Christmas in Brazil
25 december 2000
How was the stay?
Well, mixed of course, as, by now you will have realised, is everything. On the whole though it was quite excellent. The worst thing to cope with was The Christmas boredom that accompanies even the most well-endowed two week rainy Christmas break. The day time was the most responsible for the tedium, the average consisting of laying in bed for as long as possible to squeeze every drop of sleep from my corpse before finally giving in to the day and getting up, usual around 10:30. (Ah ha! You thought I was going to say lunch time didn't you?) So, get up have some bread and coffee check the weather again feel tired and go back to bed 'till about lunch time. (Well,I
was on holiday.)Get up, chat a bit with Andy and Soria over lunch about what to do with the rest of the day. Andy would go for some kind of wizard game on his computer and Soria would watch TV. I would probably have done either one of these but I didn't have a computer and I couldn't understand the TV.
So weather permit, I'd often go for a walk. I now have "the knowledge" of Varginha. Enjoyed it a lot. It's a great little city but so, so civilised compared to Olinda. Aside from the obvious differences, it could be any small city in Europe. When I was here before, I spent too much time working to really meet the city and the kind of 'general' population. The only people we met were the night people. When Lisa was here she said it was quite boring, and in that, it compared to Olinda (which is also called 'sleep city' by the way). It wasn't boring in the sense that there was nothing going on though, but it was so calm, tranquil and predictable.
Everybody going about their business, doing the shopping, going to the bank, walking here and there. There are no manic combies and the bus drivers could give a lesson or two to "City Bus" in Plymouth. You could pick your moment to cross the road without fear of some lunatic putting pedal to metal and crossing three lanes to get you before you got to the other side. BORING! No, I exaggerate. No guides, no people hanging around, no poverty, no stuck-up rich white 'shoppingmallites', but NO MUSIC! Of course there were all of these, but they weren't so obvious. Anyway, that was the daytime ambience.
And guess what? There's NO CARNIVAL here this year for the second year running. Apparently the local govenment can't afford (or be bothered) to repair and prepare the floats. Now that's something you they wouldn't get away with in Olinda. That really would cause a riot in Sleep City.
Nice walking around though. You see countryside here, which is what I miss in Olinda. It's hilly and very green and you can see loads within walking distance. Olinda really is just buildings, beautiful buildings, but not countryside. People have gardens here and drive a few miles out and its like a tropical Devon or Yorkshire. There are clean rivers you can swim in and rocky outcrops and waterfalls. All you get outside of the thin line of coconut palmed beach areas of Pernambuco is sugar can plantations and further in pretty dry sparse desert??? Still, can't have it all (in one place anyhow...)
What else? Well the grill was still very much the grill (for those who know what that means.) Many faces haven't changed (save for a few more wrinkles). Cruising still goes on with as much cool gusto as ever. I'm sure that place would sell only half the beer if it wasn't for the need to wash down the exhaust fumes from all the doodes burning off from the corner. The grill though did seem to be the only place left with any life. NO MUSIC though. Well, only occasionally when some guy would turn up and blast everyone from his car boot. Normal.
We checked out the old haunts, shop center (where I never saw more than six people), lan cassa, Panamar. All empty. Mind you, Christmas holiday Andy and Soria and Me were tending to keep more "sensible" hours than we did when we were 'working' here for Standard, and as far as I recall not that I ever checked the time much, things didn't kick off 'till about 1:00am then anyway. And we had more local guides. And we had a bigger party of animals. Thinking back to those times, with all the energy and the number of ex-pats and the excitement of the locals for our descendance upon them, the whole thing reached a kind of critical mass and became a kind of nucleonic PARTYcle explosion. No wonder ET decided to join us.
Now though the whole place seems to have quietened down dramatically. At least that was my impression. The women were still as beautiful as ever though, and still in abundance it has to be said, though again, a lot more civilised it would seem (damn! (only joking Sharon.))
Christmas itself? Well that was nice. With Sorias family. As an occasion though, a bit of a non-event by UK standards. Though the malls in particular were stuffed full of really Tacky2 jangle bangles and kiddy Santa rides and enormous forty foot high Christmas tree mountain grotto structures festooned with yucky stuffed dolls which twisted their heads and arms in an eerie slow motion, punctuated with the occasional mechanical Hick-Up. Aside from all this Americana stuff in the malls and a few bits and pieces in other shops the only form of Christmas decoration you see around is those tiny little lights. White lights. Strings of them. Sheets of them. Whole walls, whole buildings, whole office blocks covered in them. Millions and millions of them. Fixed, flashing, pulsating rippling in waves. Hanging in cascades from balconies and roof tops. Each building competing with the next for pea bulb power. But apart from al this, you wouldn't really know it was Christmas.
