Brazil: The Beginning

Well, this is the moment I’ve been waiting for and probably the moment you’ve been waiting to hear about. It’s the end of my second day in Brazil and I feel I owe it to everyone who’s been reading my blog to update you. Everything was fine when I arrived in Sao Paulo. It was much easier than I imagined. The wait-times were long, and as my boyfriend says ‘Brazilians love to wait in lines’. It took me roughly 1 hour to wait in the border control line, and roughly 10 seconds to be approved for my stay in Brazil. De nada. I took a walk outside in Sao Paulo between my flights. The red sunrise beamed from across the mountains on the horizon, creating silhouettes of the buildings and palm trees. The air was thick and the surroundings felt dense. It felt like what I imagined Brazil to feel like.

The long-awaited reunion with Diogenes was one of the scariest and most exciting things I’ve experienced. Walking out of the Baggage Claim area, seeing him immediately in the crowd waiting anxiously too, there was that moment when our eyes first met... my heart was beating loudly. I was greeted at the airport with a beautiful bunch of exotic roses, presents and chocolates on my seat in the car, another present at the hotel, and 20minutes after we’d had some time to settle down a trolley of champagne, fruits and a huge assortment of different Brazilian foods was delivered by room service. I’ve been taken out to restaurants and generally treated like a princess. Needless to say, I’ve been feeling pretty spoilt. I’m not going to go into personal details, but I can say that it feels like we’ve never been apart and we were quick to remember why we felt and knew it was worth waiting 6 months to see each other again.

So – first impressions of Brazil? I guess it still hasn’t hit me where I am. It’s really new for me. I’d describe it as a mix between Darwin, Australia, and Vietnam in infrastructure and architecture. Concrete and tiles are building material of choice. The architecture is soviet-esque and the powerlines look fierce. Curitiba is known as the ‘Green City’ and has the reputation of being one of the nicest cities in Brazil to live. On the way from the airport we drove past many slums, and generally poor neighbourhoods. It was a bit of a shock for me. Not because I didn’t expect to see them, but because I wasn’t prepared to see so many of them. The Aboriginal urban government-housing settlements and ‘slum areas’ in Darwin and Vietnam look pretty upper-class compared to some of these places. Brazil is a little hot and cold for me still. The moments we’ve had to explore the more natural parts of the city, such as the hills and the parks, have been beautiful moments for me. The stress and chaos of the big city is a bit more difficult to warm to. I thought I would be scared of Brazil at night, but actually I prefer it and really enjoy the buzz of the city when the sun goes down. There are lots of men randomly standing around waiting down dark streets, alongside stray dogs and masses of graffiti. The general graffiti scribbles mimic Egyptian Hieroglyphics in my opinion, and there is much graffiti ‘art’ throughout the city. Some streets are completed secured off, and when we park our car at night there is a man who runs around the street who we pay and he keeps watch over all the cars. I don’t feel threatened here, and people always advised that I would be fine if I just used my ‘common sense’. Unfortunately I don’t really have the stay-safe-in-Brazil-common-sense yet because many of the dangers here have never crossed my mind before. Nevertheless, I am really starting to understand what people meant by this. I’ve seen many girls from my hotel window walking on their lonesome throughout the streets at night – a sight I never thought I’d see. People don’t really stay in their lanes or follow road rules strictly here, and there is general disarray on the roads (i.e. buses so completely full that they look like something out of a movie!). For the amount of people I see cleaning the streets I can’t really comprehend why everything still looks quite so unkept. Men and/or horses pull carts along and pickup rubbish/paper recycling from the road side. ALL the women wear jeans and knee-high boots – don’t ask me why. I dressed in accordance with the locals yesterday, but it felt a little too Brazilian and a little too little Sarah. I feel there is a lot more to say about what I’ve seen so far, but I feel like I’ve barely seen anything yet. After the weekend and a trip to Sao Paulo on Monday, I can't even imagine what I'm going to have to say.  Day 2 – this is the beginning of my Brazil...