Finding our feet

So, what has a week done? The days no longer each feel like a year and we’re not exhausted by over-stimulation at the end of each one. We’re taking it as it comes, we’ve got over the exaggerated sense of danger that precedes Sao Paulo, we can read signs on the walls and we don’t worry about getting lost. We have walked for miles and miles and we know where the buses and metros go and where we are on the map. My feet are finally coming out evens in the battle of My Feet vs My Havaianas (who’d have thunk that breaking in flip-flops could be so hard?).

So we’re braving the city now, trying to treat it as we would our own metropolis. We spend time trying to separate out myth from perception. Are we jittery walking down the street because we are actually unsafe, or because we keep being told we are? Brazil’s reputation precedes it – everyone you speak to has a story about them or someone they know being robbed at gunpoint. Hijackings, kidnappings, bag snatchings…Paulistas don’t stop at red lights at night. Kids on the street snatch anything that’s not attached to your body. It all has the accumulative effect of making you feel like you’re constantly waiting for a gang of crack-crazed bogeyman to leap out at you and violently alleviate you of your worldly possessions.

It’s a horrible position to be in because you become ruled by fear. When you actually talk to the Paulistas, they’ll admit that nothing has ever happened to them – or certainly, nothing we’ve heard about has surpassed by any margin what you might expect in London. All my male friends in London have been mugged – it’s a fact of life, and one which you don’t let prevent you from doing as you please.

Walking the streets, eyes on stalks, we try to rationalise it. Is anything actually making us feel uneasy? It’s dark but normal. There are people about. They all look normal. A case of learning to use your judgement and perception rather than allowing yourself to be governed by worse-case-scenarioism. Because if everyone barricades themselves in against the invisible threat, then it all just gets worse.

That said, when push comes to shove, we’re still jumpy. We thought for a brief moment that we were being kidnapped the other day. Ju left us in the car while she popped into the bank. We had the radio on and I was looking at something on the back shelf of the car and singing along loudly to Luther Van Dross when the car started to move. I assumed Ju had returned and was mightily surprised when I turned round, still singing, to find the car being swung round in the car park by a teenage boy. “Why is this dude driving the car!” I squealed at A, who for some reason that I couldn’t immediately comprehend, didn’t look shocked. She had had a couple of seconds longer than me to digest the situation and had realised that he was one of the car park attendants and was moving our car out of the way. Luckily the car park dude found it almost as funny as we did.

There’s a strange sensation of two cities existing next to one another. On the metro, you could be in any European well-off city – then you step out of the station and see another lifestyle hidden under the flyovers. We passed this building yesterday that Ju pointed out to us – a towerblock of maybe 40 stories which looked like it had been ravaged by time and misery. Every window had been smashed or boarded and the outside was scarred by grafitti – if you saw it in London you’d assume that the bulldozers were just about to move in.

It reminded me of that tower block in 28 Days Later where they’ve barricaded themselves in with shopping trolleys at the end of the world. It’s inhabited though – a vertical favela, squatted by hundreds and hundreds of people with no other option. As we waited for the lights to change, a procession of people flooded round the stationary cars trying to sell what they could “cinco reales, quarto reales, dois reales, por favor?” Ju warns us not to have our bags anywhere near the open car windows.

We go with Ju to the market on Rua 23 Maio, she’s there to buy fabric for her set design. The place is crazy; brilliant wholesale shops selling beads and feathers, street traders being cleared sporadically by teams of police – a birds eye view would see them disappearing ahead of the police like a Mexican wave only to reappear behind them shortly after. We tried not to stick out like sore thumbs which was not easy as we were the only non-Brazilians there as far as we could tell. Overwhelming at first – just the sheer amount of things to look at and look out for, your eyes constantly being pulled and your body being brushed and bumped. But I love markets, they’re always bonkers, and there’s a common denominator whether it’s 23 Maio or Marrakech’s souks or just good old Brixton on a Saturday. All the normal structure of life seems to go out of the window, and a new, much more organic structure emerges. They’re brilliant because everything is so negotiable and chaotic.

Once you stop dedicating your attention to noticing the unfamiliar things about a place, and start instead to notice the universal familiarities, the whole world shifts, and you start to feel like you fit in it.

Were going to head to a place brilliantly named O Do Borogodo last night but didn’t because we got home late and knackered after walking about for hours and hours and hours, and were then greeted by the news via email that the apartment we thought we’d secured in Rio for NY had fallen through, mainly because of our unwillingness to send a large amount of money to an unknown person via Western Union, so maybe a good thing. Trying to find a place to stay in Rio over NY is a fucking headache and we couldn’t face trawling the internet again. Prices skyrocket to ridiculous levels – Juliana was absolutely appalled when we told her what people were asking for a shoebox with a view in Ipanema – it works out as twice as much for a week as her monthly rent here, which is a really lovely 3 bed house with a big art studio and a garden. In London terms, the equivalent of about £2500 for a week, which I swear tops even Mayfair shoebox prices. Criminal. And yeah, we could afford it here, but I’m adamant that just because you could pay for something doesn’t mean that you should. Opting out of the reality of a city because you can afford to throw money at it just makes me feel like a dickhead.

Lots of people disagree with me but I do think that when you’re travelling in another country you have to think about the money you’re spending in real terms, i.e. linked into the local economy and in parity with local earning potential, otherwise you are behaving in a way that seems to me to be colonial. And it’s really fucking sore here where so many of the social problems are caused by the enormous disparity between the lifestyle qualities of the haves and have nots. There's lots of sensible arguements to counter that rationale, but at the end of the day that is just how I feel and I have a very hard job getting over it.

The lovely A has got leprosy, the skin is falling off her fingertips. I told her this morning that it’s because she’s losing her identity since she started wearing that religious icon thing that she bought yesterday in the market.