Saturday, June 14
The view from the conference room that I work in. No joke.
I got to go to another demarche yesterday. This one with the foreign ministry regarding something that amounts to little more than a Brazilian tradition, but something that causes some concern nonetheless. You can find out what I'm talking about here. Other than that, work was more research, a great lunch and a chance to practice my portuguese on the phone. I'm happy to report that the language is coming along fantastically. Being able to converse on the phone, however stiltedly, indicates a significant step up, so hooray for Portuguese!
I left early with Rosa. She had spent all day Thursday preparing for a party she was hosting in honor of her son and his friend Will, and she needed an extra hour on Friday to polish everything off. I got home and promptly left to go jogging as the sunset. I ran at a good pace for about half an hour, down to the end of the bridge near my house and back. The scenery was stunning: trees and houses blocked my view as I ran down the main thoroughfare that servies the little street that I live on, but a bare grassy hillside opened up as I approached the bridge, exposing the lake and a sunset partially obscured by cotton ball clouds over the cityscape. As I've mentioned (and will continue to mention), the air here is very clean. Having lived in smoggy Salt Lake City, I can attest to the fact that air pollution makes for some beautiful and colorful sunsets, but this clear one had its own simple beauty as well. The clouds broke the dying sun's light into orange and red shafts that were reflected on the deep blue water in front of me. Men were fishing down on the steep banks of the lakeside and I jogged on, over the bridge and back. It's a really nice bridge. It's supported by three arches in a line that begin on one side of the bridge and cross over and above it and end on the opposite side. Back home, showered, read more of Owell's Homage to Catalonia, and it was party time. Yes!
Mexican food galore! Kids galore! Grown ups galore! I got to sit at the kid's table for a bit and ate a whole jalapeño on an 11 year-old dare. Not bad. Interestingly enough, Will and his family are Mormon and there seems to be a sizeable group of Mormons down here in the embassy with me. Well, not sizeable, but more than I expected. We all crossed our arms and blessed the food before we ate, and it was indeed pleasantly surprising to find that my community was here for me. It's interesting how a simple ritual like blessing a meal can make me feel so at home with the people that I'm with. Anyway, two plates of tortillas, tacos, chicken, beans, cheese and sour cream later, Geoff came to get me. We were going dancing.
We stopped along the way to pick up two Ecuadorian sisters, one of whom is Geoff's Spanish tutor. We got ot the club, but were nearly assaulted by a group of fundraising university students who were pushing São João (St. John) festival tickets on us. Well, they got us to cave in and go to the festival because the salsa club that we were headed for will be open for a while, but São João only comes once a year, and its kind of a Brazilian folklore/hicklore/agriculturelore party. I should mention that by a fortunate coincidence, I was in the northeastern city of Recife for São João two years ago with my friend Jeremy Moss. The parties are bigger up there because they have a bit more farmer heritage than the politicians in Brasilia, also they eat tons of corn for São João up there...too much, if I remember correctly. Anyhow, in we went, presenting our tickets only after I had the most frisky frisking of my life. I didn't need to find any girls that night because the security dude worked me over just fine. Jeez! Which brings me to an important point: Brazilan women are not beautiful. It's not fair to say that because there are beautiful women all over the world and I don't know how beautiful these girls are on the inside which is what really counts. Seriously, I don't know who started this rumor, but Brazilian women are entirely average on a whole. The thing that I noticed most as we walked among the food stands (everything from grilled meat on sticks to stroganoff and candied apples) was that I did a lot of double takes. The girls seem beautiful at first, but a second glance will reveal some discouraging feature like a lazy eye or missing tooth. So around and around we walked among carnival rippoff games (pay the equivalent of $1.75 for a chance to win some Halls lozenges) and liquor stands, noticing the ladies that resembled any number of celebrities:
OK, now I'm just being mean, but to be fair, there were a few Shakiras and Marisa Tomeis to be seen.
The entertainment was three fold: a live forró band (pronounced fo-hó, it's a Brazilian accordian-based backwoods music), an empty stage by the lake with a nice lighting system, and a hip hop DJ that looked like Bill Cosby. We opted for the hip hop. And oh how we opted! The Cos' rocked us all night from his 10' tall DJ stand with everything from Ja Rule to Outkast (requested by yours truly...being able to request Outkast also indicates my ever stronger verbal skills). The highlight: "Beautiful" by Snoop Dogg and Farrel. Not only is the song's video filmed in Rio de Janeiro, but the song sounds 210% perfect while dancing on a tiled pavilion under sycamores and a bright full Brazilian moon that looked pinned right at the top of the sky. Perfect. Amazing. I marvelled as we danced and I watched kids from Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay and Brazil rap along with Eminem and 50 Cent. It's a wild world, and it's getting smaller. A trip indeed. We danced until the DJ made the mistake of playing some lame LL Cool J song and we all got suddenly tired. Next thing we know, Mr. Huxtable was being replaced by a house DJ that looked like Horatio Sanz. It was about 1:30am.
music listened to while writing: The Avalanches' Since I Left You and Frank Black's Teenager of the Year
Thursday, June 12
Self portrait in front of a Brazilian government building. The glow behind me is a man walking by as the shutter opened. I was listening to Stan Getz's Desafinado at the time. How appropriate.
