Brasilia

It has been a little over two weeks since we landed in Brasilia. Somehow, Elise and I were able to get 9 suitcases, each weighing in between 60 and 70 lbs, a pack-n-play, two car seats and two groggy toddlers through customs to the van waiting for us in sunny Brazil.

The van pulled up in front of our “Brazil house”. In preparation for the move, we explained to Sam that we would be moving to our “Brazil house”. This was especially important given the number of different places where we would be sleeping in the days and weeks leading up to us finally arriving. At the hotel in Everett where we spent Thanksgiving, I checked in, then ran chocolate chip cookies back to Sam waiting in the car. Once we unloaded and spread out in the room, Sam asked, “This my Brazil house?” No, not quite. When we finally did arrive in Brazil a week later, he asked again, “This my Brazil house?” “Yes! This is your Brazil house!” A few times over the next couple of days, as we were unpacking and stowing our suitcases, dipping our toes tentatively into the cool blue waters of our swimming pool, venturing out into the backyard for the first time, peering into the mango trees for the flash of bright green that might be a parrot’s wing, he would ask Elise, “How long we stay in my Brazil house?” We would answer for a long time. We weren’t going anywhere for awhile. This seemed to mollify him, if not make him happy and comfortable.

After a quick shower, I was whisked to the work for a few hours to start checking-in. The biggest challenge is going to be transportation. Due to the immensity and lugubriousness of government bureaucracy, our car won't arrive until February or March. The city is impossible to navigate without a car. Work sends a shuttle to pick me up and bring me home, but Elise is a prisoner in the house. You can imagine how well that is going over. So, the next day I went to the Cidade de Automoveis (The City of Cars) with a few colleagues from work.

To fully appreciate the City of Cars, one must understand a unique characteristic of Brasilia. Everything has a ‘sector’, a special part of town designated for that specific thing. For example, all the hotels are located in the hotel sector. All the fabric stores are quarantined to the fabric sector. Likewise, all the hospitals are in the hospital sector. Not kidding. Someone thought it was a good idea to put all the hospitals in one place instead of spreading them out throughout the city. New ones have sprouted since then, but I can’t imagine what procuring medical care must have been like in the 1950’s.

The City of Cars occupies its own special sector, just outside of town. Used car dealer is squeezed next to used car dealer, all in the same neighborhood, one right after the other. In between there are dusty, thatch-roofed shanties pouring draft beer. Men in denim-cut off’s and flip flops shoot pool in the open air. Each car dealer has one car with the trunk open, bass thumping, and several hawkers trying to lure you in. You walk through the dusty orange caking the dirt streets, trying to negotiate the purchase of a car in a language of which you just barely have a working knowledge. I ended up buying a used car last weekend, but am still waiting for the wire to clear from my U.S. bank to the dealer's bank in Brazil. Yes, I bought a car in Portuguese. Sam came with me to negotiate the finer points. Really, he watched cartoons through snow in Portuguese and read a comic book while I struggled through the wire transfer form.

The other challenge...this isn't Japan...NO ONE speaks English. It is much like the U.S. in that respect. It is such a big country (of continental dimensions, as I’m frequently reminded) no one feels the need to, but thanks to a modest investment in a few Brazilian fashion magazines, Elise is learning a few words and phrases here and there.

Brasilia reminds Elise and I a LOT like Florida, but perhaps the Florida of 20 or 30 years ago that neither one of us had the opportunity to appreciate. We remarked to one another how this place didn’t feel that foreign. It’s different, strikingly so, but not unknown. It rains. A lot. It will rain all night. It will rain as we go to sleep and still be raining when Pete wakes us at 6 to the rain splattering on the concrete outside our window. Our roof leaks in spots. The sky is big here. Tall thunder clouds can be seen hours away, coming or going. The sky is so big the bottoms of clouds can be dark, giving rain, rumbling, while the tops are higher in the sky, in full sun as though blissfully unaware of what transpires beneath. When we first walked into our house, there was something immediately familiar about it. I wasn’t sure if it was the gas stove, the fact that the kitchen was removed from the rest of the house (uncommon in American homes, where the kitchen is the social nexus of the home, though common in Brazilian homes where it is connected to the maid’s quarters and the pantry and, therefore, cordoned off after dinner) or the fact that we had mango trees in our backyard. It reminded me of Sitti’s old house in West Palm.

Our house is beautiful. It has 4 bedrooms, one of which, the one overlooking the sparkling pool in the backyard, we made into Elise's office. Another room will forever be called the lizard room, because of the lizard that snuck in under the screen and now lives in the a/c unit. There is a huge backyard with 4 mango trees, a lime tree, a banana tree and a coconut tree in the front. I can’t wait for our tent to get here, so we can camp back there and toast marshmallows in the fire pit. We have been told that there are monkeys back there, too, tiny squirrel-like things with flowy yellow manes, but we haven't seen any yet. Mango and breadfruit trees grow in the medians of the roads and are public property so during lunch or on my drive home, I can see people in the median throwing rocks and sticks into the trees to get the mangos down!

Last weekend, we ventured to the TV Tower, the tallest structure in Brasilia. Beneath it, there is an open air market with vendors selling t-shirts, trinkets, Indian jewelry, rugs, everything. There were churrascarias, buffets with people selling spits of meat. We ordered deep-fried pastels, and I had an Antartica. Sam took a moment to settle in, but soon was ogling kites and the giant fountain spewing giant balls of mist. A crowd surrounded two men engaged in capoeira, a graceful combination of martial arts and dance.

We ordered pizza one night and the guy brought us a 6-pack of beer for free. I didn't even ask for it. It was Skol, the worst beer I’ve had since Natty Bo in the basement of the rowhouse in Baltimore. The pizza had cream cheese in the crust. Everything is familiar, but everything is a little bit different, too. Elise bought chocolate ice cream that already had chocolate sprinkles in it. Sadly, there are no Starbucks here and, therefore, no sprinks doughnuts for Sam. On her initial shopping expedition, Elise bought plastic trash bags at the store for roughly the US equivalent of $24. I was told you buy trash bags from the side of the street. From the trash bag guy. Sure enough, last weekend, we were driving back from the store and spotted him, in the median, with a roll of trash bags wound around his forearm. We swung the car around and flagged him down and spent 20 Brazilian reais on trash bags. There are capybaras here—or so we’ve been told—though we haven’t seen any ourselves yet. They, like Elise and I and the boys as we slowly spread our wings, stroll right down the sidewalks and through traffic.