One month down and two to go

Having had enough of the complicated logistics of getting from A to B, the lovely A and I decided not to go back to Rio just yet, and have found ourselves a nice little pousada in Paraty (we’re getting better at bargaining on the rates, in the absence of any vocabulary for negotiating, mainly by putting on a series of pained faces until the price is dropped) and are now just sort of taking it easy and waiting for a plan to reveal itself to us.

To illustrate the extent of our ´blowing in the wind-ness´, today it took us several hours to get to the bus station in Paraty (a five-minute walk) because on the way we decided to follow a horse which seemed to be wandering about on its own, which led us on a little excursion around the outer fringes of Paraty. A lovely excursion actually - neighbourhood Sunday life playing out on the streets, the real life of this city revealing itself once you look past the facade that is offered up to tourists in the scenic centre. Birds in cages hanging from trees, a man painting his cart, kids on bicycles and skateboards and with kids richocheting from house to house, the smell of church cook-ups wafting out of buildings, balcony gardens blooming, dogs flopping in doorways, groups of old men everywhere sitting around putting the world to rights outside a row of little food stalls. But I digress....

All the deadlines we’ve had so far which have driven us from place to place (friends arriving, Christmas, New Year etc) have passed, and now we are in the liberating but somewhat incomprehensible position of having absolutely no commitments to anything or anyone until the 4th of March, when we are supposed to be flying back to London.

So what’s changed in a month? Let´s have a little audit.

In no particular order....

We’ve pared down what we carry to the essentials. Anything too hot, too impractical, too heavy or too bulky has been sent back to Sao Paulo (including my leather jacket. Why did I bring a leather jacket to Brazil? We´ve been attempting to bribe each other to put it on for half an hour in this excruciating heat, but the price was never high enough). Vanity has to be relegated: I have very low expectations of what I might look like when I look in the mirror. Hair is either clean or not – I have had to relinquish control over anything else it might choose to do. I am bored to the state of total apathy with my tiny clothes collection and choose what to wear based on what is clean and not too hot. My shoe collection here is now entirely Brazilian-made. I’m living in Havainas and loving it. I reckon that at any one time, 80% of the population of Brazil is wearing a pair of Havainas, and for good reason. I’m a complete convert – they allow you to be barefoot in seconds, they come in a dazzling array of colours, and when they eventually wear out you can buy another pair from the next supermarket for about 3 quid. Makes one laugh when one considers how much you pay for a pair in Urban Outfitters in London. When the terrain is too hard for flip-flops, it’s into the capoeira shoes, which again come in all the colours under the sun, go in the washing machine when they’re dirty, take up no room in my bag, and cost about 8 quid.

We are browner than we were despite liberal application of factor 30 and are no longer always the whitest people in sight.

The Portuguese is coming along – the musicality of the language is revealing itself now since someone patiently explained the accent marks to me, which tell you on the page how to say the word, its stress and cadence. I’ve discovered that there’s no point rushing when I speak and that slow and drawn out works better. There´s none of the rapid staccato tatatatata that you get with Spanish. I can read the newspaper with less frequent recourse to the dictionary, and occasionally realise that I have understood something that I’ve overheard without consciously trying to.

My relationship with time has changed; usually I have no means of telling it. Quite a lot of it just disappears, and then you wonder where it went. The Brazilians, it has to be said, have a very different relationship with time than we do. I think it´s quite interesting that they use the word ´finalmente´ (finally) but not really ever `eventualmente´ (eventually) to describe when someone turned up. ´Eventually´, I think, implies that you were more impatient while you were waiting.

I carry very little on my person and wonder why in London I’m always lugging a huge bag around.

We’ve stopped being ridiculously paranoid about getting robbed. Everything matters less.

Frequently (and this is a little sad) we realise we have stopped being surprised at our surroundings.

I haven’t had a cup of tea for a month and have developed an intense liking for feijao and arroz (got to learn to cook beans like they do here), and found a plethora of new ways to consume cheese. (Last week’s discovery: Pastel de quejo – deep-fried cheese pie. I’m going to end up the size of a house.)

My slipped disc seems to have unslipped (touch wood) and I can touch my toes again and have stopped worrying unduly about hurting myself.

Most profoundly, I feel far away enough from the life I’ve constructed for myself back home to have a good long look at it and to decide which bits of it matter to me. Before we left everything seemed inextricable and unchangeable. Now I’m more and more wondering what exactly I need to go back for. Whilst ambition is obviously a wonderful thing, it’s incredibly liberating to rediscover what it is that you actually want to do in the moment that you’re doing it, and to realise that even the best laid and grandest plans are changeable.

And the next two months? We’re both feeling itchy to do something more constructive, to get off the road, settle down a bit and get stuck into something. I’ve got a new play brewing and am on the look out for somewhere with a nice veranda or balcony from which to start to write it.