to complain at home that things were always the same. Sure, I´d experience new things at home, but you dont go through as complete a transformation as when you´re put into a foreign (literal too sometimes) place. I really think that is one of the keys to changing your life. And with this I have never felt so much more strongly about being able to live somewhere else and really make a go of it. Living a new life, adapting. And hell no it will not be in the U.S.!