Correndo Atras

I got dropped off at the bus station on Monday night a little nervous and very anxious to get away from Jundiaí. I said my goodbyes and boarded the packed bus of which the last remaining seat was mine. I sat next to a large man who took up most of the space of the two reclining seats. The driver put on a movie starring John Cusack and Morgan Freeman. (How many movies has Morgan Freeman been in the last five years anyways?) I had difficulties reaching my contact in Floripa that night, she wasn't picking up her phone and I wasn't sure if she knew I was coming in the next morning. I sent some urgent text messages but to no avail. I got a beep at 6 AM giving me less than explicit text message directions on how to arrive to her house, using the bus. I was expecting her to meet me at the station so I took a cab to her house. Luckily the bus driver knew where the place was.
I hauled my two enormous suitcases out of the trunk of the station wagon and was greeted by every dog in the neighborhood. I tried calling her cell phone but again no luck. Luckily one of her roommates was on his way to class and he woke her up and let me into the complex. She greeted me in a light pink silk matching pajama set and a pair of saggy eyes to compliment the ensemble. She's a nice Irish looking girl from Arizona, and an ex-teacher of the school where I taught. I squeezed my luggage into the tiny efficiency she lives in. Her apartment is small and can barely fit one person much less two. She said she kept meaning to clean the apartment to make it appear presentable but she never got around to it. I somehow found some room to stash my suitcases.
She was still sleepy so she laid back down to bed and we talked for a while getting to know each other. Her Portuguese is pretty good. She's lived here since January 2007. I told her my game plan of finding a place to live, private students and or a job as soon as possible. She advised me that the Island pace was much slower than I was accustomed to in São Paulo and that I shouldn't expect to find any of those things within a week.
I hadn't eaten anything and she offered me some of her fruit to make some morning juice. Her dream is to live on the beach and to go running in the morning followed by a heaping glass of fresh squeezed juice.
We met her neighbors, a nice couple of late teenagers from São Paulo. My host works about 10 hours a week and seems very content with this workload. She went off to the downtown for her to teach her class. She pointed out her favorite landmarks especially the market to buy fresh fruit presumably to be later be used for fresh juice. She has a very peculiar way of speaking English, which she accounts to her being in Brazil for such a long time immersed in Portuguese.
The downtown historic region of Florianópolis is a cobble-stoned collection of post-colonial buildings built in an Azorean style but with cell phone and chic boutique storefronts. We walked through a lovely park where old smelly men played card games and bickered about the pestering gypsies. The park's centerpiece is a tree whose sprawling branches are covered in hanging moss, recalling trees from Savannah Georgia. (Disclaimer: the author has never been to Savannah, Georgia.) While she taught her class I got my cell phone number changed from a São Paulo 11 area code to an exotic Santa Catarina 48.
We went back to her dwelling for lunch and logically more juice. We had some pretty good spaghetti highlighted by dried mystery sausage. Good pasta is hard to come by here because Brazilians are crazy about all their tomato sauce being sweet and this unfortunately includes ketchup. After lunch I did the dishes and she had to go back to the downtown for another class. While she went back downtown I walked down to the Federal University of Santa Catarina, or as I will from now on refer to as UFSC (ooof-skee)
Brazilian Universities function like this. When you graduate high school you take a test called the Vestibular in your intended course of study. Therefore you enter University already knowing your major. However the vestibular is very difficult to pass because whoever succeeds is granted free admission to the Federal University of their choice. The Federal public Universities are highly competitive; the Private universities are not competitive and cost money.
I walked around the campus and found a "Kinkos", printed up some Résumés, Housing Wanted posters and some flyers advertising my private English tutoring/ male prostitution services. I walked around the campus hanging up these adverts on any bulletin board I could find and in turn finding a few house vacancies and discovering I had some fierce competition in the English lesson bulletin board market.
