Culture Shocked²

Holy Sweet Jesus I’ve done it again. The gauntlet has dropped and my head strains with the weight and noise of it. Monastic Oklahoma life, in all of its solitude and insulation has quite literally passed away—a swelling and triumphant discorporation leaving me twirling on my callused little toes. For the second time in two years I stepped off the plane with butterflies, rightly anticipating a swathe of verdant greenery and a heady cascade of summer air. Flying into Salvador by day has its charms, with the South Atlantic dancing on the right outside wing, and the white sandy beaches beckoning to the left. As soon as your foot steps off that plane everything changes. Not only does your language and familiarity pass away, but so too the steady cascade of inputs feeding the machine—those patchy variables of everyday life that function with hardly an upward glance. Once in and onto new land, it truly feels like a sudden rebirthing, and all one is left with is to look and feel and touch anew.

Upon my arrival, things got started right and proper with a meeting of my Denver friend Ayda, who in her jubilant and expressive manner so typical of Brazilians picked me up from the city airport. Her brother Ciao took the reigns of the car, but only after a difficult round of Tetris where we tried with great difficulty to fit all three passengers and my luggage into the most mini of miniscule iddy biddy cars.

As we drove through the city, running errands to this place and that – picking up things for the apartment, visiting friends and relatives – my how my foreign eyes slowly began to adjust (or at least attempted to). To those denizens accustomed to first world living, what could be more shocking than a transplant into this.

This city is fulllllll of people. And I mean full. I had to cringe every second or two thinking our car was going to nail some poor passerby making their way down the street. Lines of people, parading every task and masquerade of greater humanity, vibrated as we passed on by. Every bus stop, every city corner, were like mini solar systems, full of groups and assemblies and clusters of stars.

Now, if one were so inclined to play creator, grab up a number of these clusters, hold them in your hand, and then loose them onto this world. The chaos that would ensue, from forces of gravity and boundary, like some great cosmic marbles game, is exactly how I would describe the movement of the city (and especially the traffic). On the road, people cut lanes, slam on their breaks, run through crowds, and completely ignore speed limits, street signs, and polite gestures. How strange that on a social level, I find Brazilians to be the most friendly and helpful of people, but on the street all laws of opposition somehow come into affect. At one point, Ciao got in a fight with Ayda over some petty matter, and decided running red lights in heavy traffic was sound and justifiable. Not to mention, drinking in the car is no big deal, and we all had a couple of beers (albeit light) full and twirling in our bellies.

Yes, life here is indeed inconceivable. One just has to experience it first hand. The poverty here is so endemic, so deeply entrenched; it is hard to picture the city any other way. Hanging out with working class true to rank Brazilians is so different than life in the green tourist zone. Had my maiden voyage to Brazil unfolded as it did yesterday, driving around the slum areas and in full unabashed traffic, I think it would have scared the living shit out of me.
But this time around, things are different. I want to take the authentic path—to live, and love, and learn as a Brazilian, to truly get a handle on what life is really like here. This requires some level of acceptance, and courage, and an ability to forget position and first world ideals. This, I feel, is my path—to be a cultural warrior and combat my scrappy hold on normality.
In just one day, my first day here, I felt more challenged than in the whole of my year and a half return to comfortable living in the United States. Such things are overrated (at least for me, for the time being), and I look forward to this narrow path and the wide array of challenges that now lie ahead.

Departing the Oklahoma sub suburbs.

View outside the living room window. Yeah green!

Cafe da manha

Thought this was such a great subtitle, had to snap a photo.

My bedroom. The mattress is thin, and the air hotttttt, but I call it home.

As morenas do Brasil. Sigh. No caption necessary.