Beach House, Coming Out, Pipa, Natal, School, and Survival Orientation

Gah, I haven't been updating this as much as usual. At the time of writing this, I am two days into week seven (I know, seven weeks, already?). This covers weeks three and four. Also, muitas palavras. You have been warned.

------------------------------

Saturday morning Rapha had a friend over, and we went down to the soccer cage and played a game called gol a gol, where the cage is split down the middle and each person plays both the role of goalie and offensive person. Barefoot. It's very simple, but actually pretty challenging, and it works both on aiming the ball and defending.

Is that not a beautiful staircase?

Later that day we went to a beach house...it's Mae's uncle's. Here are some of my favorite pictures that I took: 

Two beats, side-by-side

The house and backyard

The trees in Brazil are generally friendly

Bella and Rapha in the pool

It's symbolic of something, right? ;P

I can just imagine an old couple sitting in these chairs,
remembering the old days by the ocean...

I enjoy the beautiful simplicity of this picture

Out of the barren sand springs life....

Do you see the stairs?

Dead fish! :D 

Stretching to reach the horizon

A praia é muita bonita....

---------------------------------
That following Monday, I took a big step in my transition process: I came out to my classmates. 

The attitudes towards gay people in Brazil are so much different than they are in the US. In the States, there's a stigma with being gay - you can't be gay and do this and you're expected to act a certain way and talk a certain way and walk a certain way and there is this cultural misunderstanding that gay people are fundamentally different from other people.

There's brain research and digit-ratio theory and the like, but that's just biological. That's the difference between me and my sister. We look different. I'm a boy, and she's a girl. Her skin is darker than mine. I'm older than her.

Remember AFS's golden rule: It's not better, it's not worse, it's just different.

And so therefore, we should treat it the same.

In my region, the Northeast, I've been told that there's something called machoismo, which is best described as the idea that a man should be, well, macho. Prove his manliness. I have encountered little of this.

-------------------------------------

We had Friday off for Student's Day, and Monday off for the Patron Saint of Fortaleza, so it was a long weekend. My family took me to Natal.

Natal is another major city in the Northeast, although its not as large as Fortaleza. Because it's about a 7-hr car ride, and because the Brazilian countryside is sparsely populated (thereby creating a monotonous landscape), people usually go by plane, but, because I am not made out of money, we went by car.

For the first few days, we actually went to a beach called Pipa. The beach is called as such because when the Portuguese arrived, they saw a rock that looked like a barrel, and in Portuguese word for barrel is pipa, so it was called Pipa. I get the feeling that, in general, European explorers are not creative. Newfoundland? Iceland? Cape Horn?

But, regardless of their names, Pipa and Natal were a lot of fun. We went to the Praia de Amor (literally Beach of Love...it's named because the waterline at the shore dips in the center, so it looks like the top of a heart), but first we had breakfast. 

There. Were. Monkeys. I kid you not, there were adorable little monkeys that would come to eat the scraps people left at the tables. They let us get close, and consequently, we snapped dozens of photos. They didn't care. They wanted our food.

Mae's friend from Natal, Kelva, came to visit us at Pipa. She brought her husband, Aldaberto, her son Filipe, his girlfriend, another boy named Leo who is the son of another of Mae's friends that lives in Brazilia (the capital), and Leo's girlfriend. Kelva also has another son, Pedro, but he couldn't come. Both Leo and Filipe were in college. Pedro is in his last year in HS, although he's two years older than me. In Brazil, when people go on an exchange year (as both Filipe and Pedro did...to Austria and Germany, respectively), they have to repeat whatever year they missed. This is due to the structure of the Brazilian school system. 

My Portuguese was improving to the point of being able to hold a simple conversation, so I spoke with Kelva and Leo's girlfriend, as they spoke very little English. Filipe would sometimes speak to me in English just to help out - he's actually an AFS volunteer in Brazil, and he's gone through the exchange program, so he's another great resource for me. 

Eventually, we decided to go off in search of food. Well, let me tell you, there weren't actually any roads, so we went full-out 4-wheel terrain. Jeep style. It was bumpy and sometimes painful, but definitely fun. Eventually, we reached a small brook that was too deep for us to cross. We parked, and everybody got out of the car. At first, I didn't quite understand what was going on, because we started to move. But then I figured out that we were on a raft. Ah. Understanding abounds.

After spending the night in Kelva's house, we left Natal Monday morning after breakfast and spent the rest of the day travelling back to Fortaleza and sleeping. It was a weird experience - coming back. I'd never really though of the city as "home" until then, but somehow driving into the city and by familiar roads was reassuring.

I expected the transition from suburban life to city life to be really unsettling, but I suppose my brain got overloaded pretty quickly and didn't have any trouble with that. Good job, brain.

Me, Rapha, Jeanne, Carlos, Bella

They says that the Northeast of Brazil has some
of the most beautiful beaches in the world

There were monkeys during breakfast! Isn't is adorable?

Yes, I took a picture of the sign

Actually not posing for me!

Got distracted...

Dropped his food...

They stayed like for that a good three minutes.
Staring contest. Ghost Crab vs. Stray Dog

More of the monkeys! I really liked them.

See the baby monkey?

It was rainy, but still beautiful

Eating lunch in Natal

These outfits are traditional cowboy outfits from the
Northeast. They kind of resemble our cowboys.

Rapha's face! Pfft.

Me, Aldaberto, Filipe, Kelva, Pedro, Bella, Rapha

See how high the water is?

Leo and his girlfriend

Then I started my third week of school. School was becoming more comfortable; I was beginning to know know the people in my class not only by face, but also by name.

This week, I spent a lot of time with a girl who lived in Germany. She was very nice and eager to learn about me and show me about Brazil. She gave me my first insight into saudade, the Brazilian word of an insatiable longing. There is no such translation in English. She was also very good at helping me with Physics. (In English? I can do it. In Portuguese? Gimme a rain check.) Thank-you.

That Friday night we had our AFS Survival Orientation...the one we were supposed to have right after we got here. Way to go, AFS Brazil! (No, in reality, the current AFS President was abroad in Canada and that left the local committee a little slow.) The meeting started at 7:00, but I didn't get there until about 7:15 (for social gatherings in Brazil, Bella explained, it's not the norm to be on time). Thus, only Alex (the boy from Germany) was there. Laura (the girl from Italy) and Elif (the girl from Turkey, who flew down the night we got here) were staying with the same family due to extenuating circumstances, and they arrived twenty minutes after I did. Then our Orientator (that is now a word, just fyi) showed up ten minutes later at 7:45, so we "officially" started the meeting (not that we didn't already talk about relevant material before her arrival). Two of the volunteers/counselors get there later. 

The meeting was conducted in English, since everybody spoke some. There were only four of us exchange students, one visiting returnee (from Germany), and the volunteers. I found the meeting very useful (and funny. "Why do you think you're here?" "To learn how to survive...? Cue rolling of eyes.) and I left with some new ideas and an actual focus of why I was where. What did I hope to achieve - did I have a "bucket list"? What constitutes an unreasonable expectation? Why did I come? What do I hope to learn, and what can I give to Brazil? What do I want to take back to the United States? 

I have a bucket list, and I am constantly adding things to it, but so far here are some of my favorite things - 

- Take a gringo day around the city

- Fail a class (I figured it's a good life experience, right? Then I can say I did it.)

- Learn how to dance to Samba and Forro

- Dream in Portuguese

Next time, I'll cover the next two weeks until I catch up to the present.

Jake