The day before my friend Emily left, she had a bunch of us over for a party with her family. We hung out and ate sausage – and chicken hearts, which I’m not at all sold on – and mixed drinks and played party games in Portuguese and it was fun. My favorite moment was when Emily’s host brother asked me where I was from. When I said “California,” his response was “Oh. Blunt.” “What?” I said. It was a little hard to understand through the accent. “Blunt,” he said. Then he told Emily that I looked like I probably smoked a lot of blunts. This may be the best response to being from California that I have ever gotten.
During the month of June, there are these festivals held all over the Northeast in celebration of São João and I think also of the harvest, because it’s approaching the end of the rainy season and things are green now but are going to stop growing very soon. I’ve seen a lot of the imagery of this holiday season in ads on TV, but on Saturday, I went to one of these São João festas with my host family. It was one of the most charming things I’ve ever seen. I’ve been trying to think of how to describe it in relation to American things and it’s a challenge. I’d say it looks kind of like if you crossed the Fourth of July with some kind of Pioneer Day celebration. Everyone is wearing clothes appropriate for a good old-fashioned hoe-down, or if not are at least alluding to it through use of denim, plaid, pigtails, or hats. There are scaled-down carnival games, like throwing the ball through the clown’s mouth and fishing for prizes in a little pool full of straw. There is square dancing. There are also those Brazilian quirks, though – the little girls are dressed up in these dresses, which I guess are supposed to be traditional-ish – they’re very flashy, though. There are also these specifically shaped little flags, which show up almost everywhere in the city. They are so ubiquitous that some of the flags even have the shapes of the flags printed on them. On TV there are always people dressed up as cangaceiros, or bandits who inhabit the sertão – the Brazilian outback. There’s a novela on right now that features a romance between a peasant girl who turns out to actually be a princess and a peasant guy who turns out to actually be the son of a cangaceiro, and the show has this Robin Hood take on the whole thing – he comes from bad stock, but he does good. I’m not sure if that’s typical or not, though. The whole thing is very traditionally Northeastern, though, and I’m really glad I got to see a bit of it.
I spent my very last day in Fortaleza enjoying the perfect beach weather...
This was June 21, the first day of winter in the southern hemisphere. Winter in Fortaleza, hah. A likely story.
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