Oi Brasil!

They have a joy for life in Brazil unlike any country I've ever seen.

-Morena Baccarin

My past semester of adventures is long over, but after a much-needed break from travel and study back at home in Michigan (with a brief cameo appearance in Vermont), I once again have returned to my "other" home continent of South America. I spent the latter half of January in Bolivia performing research for my thesis, and now, finally, am in the land of beautiful beaches, fruit-headed dancers, and other wildly inaccurate stereotypes. I'm feeling too lazy to sum up my adventures in Bolivia (most of which felt like it either took place inside airplanes and taxis, or outside wondering why it was so damn cold in the middle of the summer), but I there's been so much stuff happening in Brazil that I suppose it deserves blogging.

I departed Bolivia on the last day of January, flying from my home city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra to São Paulo, Brazil's largest city. I am not studying abroad in São Paulo, and a day-long layover there showed me that that may be a good thing. I've never lived in a big city for any significant amount of time, and SP is a city on steroids; the metropolitan population is over 20 million people. For perspective, the entire population of Bolivia could fit into the metropolitan area, with room to spare. There's a beautiful city center and financial district, but all this is surrounded by miles upon miles of cookie-cutter high rises, chaotic streets, and smoggy skies. I guess this could be said of any large, developed city, but when the population of one city is bigger than that of the state I grew up in, it gets to be a little too much. 

Brazil is characterized by having one of the most frustrating immigration policies in the Americas, particularly for Americans. In part, this is of our own doing; the United States has such draconian requirements for tourists, immigrants, and anyone else entering our borders that several South American countries have begun a policy of "reciprocity", wherein any costs suffered by their own citizens entering the USA are duplicated for Americans entering the country. It's a good policy in theory, except that the United States government is certainly not going to change its national security policy because of annoying visa applications, so the cost instead just falls on ordinary citizens. For me, this process involved lots of grief in sending all the requisite documents (and money... so much money) to the Brazilian consulate back in the United States, and another long, agonizing wait once I got to the São Paulo airport once again. By the time I had made it through an interminable line of noisy Argentineans and the vacant-eyed lady at the customs table had flipped through my passport suspiciously a few times before stamping, it was five minutes after my connecting flight to Belo Horizonte had departed. After a few minutes of arguing with the ticket agent in my horrible Portuguese, I was finally put on the next flight, and at 11PM on January 31, I arrived at my final destination, Belo Horizonte. 

Belo Horizonte is the third-largest* city in Brazil, after São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, but isn't nearly as well-known as the other two abroad. I suspect a large part of that is because it lies several hundred miles inland, and therefore doesn't have a beach, which according to what people told me back in America is the only reason one would ever go to Brazil. I mean, what's the point of Brazil if you can't sit back with a coconut and enjoy the sun, sand, and scandalous bikinis? I think part of what I'd like to show on my blog over this semester is the sides of Brazil most people don't think about quite as much, but which are, of course, just as important. Though I do hope I can at least enjoy a little bit of sun, sand, and scandalous bikinis as well.

What BH lacks in vacation spots, it makes up for by being a center of Brazilian history and culture. It lies within Minas Gerais, a large, misshapen state in southeastern Brazil which still bears many traces of colonial Brazil. While the southern coastal areas, such as São Paulo, have been more influenced by recent immigration from Italy, Central Europe, and Japan, Minas still retains quite a bit from the old Portuguese Empire. There are quite a few beautiful colonial-style cities within the state, such as Ouro Preto (which I plan to visit very soon) and the culture itself is quite a bit more traditional and conservative. It's also known for having incredibly good traditional Brazilian food, a very friendly and welcoming culture, and being the home of cachaça, a traditional Brazilian liquor that mixes very well with sugar and lime juice. Naturally, I've fit in pretty well so far. 

My Brazilian host mother greeted me at the Belo Horizonte airport with a hug and a flurry of rapid-fire Portuguese, about half of which I understood. I left Middlebury in May of last year speaking reasonably fluent Portuguese, but in the intervening 8 months, spent speaking Spanish, English, and bad French without any verbal practice, I managed to lose my "ear" for the language. This made communication quite an adventure for the first couple of weeks. 
After a long drive back home, I was introduced to my new home.My host family is a very young family; both parents are in their 30s, and they have a 10-year-old daughter who's sometimes adorable, sometimes unbearable, and usually a mix of the two. My host mom, Luciana, is obsessed with keeping up with Brazilian popular culture, and reminding me that she's one of the "cool moms" (think Amy Poehler in Mean Girls). Her husband, Gumercindo, is more of the responsible one, doing most of the cooking and cleaning in the house. We live at on the top floor of an apartment building, and I generally have the run of the (small) top floor, including a balcony with a great panoramic view of the city. 