Work was good. I spent my time trying to motivate myself to keep up on my senatorial research, but there are no deadlines as the research that I will be doing will merely contribute to the embassy's resources and is not imperative. Nonetheless, I will feel pretty stupid if I don't start to take advantage of this opportunity to learn so much about the Brazilian government. I'm sure I'll get a feel for it. By the end of the summer, I'll know more about Brazilian legislation than American!
I ate lunch with Alessandra and the previously mentioned Geoff. The cafeteria charges by weight, but it's fairly cheap and very good. It's a step above American cafeteria food. I imagine the quality is due to the lack of frozen and processed food industries like the ones that supply the majority of American cafeterias (my mom is convinced that 90% of America's egg rolls come from a factory in New Jersey). Anyhow, great stuff: salad, chicken kebab, pork chop, beans & rice...all for about $3. Beat that! I charmed Alessandra with my mockery of the nasal Brazilian accent too. Or perhaps I offended her. Let me explain: Alessandra is a very intelligent girl of about my age who works as a 'Foreign Service National,' or basically a Brazilian who is employed at the US Embassy. She was born and raised in Brasilia, which is unique because the city is barely 30 years old. We were chatting over lunch and I practiced some of my Portuguese on her. She says that I don't have an accent, but I find that hard to believe. I imagine she's just flattering me or something, but I showed off my exaggerated Brazilian accent and she got confused. It's hard to explain, but if you've ever had somebody try to mimic your accent you might understand. When Brazilians speak, I hear things that they don't hear. Things sound strange to me that don't sound strange to them. When it comes time to mimic them, I merely emphasize the oddities that I perceive. Oddly enough, I end up sounding bizarre, and I sound especially bizarre to the people I'm mimicking. Alessandra tried to convince me that she didn't speak the way that I was speaking and I had to dig myself out of my pseudo-mockery of her mother tongue. Fortunately, there was another colleague there who backed me up; Brazilian Portuguese can sound pretty funny at times, especially in certain regions. Anyway, it was an interesting linguistic clash of sorts.
Before lunch, I went to my first demarche. I followed one of the Foreign Service Officers (FSO) over to a government bureau devoted to science and technology and we had a little chat over coffee and water. The purpose of our visit was to gauge Brazilian feelings about the IAEA's latest report on Iran and to try to help them understand our feelings about the report. Nothing major, but an interesting experience nonetheless. I got to watch a little diplomatic dancing: the small talk, the coffee, the discussion, the cordial 'see you later,' and that's it. We walked from the demarche back to the embassy after checking out the ongoing social security reform protests going on outside of the senate and congress building. Brasilia is a visually bizarre city. I'll have to write about it this weekend or something.
I went for a bike ride after work. I'm planning on riding one of Rosa's neglected mountain bikes to work in the mornings so I sampled the route. Let me tell you: if you ever get a chance to ride a bike around Brasilia while listening to Eek-a-Mouse, do it. Eek-a-Mouse is a reggae dude unlike any other. He makes some truly bizarre, yet magically wonderful stuff. There's nothing like it. Props to the lovely Amanda for turning me onto him. Anyway, I rode through the night (it gets dark at around 6:30 here, the sun drops behind the flat horizon and the clear air lets all of the light go with it) with my headphones on. First Eek-a-Mouse, then Beta Band, then Stan Getz and finally Modest Mouse's The Moon and Antarctica. Anyone who knows me well, knows that I'm obsessed with Modest Mouse (all of these mouse bands tonight!), and The Moon and Antarctica is one of the most epic, cosmic, and emotive albums that I have. There are few things like it. I've listened to it consistently for over two years now and it made my heart skip to hear it come into the random queue on my iPod. It was a great ride. I took some pictures of the crazy buildings (like the one above) and made it back home for chicken mole, beans and rice, and Brazilian Pepsi Twist (with lime instead of lemon). A great dinner (except for the Pepsi). A great night. Holy crap! It doesn't get much better than this!
music listened to while writing: Outkast's Stankonia
Great line: "I prayed so much about her, I need some knee pads." Word.
Wednesday, June 11
Canned fish aisle at my local grocery store
Yeah, so I have a maid here. Her name's Valeria. I got home from work today to find my laundry bag empty and folded. The laundry previously contained therein had been washed, dried, and neatly put away in the drawers that seemed appropriate to Valeria. She didn't get it all right, but I don't have the heart to correct her. Shucks! I'm not used to having a maid.