So at Soria's house, the feast. Christmas Eve. A kind of buffet feast, mostly beautifully cooked meat, loads and loads of it, that you hacked from the bone yourself (sorry veggies) and as much beer as you could drink. Though here your more likely to fall asleep within the four or five hours it takes you to get merely merry on it. There was some whiskey and some pingar, though not in abundance, so I played it safe. The feast began at around ten in the evening, by which time most people had arrived and were making merry. Still no music though! At the strike of midnight, it was present exchange time. There being no tree or formal display of the meager wealth of presents that was to be exchanged, it was a kind of running around to respective bedrooms and getting stuff from under beds and giving it to other folks. It was all over in about twenty minutes, at which time, the feasting continued. Now, the serious drinkers got stuck well in, 'till they became silly drinkers. Only a couple though, and they only started wobbling a bit.
By about 2:00, most of the sensible family had toddled off home, most of the wobblers had wobbled off to bed and the dregs were drained. Couldn't understand it myself. It all seemed to be done and done with in a wink. No music, no dancing and no party games. Nerurgh.
So to bed.
The next day, or rather Christmas day as it was but boxing day as it was in our terms, was just that. All the folks coming around again (some geographically and other physically) and trying to finishing up the grub. 1:00 till 4:00 saw me watching a dubbed, taped off the TV video of Titanic (would you believe) with Soria's two brothers and their girlfriends and a couple of cousins. When I did see that film in UK, I remember it being a bit drawn out, but three hours of not understanding a word? Still it had about the same interest value for me as before, so it passed the afternoon in a very satisfactory boxing day kind of way.
And that was it really. A very pleasant, but rather short Christmas experience.
I hope your Christmases were all good too.
New year was good too, though I can't be arsed to go into all the details of that as well, any more than you'll be bothered to read it. It did involve fifteen peops driving to another town, (one car running out of petrol in the dark dark countryside) to this bar with lots of other people and MUSIC (electronically accompanied 'bontempi' with vocalised musician), and drinking AS MUCH AS YOU COULD from 10:00pm - 4:00am. Plus other goodies like food and fruit. Bloody good fun. Excellent night. And all for just eight quid a head. The bar was next to and open to the street where all kinds of people were playing and letting off fireworks. The strike of midnight was exceptional. So, no details, but that was it.
So, what else. Oh, forgot to say, but I'm sure you've guessed by the epic proportions of this piece of work, that I'm now on my way home. Decided to skip the bus thing this way. Well the bus only cost sixty quid odd, but for the three days odd it took I consumed about twenty quids worth of fast crap en route. I know that's an awful, lot of crap at these prices, and its not bad crap, but it sure does get a bit repetitious. The flight about £120 and including the five hour trip from Varginha to São Paulo and a three hour connection will take twelve hours. I'll almost fit that in between breakfast and tea. And I'll be home in time for Z4 tonight and I won't get high jacked on the way (fingers Xed.)
So, one last thing (honest.) Just as I was wondering how I was going to get through the last boring weekend on my own in a hotel, in the rain (my flight was for Sunday, Andy & Soria are going away Friday for the weekend). In true Brazil fashion the sun came out and I got an invite from a Mariza (a friend of Soria who came to UK for a while) and to go with her, her husband a bunch of mates to São Tome on Friday. São Tome is a pretty special place in this area. So that's that sorted.
São Tome is city (town) atop of a white rock mountain. There are quite a lot of quarry workings around but the town itself is all a bit weird. Everything from the Church to the restaurant tables is made out of this white sandy/quartzy/micary kind of sedimentary stone. You can really see for miles from there and it's all a bit of a spiritual hippie kind of place. Pretty commercialised with Totness stuff but a nice place all the same. Some great well priced restaurants and pousadas but best of all, the surrounding area is littered with rivers, rock pools and waterfalls. And the water is warm The weather was superb. Beautiful blue sky and really hot. Visited three of the falls Had a good day of alternating dips, douches, cervajers and sun bathes till it got too dark to do any more.
We went back to the town to a Pizza restaurant for and a cycle of the best flavored pizzas I think I've had. Served, of course on a white, though slightly scorched, stone platter.
At this point we should have gone home, but Mariza's husband suggested staying at the nearby farm of one of his relatives. He has fourteen brothers and sisters. Half of us decided to stay, but the others had to go home. So bla bla bla. We stayed bla bla. Did some more waterfalls yesterday, bla bla. Finally got to Mariza's house in Paraguacu for 11:00. Eat. Showered. Went out with some of the family at 1:00am. Bar closed at 2:00am. Left next bar at 5:00. Bed by 5:30. Up 7:30am to catch the 9:00 bus to São Paulo. Bla bla, and here we are.
One thing I didn't tell of in the last stuff was of this amazing and enormous spider's web. A whole colony of hundreds of big black spiders the size of my thumb all working together to make this net. It was stretched across two tree trunks about twelve feet apart and twelve feet high, right across a pathway. It was dusk and they were all busying away setting out to entrap the next passer by. Imagine walking that path at night, straight into the net covered in spiders about ten inches apart. Urgh. I'm not squeamish normally but I can't imagine coping with that. I didn't have my camera with me unfortunately but here's another picture that might piss you off. (Looking a bit plump these days.)
