Continued neglect...

So no fun blog post today. I have, however, posted all of my pictures from Brazil and all of the ones from Argentina so far on Facebook!

Here we have Brazil, Brazil 2, and Argentina.

Whew.

Hola, Buenos Aires!

As you may have guessed, I have made it to Argentina, despite Puyehue's best efforts.

The sky over Rio from the airplane... so blue!

So far, I've spent most of my time in Buenos Aires with Nina! Unfortunately, I don't yet have many photos of Buenos Aires - I only took my camera out for the first time today, which is also the first day I ventured out totally on my own, so none of them include Nina. You will just have to wait. In the meantime...

I went to the Feria San Telmo, a weekly outdoor market that happens on Sundays a few blocks from my hostel. The neighborhood of San Telmo was where all the wealthy people lived back in the day, but they all got as far away as they could get in 1870 or so when there was a yellow fever epidemic. So that's fun.

Can you see how cold that sunlight looks? It is freaking freezing here compared to Fortaleza. The feria has a lot of antiques, but also a lot of touristy things and jewelry and things.

 

I may have bought a sweater. I don't think it's of particularly high quality or is in any way "authentic," but it's made of alpaca and it has alpacas on it, and I was so cold when I saw it that I had to.

This is the Iglesa de San Pedro Telmo, which I had sort of intended to see but mostly just stumbled upon it.

I came in while they were having Mass, and stood in the back. It was very beautiful.

 

So far, I like Buenos Aires a lot. It's a shock that it's actually cold, and that it's continuing to be cold - it's not just a freak middle-of-the-night thing. It also feels very old and established - I think this is partly because the places I've been to so far have been in the nicer, historical areas, and partly because it actually is older and I think generally wealthier than anywhere I went in Brazil. Regardless, it's incredibly beautiful. 

Tchau, Fortaleza...

A couple of stories from the last week in Brazil...

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.

Dear Puyehue...

I realize you're having a hard time right now. I know you're under a lot of pressure most of the time, and that sometimes you just need to let go without worrying about a lot of irritated travelers grumbling at you in airports around the Southern Hemisphere. It's tough. I get it. But I really need for you to just take a deep breath and try to relax. Everything will be okay.

Alternatively, if you could arrange for your ash cloud to blow some other direction than Buenos Aires, that would be great too.

Thanks,
Molly

Some amazing photos of the ash cloud and the surrounding area in Chile...
An article and video from Al Jazeera...
And another article...

The view from "home"...

A couple of long-overdue shots out the window of our fourth-floor apartment. 

And this ingenious invention - I don't know why we don't use these to reheat rice in the United States! You put water in the bottom part, get it steaming, and put the rice in the top part. Way better than sprinkling it with water and sticking it in the microwave.

TA-DA.

I have finished my ISP. If you really want to, you can read it in a nifty Google Document here. The actual writing part is about 25 pages long, so I don't blame you if you don't want to. But it's there, at long last.

To continue in this celebratory mood, here is some lace...

 And me with Tebe the Italian, on the left, and Melisse the Brazilian, on the right. I'm the really white-looking one in the middle.

The clock is ticking...

William and Fátima

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned them before, but these two fabulous people, William and Fátima, are the hosts of Brazil’s Jornal Nacional, the nightly national news that broadcasts every day except for Sunday, so everyone in Brazil including myself sees them almost daily. I like them a lot. I actually feel very similarly about them as I do about Barack and Michelle Obama. I associate them with the connection with the rest of the world that they provide. They seem like they know what they’re doing, and I kind of trust them, I guess. I also associate them with understanding Portuguese, since helpful photos and videos about always accompany their news stories. I wish all interactions with Brazilians were like that.

It didn’t take me very long being in Brazil before I realized that they’re married. They and their three kids pop up every so often in magazines, and when one of them isn’t on the news, neither is the other one. It’s nice to think about them having a nice family night at home, or whatever it is they do.

Tonight, however, they did not get their usual Sunday evening off – they were on Faustão, which is perhaps the most irritating variety and talk show that has ever existed, but that’s an unnecessary boring description for another time. Since today is the Brazilian version of Valentine’s Day, known as Dia dos Namorados, William and Fátima along with their twenty-one years of marriage were featured. It was too cute. They showed a lot of photos of them as a young couple and with their kids, and spent a lot of time hearing from regular Brazilians on the street about how they’re the most respected married couple in Brazil, and how watching them on the TV and knowing they’re married makes people feel like they’re their friends, just letting them know about the news of the day.

Not going to lie, that is about all I understood – my TV Portuguese comprehension has gone way downhill, since this is the first time I’ve watched any in over a month. But it was great. It was so funny to see so many different emotions on their faces, since they usually have their stoic news anchor faces on.

Oh, the things that light up my Brazilian life.

(There are only nine days left until NINA IN ARGENTINA. I'm trying not to get too excited about it too soon, but there's only so much I can do.)