I walked home exhausted and worn out. I ate a bohemian dinner of what resembled sliced ham on bread and a beer. I met a drunken bunch of Students of whom I could barely understand. I encountered my host's roommates having a conversation about some drama that involved a rowdy security guard and unwanted Internet publicity. I dozed off on the stairs while they vented. I was awoken by a call from a friend of my host who was bringing by a mattress for me to sleep on. I grabbed the mattress and placed it on the kitchen floor the only spot in the apartment that it would fit. My host came home and was disappointed to see me lying on the kitchen floor mattress expecting that I would have made some dinner or at least some juice. She tried to engage me but I was not having it.
The next day I was awoken by the poignant sounds of Fergy's "Glamorous" She said she was going to lay in bed a while so I took this as my cue to grab the first shower. I jumped in the shower and brushed my teeth, not rushing yet not taking my time either when she started banging on the door telling me to hurry up we were late. I jumped out of the shower got dressed and she was in a panic, frantic and hurried. A majority of Brazilian bathrooms do not have a separate spot or divider for showers, only a notch in the tile so you have to have a squeegee to push the water into the drain. She does not have a squeegee, so the water gets everywhere and she leaves towels all over the floor so they become sopping wet. She started cursing and freaking out that we were late, she didn’t have her books, she didn’t have her keys, we left and she realized she had forgotten a CD so we had to run to the bottom of the hill to meet her ride/boss. As we were running I said to myself I must find my own apartment, today! She brought up her view that English contractions were incorrect and uncommon such as I am=I'm, He is= He's, I would not have= I wouldn't have etc. I told her I disagreed and that this was one of the hardest parts about understanding spoken English. She insisted and I turn changed the subject.
The ride arrived and I met her co-workers a guy from England and a girl from Minnesota. We arrived at the hotel where she was teaching an intensive English Language program. I met her friend who is a surfer/doorman of the hotel who offered to get me a cup of coffee. He returned with a co-worker. When I asked him for the coffee he told me it wasn't for me. This offended me and I went down for a walk on the beach.
I was approached by a Jimmy Buffett aged stoner who asked me if I had a joint. This threw me off because he used the "Tu” form that is uncommon in most of Brazil where they use the Você form. I told him I didn't and he walked off extremely disappointed, which in turn made me extremely disappointed and I became frustrated with the fact I didn't have a coffee and that I had disappointed Jimmy Buffett.
I went back to the hotel and the doorman/surfer explained to me that he couldn't have given me the coffee at that time because the man he was talking to was his boss and he wasn't allowed to give things away to random gringos. I went to the front desk to drop off a resume and I met the receptionists and explained my situation. I met the manager but he told me they weren't hiring at the time. However I made a good contact with one of the receptionists who said he and his roommate had a spot in their apartment. We exchanged numbers and he gave me some ideas about where to drop off some resumes.
I went to the north of the Island to a beach called Praia de Ingleses (English Beach, named after a boat not a group of people) I went there with expectations of encountering hotels courting my English Portuguese skills as if it they were MBA law school credentials yet unfortunately the tourist season had ended and the most common response to my question as to whether or not the hotel was hiring was the contrary, they were as a matter of fact firing people.
I walked around the normally tourist littered streets of Ingleses as if it had become a ghost town, like North Haverbrook in the Simpson’s monorail episode. It was eerie and discouraging. I caught a bus back to home base but I caught the wrong bus and had to wait by a sticky, mosquito infested environmental police base for almost 2 hours. I got back to the campus and checked out an apartment that was much too far away from everything to consider living in despite its low, low price.
I waited for the rain to cease and went to look at the apartment of the receptionist. I walked away from the Campus into the Trindade neighborhood that a majority of the college students live in. I got to the apartment and was greeted by Ramon. He showed me the room, told me the price and I decided to take it. So I'm paying about $212 dollars a month for my own room, shared bathroom, Internet and utilities included. The place is very clean and well located 5 minutes from the mall, there's a bike trail that is right outside my house that circles around the lagoon that is in the center of the island, there are grocery stores, convenience stores and the Brazilian Wal-Mart all within 10 minutes walking. To use some Maryland slang, it’s vicious, I love it!