Not meaning to brag, but...

After a much-needed sleep in a real bed that fit me (I'd almost forgotten those existed), I got up in the morning of my first day to begin my orientation. My orientation for last semester's study abroad program was the better part of two weeks in California, and consisted of endless group bonding exercises, safety sessions, and speakers flown in from the other side of the country just to give a talk about why we shouldn't jump headfirst into water. My orientation in Brazil consisted of a 2-hour meeting in a bar with our program director, who is actually Argentinean and probably won't ever see us again. He met up with us once more to choose classes, and then was gone. On the one hand, it's a refreshing change having a program that doesn't breathe down my neck and control every second of my day, but on the other hand, I sometimes feel like it would be nice to have help closer if I'm having issues, such as my current host family problems (details to come in a later blog post). 

Upon returning home after orientation, I found out that my host mother had invited an extensive list of relatives over to our apartment for a barbecue, ostensibly to get to know me, but also partially (I suspect) because she really likes getting drunk with her family. It turns out that two of my host cousins (host second cousins? Host relatives? Not entirely sure) have worked at the Middlebury Summer Portuguese School, and one of them is the director. Which I guess explains how I ended up here. I was plied with excellent Brazilian barbecue and sub-par Brazilian beer while my the relatives grilled me with questions about everything from how cold it was back home (very cold) to when exactly I was going to get a Brazilian girlfriend (no comment). My host mom got progressively drunker as time went on, and the conversation got increasingly... interesting. It was my host cousin's birthday that same day, so I took the opportunity to escape and head to a restaurant. 

We ended up at Baby Beef, which despite the name is arguably the best restaurant in Belo Horizonte. Diners pay a fixed fee and have free reign of the buffet. I made the mistake of overfilling my plate at the salad bar, because it turned out that waiters constantly approach the table as well with different cuts of beef and chicken. I had no idea there were so many ways to serve dead cows, and I have no idea what the name of most of it was, but good heavens the Brazilians have their beef thing down. It might even be on par with Argentinean barbecue, which for those who haven't been there, is just about the highest praise you can give. By the time waiters came around, I had drunk slightly more than I like to, enough to trick me into thinking that I could totally eat another hunk of meat, and another, and another... Meanwhile, an elderly host aunt plied me with advice on how to pick up Brazilian girls in bars and I regaled the family with a few stories of things I did (and ate) in Vietnam and Morocco. By the time I returned home very late at night, I'd probably eaten about half a cow and drank enough to impress most Russians. It was ridiculous, chaotic, and confusing, and probably the best introduction to Brazil I could have had. 

Aw yiss.

The next day, my host mom took me on a small tour of Belo Horizonte. The city is in the middle of a range of low mountains, so the streets are very hilly and confusing. It's sort of like San Francisco, except without beaches or random naked guys. After eating lunch at another one of the best (and most expensive) restaurants in the city, perched on top of a mountain a little outside the city, we headed to some of the wealthier areas of the city. Whereas most of my own neighborhood could just as easily be part of an average city in Bolivia (the only other Latin American country I have for comparison), some of the areas she showed me would have been pretentious and overdone in the United States. As in, helipads on the roof and homes the size of small castles pretentious. I guess it makes sense, as BH is one of the centers of the Brazilian service industry, with a booming tech sector and things like that. Still, it was somewhat shocking, coming directly from Bolivia.

This was appropriate in more ways than one.

She also took me to one of the best lookouts over the city, where I could appreciate it in all its enormity. Even though I've been to five different continents and seen some of the largest cities in the world (Ha Noi, Paris, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, etc.), it's still strange to find yourself completely surrounded by humanity, with no end in site. At heart, I am and always will be a child of the countryside. Seeing the city in almost its entirety really made me realize that, once again, I was abroad and in for lots of completely new experiences.

PDA is REALLY a thing in Brazil. Like, this happens all over, not just in the romantic spots.

Only two days after I arrived, it was already time to start classes. And by start, I mean figure out where I was studying and what classes I was taking. As it happens, my university, Pontifícia Universidade Católica, has a rather lax policy when it comes to choosing classes: foreign students basically pick their classes the same day they start. In the office of International Relations, I was handed the schedules of a few different facultades (basically departments) and told to start choosing. While Brazilian students generally take 7 or 8 classes a semester, I (thankfully) was only allowed to take 5, which is my normal courseload for a semester at Middlebury. I ended up signing up for Brazilian Foreign Policy, Brazilian Social and Political Thought, Socio-Economic Development, a senior-level seminar on international environmental policy, and a mandatory class affiliated with Middlebury that's basically meant to improve my writing skills. One year of instruction in Portuguese isn't necessarily enough to prepare one for university-level essay writing, after all.

