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Caipirinha: This drink is a mixture of cachaça (native Brazilian liquor; very sweet and potent) and lime and sugar.

As my interest has risen in the passionate culture of Brazil, I have explored their music, their language, and their…appearance. I had not as of yet made much of an effort to taste their cuisine. I had a vague inclination that the food in Brazil is tied closely with that of Argentina – specifically, I had decided that these two countries had little in common with the strict diet of comida tipica found in many Central American countries. (In my experience, comida tipica changes a little bit in each place, but revolves around rice, beans, and some sort of meat fritado.) I also had been exposed to cachaça, the elemental native Brazilian liquor. I enjoyed my shot of cachaça. I could not describe it any more that “enjoyable,” because I don’t remember. A quick Wikipedia search and I was inundated with different styles of cooking from different sections of Brazil. That only makes sense, of course, seeing as the landscape and cultures from these different sections are very varied. From the northeast, which sees seafood on its plate often, comes Moqueca, a seafood stew. Strangely this stew is cooked without adding any water – the stock liquid is palm oil and coconut milk.

Favelas: There are over 600 in Rio de Janeiro alone

Olodum: This bloco afro rocks the block, no joking around.

Thomas Kohnstamm: Going to Hell.

I started reading Thomas Kohnstamm’s “Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?” without any real expectation. Kohnstamm was a traveling journalist for the Lonely Planet. This book was advertised as the “real story” behind the writing of a guide book. The excerpt on the back depicts a scene in which Thomas impromptly has sex with a waitress, and later gives the restaurant a solid review, saying “the table service is friendly.” I should have known that the book would not tell of glorious scenery and friendly locals. (After hours of reading, I am writing in Kohnstamm’s style!) The book is self-centered, but that is fine with me. Thomas is constantly getting himself into the most depressingly hopeless situations, managing to survive on what seems to be mostly alcohol. As a result, his depictions of Brazil do not differentiate one place from another. Rio de Janeiro is the city, in which the author sleeps with the Austrian flight attendant from his flight, with whom he is sharing a hotel room. The next night, he parties till dawn, ending it by making love to a Brazilian woman he met at a bar in the bottom of a boat. Recife is not the Afro-Brazilian musical center I was expecting to read about, but the city in which Kohnstamm shared a room with a prostitute, her friend, and her friend’s boyfriend for a few weeks. In Jericoacoara, he needed money to survive, and bought 50 ecstasy pills on loan, without any plan for selling them. The alcohol-fueled memories make everyone out to be a villain, or at the very least outlandish.

I picked a random Brazilian movie, and it turned out to be perfect for this particular assignment. I watched “Cinema, Aspirins, and Vultures,” a movie made in 2005 about a German man traveling through the barren desert of Northeast Brazil in 1942. He left Germany because he did not want to participate in the war there, and he landed a job selling aspirin to the poor townsfolk of the nordeste, which is experiencing a drought. The film uses strange camera technique – it almost looks like the movie was shot in 1942. It focuses the camera on the people in the film, and so there are not many (if any) landscape shots, despite the open space to shoot film. Surely a high definition camera would capture all sorts of colors, but this movie was about the characters’ relationship with each other. That said, the main character, Johann represents a true traveler, as our class has defined it. Johann claims that he left Germany with no particular destination. He came to Brazil and liked it, so he stayed. He seems to do everything without reflecting on how this journey is changing him. He found work that allowed him to continue seeing new places, and he does this work efficiently. There is no sign from him that he does not belong in Brazil selling aspirin. One would think that this was his destined place in the world from the beginning. Tara Kolton wrote in her essay, “It is in this light that the Western world (particularly America here) views the less developed world as a place that can teach the traveler something about himself.”(21) Johann, a Western traveler of the 20th century, seems to have known everything about himself before he even started his journey.

Machado: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was a canonic Brazilian writer.

For my museum visit, I rode my skateboard to the Bea Art Hall Gallery, which is actually the hallway of the Centro Cultural Brasil in New York. They are showing about 10 pieces, all of which are inspired by the writing of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, a novelist, short story writer, and poet, who lived and worked during the 19th century. The pieces invoked images of Brazil, which is only natural since Machado de Assis never left Rio de Janeiro. One painting jumped out at me, because the whole canvas, about the size of my midsection, displayed two toucans. I could not fully translate the Machado quotation next to the painting, and so I asked for the only employee there to help me translate. The words read something along the lines of “God, you have given man a face or friendship. Devil, you have made men confused between love and friendship.” And the picture was of two toucans. The woman said that the toucans were specific to the Amazon, and represented Brazil. Another instillation piece had leaves strewn about on a shelf. All of the leaves were green, yellow, and black, which I took to represent the Brazilian flag. There were some portraits of Machado de Assis, one of which had lines of his writing spewing out of his mouth. To tell the truth, the art itself did not give me any particular impression of Brazil, or even of Machado de Assis’ works.

On my first google-search for “Brazil,” I found some very stereotypical reasons to visit Brazil. Alongside some maps, there are pictures of girls in bikinis, people playing soccer, women wearing next to nothing for Carnaval, a coffee plantation, the statue of Jesus on top of Rio de Janeiro, and beaches. In searching through Brazil travel websites, beaches and bikinis were not displayed as often as I would have thought. On the other hand, there are many photos that show Rio de Janeiro from the top of Corcovado Mountain, where the statue of Christ the Redeemer opens his arms. Everyone seems to be impressed by the image of this statue. Even national geographic has a picture! This one is my favorite that I have found.

turkey: Perhaps the most AUTHENTIC interaction I could have had in Mexico.

I have been having fun finding RSS feeds to add to my Newsgator account. I like being able to scroll though different topics that relate to Brazil. I found one feed from BrazilNews.net and I thought this would be the most informative for news from the country. Recently, however, most of the news feeds are either about the Brazilian Grand Prix or the U17 world cup going on in New Zealand. There have been a few articles about the drug enforcement in Bolivia. It seems that the Bolivian government is accusing the US of espionage and funding criminal groups. I found a fun article with the headline, “Latin America indifferent over US election poll reveals.” All-in-all, Brazilnews.net is a fun feed to browse.
I have a feed that is all photos of Brazil. The site that is connected with is not set up very well, and so every post is of only one photo, which is not usually deserving of it’s own individual blog post. Then again, one picture of a road cutting into the Amazon was paired with a caption speaking of the apparent lawlessness of the region – it was enough to start my mind wandering into my romantic future as a traveler in Brazil. I liked the idea of receiving photos, and so I searched for feeds that would deliver visual stimulation. Lonely Planet has a feed specifically for photos of various places.
The first feed I subscribed too is called “Made in Brazil.” This looked like it was devoted to pop culture of various kinds in Brazil. After a short period of browsing, I found out that it specializes in tantalizing pictures of hunky men; men in speedos on the beach, men in underwear advertisements, and male model competitions. It is a feed that includes pieces on homosexuality and homophobia in Brazil. While not something I intended to focus on, I know that gender politics in Brazil are different than here, and it will be interesting to keep an eye on.