On saturday 14th of august i awoke in a cold sweat with a very uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Lying in my bed, I began to run through the possible reasons in my head as to why i was feeling so dodgy; was it just a hangover from the disgusting but very cheap cachaca 51? Was it something dodgy that i ate? (i had long suspected that the university's worryingly cheap chicken pasties had less chicken and more pigeon inside). Was it some Tropical disease i had managed to pick up from one of the friendly mosquitos who seem to treat my arms as an open buffet? Had i reached the stage of mental cultural isolation that the Bristol international office's graph of homesickness had warned me about?
Upon logging onto my computer however, i found that there was an entirely different reason behind my predicament. The Premier League season 2010/2011 was about to get underway and i had completely forgotten. I quickly got dressed and having met up with some mates from the Uni we began a search for somewhere to watch chelsea in the day's late kick off (about midday our time). At best I was expecting to find some bar claiming to have something to do with Ireland down a side alley, showing the game on a tiny black and white telly with commentary in some indistinguishable eastern european language, and with a fat brazilian man swearing and hitting the aerial every 5 minutes to stop the picture going fuzzy. Instead we found the 'Black Swan', an english pub in the middle of Lagoa serving european larger and traditional pub fair, with firm favourites such as ye olde club sandwich in plentiful supply. We were also able to watch the game, albeit on a confusingly large number of different screens, giving the less than pleasant impression of being in a room with 20 Didier Drogbas. Needless to say i'm still having nightmares.
Whilst our morning was about as traditionally brazilian as a bottle of HP sauce, the afternoon was a different story. We had been invited to a house party in the near by area, and the lure of our first 'churrasco' made it all the more exciting. Brazil is famous for these churrascos, a type of barbecue built into a wall with long metal skewers balancing meat and fish (and vegetables if my friend Beth has anything to do with it) above hot coals. We were greeted at the door by some deceptively brazilian looking guys (I found out subsequently that they were spanish, but they still fitted into the category of 'not english') and paid our £6 contribution towards food and drink. We spent the next 10 hours speaking portuguese with a variety of brazilian and international students, eating the entire cast of Dr Doolittle (thankfully minus eddie murphy), drinking caipirinhas, beer, sangria and some anonymous orange cocktail they pulled out when they thought no one was looking and generally loving being in Brazil (at least until the sun went down and it got stupidly cold).
I woke up the following day feeling as happy and relaxed as I had since arriving here. We had arranged the previous night to go to a friend's house for lunch and so I set off around midday in blazing sunshine with two of my housemates Sophie and Nuno. We had been waiting about 20 mins at our nearest bus stop (i'll save my rant about the wonderfully impractical Floripa bus system for another time) when a slightly dirty and dishevelled man came and stood next to us.
We had been warned about the ways to avoid potential muggers; not flashing phones or cameras around, not talking in english and generally trying to pass ourselves off as Brazilian. However at midday on a sunday I will admit our guard was down. Between Sophie's bright blonde hair, my arsenal shirt and Nuno's 'metrosexual' scarf, i think its fair to say that we did not blend into our surroundings as succesfully as we might have. It also didn't help that our bus stop was opposite a renowned Favela and crack-den. (we were only told this subsequently and it certainly wasn't mentioned on our map of the local area)
However we were still unaware of any danger as the man began to talk with Nuno in a low voice, a conversation me and Sophie assumed was friendly banter. A few alarm bells started going off when Nuno handed over his mobile phone and some cash to the man, but a small part of me hoped he was some kind of travelling mobile repair man. The man then turned his attention to me and Sophie asking for our phones and threatening to shoot us if we didn't comply. I did what any self-respecting englishman would do when threatend by some foreign lout...i shrugged my shoulders and pretended i couldn't understand what he was saying. Unfortunately for Sophie her bright pink blackberry was resting in her lap. The guy saw it, and clearly unfazed by the prospect of being called a girl by his fellow favella dwellers, he demanded it, again threatening to shoot her. So she handed it over. Probably sensible.
As he was leaving he said, 'i'm sorry, this isn't the sort of thing i do normally'. Whilst i am a firm believer in the phrase 'don't judge a book by its cover,' in this case his general appearance and manner suggested that this was exactly the sort of thing he did normally. Prick.
We spent the rest of the day in a case of mild shock. We went to our friends for lunch as brazilian police don't work on a sunday, but with classes beginning in earnest the following day (at 8.20 in the morning i might add) we got an early night.
Compared to the chaos of signing up for classes, attending the first week of lectures was fairly straightforward. Having said that we still managed to get lost on the first day in typical exchange student style. We arrived at what we thought was our brazilian history class in good time and sat fairly near the front ready to be keen and enthusiastic. It was only after about half an hour that my view of the class changed from 'an unusual but interesting approach to studying brazilian history' to 'this has nothing whatsoever to do with brazilian history'. I poked the friendly brazilian guy next to me and he confirmed that we were actually in property law. Given the combined embarassment of making this mistake and then having to leave the class by squeezing between desks knocking books off tables as we went, we will not be making this mistake again in a hurry.
There was another surprise of a totally different nature in my football class. The session was not in a classroom studying muscle groups as I had feared, but instead a 6 aside tournament in the uni gymnasium. In the sort of cultural exchange that only happens on the football pitch, the brazilians taught me a variety of portuguese swearwords, and in return I taught them some of the unbeleivable tekkers I have picked up over the years. Apparently slide tackles aren't alowed.......woops.
We spent our nights during the week attending more on campus 'festas,' and frequenting a bar named 'Pida' which made up for its strange location in the middle of a children's playround by offering very cheap drinks and a good atmosphere. (it helped that half the university also went there before the 'festas' got going). However, at this stage I am slightly worried about the ramifications for my teeth of drinking large amounts of caipirinhas, as the local recipe seems to be something like;
ingredients;
1 packet of sugar (preferrably large)
1 lime
1/2 a bottle of vodka/cachaca
2 cubes of ice
Preparation;
Pour the packet of sugar into the glass
Cut the lime in to quarters and place decoratively in the glass
Add 2 ice cubes but no more or people might actually enjoy the drink
Fill up with vodka or cachaca.
Stir well although there is no possible way to dissolve all that sugar
Come to think of it i might brush them now....
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