Most of my classes take place inside this building, which, despite looking sort of like a Russian gulag, isn't all that bad.

After having spent a year in high school in Bolivia, many things about my university classes here are eerily familiar. The classrooms are ascetic and featureless, with identical rows of too-small desks, everything starts at least 15 minutes late, and most of the class spends the time looking at their phones or sleeping. Oh, and I couldn't understand a frigging thing my professors were saying. Thankfully, total immersion works wonders on your comprehension skills, but it's still kind of frustrating being in college-level courses and expecting myself to have college-level understanding of the material when I have kindergartener-level language skills. 
My fairly obvious American-ness also gives me an interesting status in many classes. While the university is practically overrun with Mexican, Colombian, and French exchange students, there are only three Americans studying here. On the bright side, all of us have comparatively excellent Portuguese skills (most students come here without speaking a word of the languages), which has worked wonders to dispel certain stereotypes about Americans, but when you're taking classes in international relations and economics, America tends to be mentioned pretty frequently. In my class on socio-economic development, it means that the professor has lots to say about the United States being the absolute paragon of global power, with constant references to the only gringo in the class ("The GDP of the United States is $53,000. You see Forest here? He's literally worth $50,000. What are you guys worth). In Brazilian Foreign Policy, it means my professor usually spends most of the class talking about American diplomacy, mostly in a derogatory manner, while staring me down awkwardly. Either way, it makes me feel very, very American.

Something like this.

Over time I've begun to get used to the rhythm of campus life. Back at Middlebury, I have an uncanny talent for choosing the worst possible class schedules every single semester. That trend seems to have continued here, as I soon figured out. On the bright side, I have three-day weekends for the first time in my life, with no class on Monday. Fridays have one class only as well, which is great. On the other hand, I've also managed to have class starting at 7AM on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Many years of laziness and late-night internet browsing have made it difficult for me to wake up before 9AM, and living fairly far away from campus means that I have to wake up at 6 at the latest if I want to make it to class on time. Worst of all, my internal clock has adjusted such that I now wake up naturally before 7 in the morning, even on weekends. Ugh.  

In my free time, I've had the chance to explore a bit of PUC's campus and the surrounding neighborhood. In contrast with the Spanish Empire, the Portuguese did relatively little to develop education or academia in their colonies. While the oldest university in South America has been running since 1551 (University of San Marcos in Peru), and even Bolivia has a university founded in 1624, the oldest university in Brazil dates back to 1909. PUC Minas Gerais was founded in 1958, but was formerly the site of an old convent, so it still boasts some beautiful colonial architecture, although this is somewhat overshadowed by the hulking cinder-block buildings that make out most of the campus. The main garden (shown above and below) is a great place to sit and read or play music with friends, and there are several great cafés on campus with decent food and (more importantly) fast wifi. 

As I'm stuck on campus four days a week for lunch, I've also gotten to do some culinary exploration in the area. Because if there's something I can't go without in a new country, it's trying strange foods, and then gorging myself on them because I have no sense of self-control. On top of that, food at home mostly seems to consist of baloney-and-cheese sandwiches or macaroni, so it's good to enjoy a little bit of diversity. The most popular style here of restaurant seems to be a buffet style, with an assortment of fruits, vegetables, and main dishes that you can choose at will, and then have weighed at the end to be priced. I already knew the Brazilian specialty of feijoada back when I was living in Bolivia, and that's become somewhat of a staple of my diet here, partly because it's easy to find and cheap, and partly because it's really hard to make a bad feijoada. Which is something I never thought I'd say about random bits of cow meat and gristle thrown in with black beans and put over rice. But hey, I'm not complaining. Other new favorites include Guaraná Antárctica, which is possibly the best soda ever manufactured, anything involving passionfruit, and crocodile meat, which is apparently very common here. 


One thing I had a lot less of an opportunity to do in my first weeks in Brazil was get outside and take pictures. Part of it was because, in all honesty, Belo Horizonte isn't an incredibly picturesque city, particularly not the areas I live and study in. A bigger reason, I think, was because I was suffering from a bit of "travel fatigue"; it was the eighth country I visited in the space of five months, and it was honestly nice to have time to sit at home and enjoy staying in one place. Oh, and laziness. That was probably the biggest part of it. Nonetheless, after a couple weeks, I finally was able to get myself together and enjoy a bit more of the city, and take my camera with me. The posts about those adventures will be coming soon, but for now I'm going to quit while I'm ahead and finally post a blog entry about Brazil. And then go to sleep because it's 10 PM and I have class in 9 hours. Alas.

Again, I don't want to brag...