My Roommates are both from out of town. Ramon is a robotics student who is from Londrinha, Paraná. He's very well informed about a variety of scientific and technological subjects. He also professed his love of insect related photography to me. Alex is from a tiny city in São Paulo. In fact he tells people he is from a Small city that no one has ever heard of, that’s next to the city he is actually from that no one has ever heard of because his city is so darn small. Alex is very intellectually aware. He knows all about Brazilian music, history and cultural aspects. Talking to my roommates and significant others has been pushing my Portuguese to the limits. We’ve been having pretty decent discussions and arguments about an array of topics. They are all extremely nice and full of enthusiasm for what they are doing.
I spent the next few days distributing flyers advertising my services in a few places across the island, in the downtown, at UFSC and at the State University of Santa Catarina.
I had heard the State University of Santa Catarina has a music program. Considering my studio is all but defunct, (I got an e-mail estimate from the keyboard repair shop in São Paulo informing me my broken keyboard would cost about $400 dollars to fix, more than the value, and not to mention would take about 3 months to repair.) I went up to the music department and peaked around. I entered a classroom that the teacher was casually lecturing to a group of students sitting haphazardly around the desks and chairs of the room. In broken Portuguese I told them I was an American who had majored in music and I wanted to see what their program was about. Coincidentally they told me they were just at that moment talking about the differences between American and Brazilian music. They had literally just expressed curiosity in seeking out a native expert on the subject when I waltzed in the room. They didn't get an expert but beggars can't be choosers. The teacher and I played Coleman Hawkins’s famous ballad Body and Soul, we traded some solos and then played the up-tempo bebop blues "Billie's Bounce" Then we switched over to some Bossa Nova and played the clichéd "Só Dança Samba" and of course "A Garota de Ipanema" It was a lot of fun and I exchanged information with the students and teacher. I made some contacts for an available drum set and for some tambourine lessons. Talk about being in the right place at the right time!
I went back to UFSC to finish my mission of handing out all 1000 flyers that I made when a girl stopped me and asked me if she needed to take the flyer if she already spoke English. I thought she was messing with me but then she told me she was from Jamaica, she introduced me to her friend from Ghana and we all had a conversation in oddly accented Portuguese. She told me about a party that was on campus later that night and I told her I'd see her there. I went back home my roommate taught me how to prepare some beans and I went back for the party.
The night was a blast; there was live music, too much beer and lots of drunken college students. I was handing out the last of my little leaflets that I think a majority of the student body thought were a rolling papers. As I was courting students a rowdy longhaired hippy approached me an in heavily accented Portuguese and asked me "Do you want to sniff some glue?" That was the extent of our conversation in English, as he knew no other phrases. I think that was the funniest thing anyone has ever said to me in Brazil I ended up meeting up with the Jamaican girl and she introduced me to some of the other foreign Students, some Germans and a group of students from Santa Fe...Argentina. It was a really interesting night meeting people from Argentina, Germany, Chile, Canada not to mention from places all over Brazil.
We went back to the Argentineans place, pulled out the couches from their dorm lobby and shot the shit until the sun started to come up. But with the sun also came the resident belligerent drunk. Apparently this guy always comes in around 6:30 and just causes trouble with all the Argentineans adding fuel to the mock South American rivalry. The drunk was really upset about the fact we were drinking cinnamon tinted Brazilian rum and he called over the security guard who seemed like he had to deal with this guy on more than a few occasions. We decided it would be best if we left and we let the drunk rest in peace.
I think that my first week here in Florianópolis turned out better than I anticipated. It’s a beautiful place, located in a vibrant thriving, college, and young community. I really like the fact that I'm speaking Portuguese most of the time and surrounded by a diverse group of people. Hardly anyone I've met is from here. There are tons of migrants from all parts of the country and tons of immigrants from all over the world. I was starting to forget how great of a country and experience Brazil is while as I was in Jundiaí. Everyone is doing something interesting, I don' have to hear about people's lame jobs in São Paulo like working as a sales director for Proctor and Gamble's baby rash cream division. (True story). I can finally invite people to come visit me and actually have something to show them, but come quick, I'm an illegal!