My first day of work was just that. I didn't know what to expect, but fortunately it doesn't seem that anybody else expects much from me either. I grabbed some newspapers and gradually started to figure things out. For instance: um petista is a member of the PT (Partido Travalhador?) or Labor Party and previdência means something like social security. Somewhere around 20,000 protesters were marching on the capitol today to protest proposed social security reforms. The hubub is that president Ignacio Lula da Silva (Lula) is a dyed in the wool petista and his proposed reforms are making some people feel like he's a sellout. Who knows for sure? But I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He's a man who polished shoes as a kid and gradually rose to leadership through labor unions and ran for president three times before he was elected. Meanwhile, his partymates are crying wolf (in sheep's clothing). Of course, it should be pointed out that the PT is markedly divided within its own ranks. Nonetheless, I'm sure it hurts for him to hear petista colleagues like Heloísa Helena claim that his reforms will only help "international parasites." Yeah, whatever Heloise. Who asked Heloise anyway? I'm hilarious.
Anyway, that took all morning to figure out. My Portuguese is alright, but it gets pretty tiring to read after a while. Hopefully I'll pick it up quickly, but I'm content to struggle a little bit until I do. The first actual project that I'm going to be working on is compiling biographical info on the senators that head the various senate committees. I'll gather basic information about their political proclivities and so forth, just to get a feel for what these committees tend towards. Sounds like fun to me.
I got to go to a nice diplomatic lunch at a Chinese restaurant with a diplomat from Australia, one from Mexico, a journalist, a diputado (congressman) from Espirito Santo (a provence), and a few other Brazilian guests. Around and around went the lazy susan as we tried to make friends with one another. A nice experience, but it pales compared to my next diplomatic dining exursion: Queen Elizabeth II's birthday bash at the British embassy.
Yep! I went. It was totally blinged out with a bagpiper at the front door, a knighted ambassador to receive me, and several kinds of cheeses, breads, hams and smoked fish. I stood around with a Guaraná in my hand and basically clinged to my new boy, Geoff. He's a 20 year old summer employee at the embassy and the son of an Air Force attaché. I got a ride to the function with his family, and his sister Beth, he, and I all stuck together while the 'grown ups' got tipsy. The highlight of the evening: a certain ambassador from a certain middle-eastern country kept trying to hit on Geoff's sister. The man flashed a smile made of spaced out teeth and swirled his scotch as he told us about his over-achiever son who was planning to finish law school in Dublin at the age of 21. He told us, however, that his son didn't show enough interest in girls. He said that when he was in school that he had a 'glad eye' and couldn't keep away from the ladies. I almost told him that I had a 'lazy eye' when I was in school, but I couldn't figure out why I thought that was funny, so I was sure that the joke would have been lost on him. Anyway, it became more and more apparent that the guy was totally perved out. Apparently he's hit on Beth before, and after she escaped he told Geoff and I that he had 'a gambler's psychology.' He explained that he was not afraid to lose. He was willing to go 'balls out' (my own words) because he was prepared to lose. Said gambler's psychology is what led him to disobey orders and go after the local girls in Russia back in '79 when he was ordered to limit his pervish intentions to the ladies of friendly embassies. Whatever, the guy was awesome. I'm glad to know him.
Today's good news: I figured out how to plug my iPod into the speakers at my desk. Yeah, I was able to rock out a bit, but it's my first day so I kept the volume at..."a reasonable volume." I have a desk mate who occasionally stops in and uses the computer next to mine. He was thrilled to hear Hendrix when he came in this afternoon and told me that the speakers can get nice and loud if I turn them up. Even with his approval, I figured that the first day wasn't the time to test things out.
music listened to while writing: Modest Mouse's This is a Long Time to Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About
The 3rd Bridge - Brasilia
To those of you seeking my mp3 site, you can find it here, but it won't be updated for some time. Until then, check jedsundwall.com more often for frequent news from Brasilia and odd details about life in a remote South American capital. Oh yeah, more pictures too. Lots of them.
Tuesday, June 10
Self Portrait - JFK International. June 9 2003
All I have is a tall stack of books and plenty of clothes. Oh yeah, and my iPod...I can't live without that. I threw everything into a duffle and garment bag on Sunday afternoon, got a ride from my dad to Union Station, DC on Monday Morning and headed to Penn Station, NY. I hauled my summer living off of the Amtrak and onto the C train going uptown to 50th st. where I walked to Uncle Vanya's Russian restaurant on 54th where I was to meet my friend Pete for lunch. He got some sort of dumplings with sour cream and I got beef stroganoff on kasha. There were three Russian yuppie types eating in the corner, but they took off after a little while and we were left alone until Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, and an unidentified third man walked in for lunch. I swear Susan was checking me out as she slurped her cucumber soup (eat your heart out Tim Robbins!). I gave Richard (or 'Dick,' as I call him) a nod as Pete and I walked out. Pete and I said our goodbyes and I humped my luggage back down to 47th st. where I met up with the great Tim Valentiner who happened to be in town with some friends. We chatted, taking advantage of our happenstance simultaneous visits to the Big Apple. Off we went to catch the A train. He went uptown and I went down...way down and out past Brooklyn to JFK international.
