Aqui Ô

I started hearing this phrase here while boxing at the gym. Its kind of a filler expression or like saying right here, but after I started noticing it seems everybody and their mother utters it between every other word. Anyways.
My weeks here tend to durate more than I would like them to and I find my self itching to leave Jundiai on the 1.5 days I have off on the weekend. I´ve been hopping on the commuter train to São Paulo which is about $1.50 US, however the trip takes about 1.5 hours as well. I have some friends in São Paulo that I met while traveling before classes started in trindade. They are some nice girls and they all seem to be cousins. (note nearly everyone in Brazil are cousins, have a sibling who has a child or have a deceased close family member) I always seem to wait for several hours when we plan to meet up and Saturday was exactly the same. I met them in the Tutuapé neighborhood in the east zone of São Paulo. When I first got here I was really impressed by the fact most Brazilians my age don´t tend to be smokers, but when they are smokers they make up for lost time. My friends bought 2 packs of cigarettes between the four of them and nearly finished the entire two packs just that night. I think my first observation of the fact Brazilians don´t smoke was off.
We hung out that night on a lively strip that was mostly sit down bars, called Barzinhos, or little bars. The street is called Coelho something or other which means rabbit and the bar we spent the night was called Rabbit Bar, in English. That was almost the only thing I understood that night. Its really hard going out to a noisy bar with a lot of background noise and following the conversation. Its honest work doing having a conversation with the person sitting right next to you so when you add glasses clinking, cigarette lighters flicking, guitar players strumming and Brazilians frenching into the mix all within ear shot the task becomes significantly more difficult. I started to feel dumb. So I told my friends I could analyze their signatures. I got a book from the library once and I realized its all BS. I had them write their signatures down on a pad of paper and then in my increasingly drunken Portuguese gave them vague adjectival descriptions and let them fill in the blanks. Its a fascinating experiment because people get very emotional. My friend had loopy handwriting so I told her she liked to have fun and people liked her to be around. She agreed and proceeding to list off adjectives that would compliment my description. We left the bar, got some hot dogs paninnis with mashed potatoes and lots of other junk on it. While we were ordering the cops pulled up jumped out of their car guns drawn, dressed in uniforms that were oddly similar to those of the SS guards. Apparently there had been an assault so they were after the bandits. Nothing really ended up happening. My friends said that they had never seen anything like it and they blamed it on me. I thought we would be out most of the night and I could catch an early morning train, however they went in early and it would have been completely taboo for me to even crash on their parent´s couches. So we went to a HMotel. A hotel here is a hotel, a motel here can be rented by the hour, I really couldn´t tell on the sign if the first letter was a H or a M and I think that was its purpose. But Motel Tunisia and its orient charm wooed me over and I slept great. The next day they picked me up and we went to a large market in the center of São Paulo. Basically for the yuppies. There was fine cheeses, oils, spices, pates, meats, dried cod fish or Bacalhau and exotic fruits. Bacalhau is a Portuguese delicacy. The Portuguese, Spanish and Basque people of the Iberian Penisula are fond of the cod fish because of its dried and salted preservation qualities. We walked by a colorful fruit stand and a Japanese salesman began cutting off exotic slices of fruit for us. We were immediately hooked and I decided to buy some fruit. I only bought a bar full but it ended up being $62 reais a little more than 34 dollars. We realized we´d been jipped and started talking about it. The Japanese man heard us complaining and gave us a softball sized peach to silence our mouths.