I got on one of the worst looking planes I've seen in a while. The seats were cramped and everything looked dirty. I shouldn't complain, the flight cost me $550, but I couldn't help but wonder how such a busted vehicle was being used for such a hefty flight as JFK to Sao Paulo. The bright side of the story is that I had a seat and a half to my self. I was on the left side of the middle three seats and I shared the middle seat with a lady law student from Paraguay. I couldn't help but think as she sat down, "wow! A girl my age sharing these three seats on an international flight, well! Twice in a lifetime!?" Well, nothing. She was busted to say the least. I think she kept trying to catch my gaze throughout the evening, but we barely conversed. It doesn't matter though because I was already wearied by my day's travels and soon found myself twisting my body into whatever positions seemed to favor sleep. Our arrival to Sao Paulo couldn't have come soon enough.
On my way to customs a guy about my age struck up a conversation with me, asking me if I lived "around here." I told him that I was off to Brasilia to work at the embassy. He told me that he came down for the summer in an effort to insert himself into the design scene. It didn't take long for me to figure out that he had served a mission in Brazil. He was a BYU alum and had been living in NYC for the past few years, but suddenly decided to follow an impulse to come down here and get involved with the Sao Paulo design community. Props to him! I salute such ballsy dream chasing. We parted and I waited for my connecting flight.
I arrived in Brasilia at around 10:30 this morning to be welcomed by a Brazilian man with a sign reading "US Embassy." I hit him with an awkward Portuguese salutation and he directed me to meet two Texans that I'd be working with this summer: Sally and Rosa. Sally is the secretary in the political section of the embassy where I'll be working this summer, and Rosa is my new mom. We drove to Rosa's home where I was left to settle in until a driver would pick me up at 2pm.
I'm lucky to have a computer in my room, so I sent some emails off and put my things away. I took a much-needed shower, ate some leftover lasagna and chicken milanesa, and lied down to read Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Before I knew it I was being awakened by Rosa's son, Ivan. The driver had arrived, and I was to report to the embassy.
The driver and I spoke: me in halting Portuguese and he in halting English. We were met at the gate of the embassy by a guard who searched under the hood, in the trunk and under the car for any suspicious looking artifacts. It's apparently a standard practice. He dropped me off at the front door and...
I didn't know what to do. I didn't really know where to go or where to begin, but I remembered the name of Susan Pratt, the human resources official who had been my primary contact as I prepared to come down here. I dropped her name to the blank faced marine guarding the door behind a pane of tinted bulletproof glass. He looked at me as though he thought that I thought that he might know what I should do, but duh! Obviously he didn't. Finally I explained to him that I wanted to see this woman and he let me in and told me approximately where to go.
The rest of the afternoon was spent being ping-ponged from woman to woman and bureau to bureau on a paper trail. I got my ID badge, I submitted all of the proper paper work, and eventually I met my bosses. I'll be working with a team of political analysts all summer. They don't have anything set for me to do, but I'll get to tag along to meetings and lunches. I get to watch the diplomats dance. And essentially, in their words, I get to join them as they "watch Brazil." For the rest of the summer I'll spend my morning hours reading several regional newspapers and will eventually end up researching whatever interests me most. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to produce something worth publishing someday. Everyone welcomed me aboard and went back to work. Rosa was going to give me a ride home, but I had time to kill until then. I read the paper, but my mind wasn't up for struggling through all of the tilde covered a's and hooked c's. I was tired and I fell asleep in the armchair that I waited in.
Rosa left me at home with Ivan and a friend of his as she went off to ex-pat ladies' game night. The two kids promptly took off to buy some cold cuts for dinner and when they returned we all chatted over chester (some sort of lunch meat made of chicken and turkey), pastrami, mustard, and cheese sandwiches. The two 18-year-old culinary masters then treated me to a shake made of chocolate ice cream, chocolate pudding, chocolate syrup, chocolate pop-tarts, and milk. I think I'm going to go blind, but it was real chocolaty, and hey! I'm in Brazil, so why not?
I don't expect that all of my posts will be this ebullient, but I look forward to writing more about this beautiful little remote capital. Brazil is an interesting place. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions: jedsundwall at mac.com
music listened to while writing: M83's Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts