São Paulo, Brasil: A foreign land, but strangely familiar

When I landed in Guarulhos Airport, I had convinced myself that I was ready for this. After all, I had been practicing my Portuguese for… maybe two whole weeks? For the first hour or so, I think the only thing I said in Portuguese was, “Você fala inglês?”

I was very fortunate though, because of two friends I had met in Boston. One friend, Julia, from Rio de Janeiro, when asked what a tourist should do in Brazil, replied, “Meet my friends there!” The other, Joana, from Lisbon, Portugal, happened to be in São Paulo herself on business. After dropping off my things at the hostel, I met Joana for lunch along with Julia’s friend Taciana and her teenage son Luigi. Seeing a familiar face helped a lot, and Joana has always had strong opinions, which usually challenged me to think about things differently. Now that we were in a restaurant where I didn’t know what I was ordering though, I had to pretty much accept those opinions as my own!

Taciana proposed that I go to a soccer match with Luigi, whose favorite team, Palmeiras, was playing. When I showed up wearing my black shirt, I discovered that the opponent was Ponte Preta (Black Bridge). Luigi suggested that if I value my life, I shouldn't go into the home team’s stadium wearing the road team’s colors! So I bought a new, green Palmeiras shirt.

Me with my new Palmeiras shirt.

A big Palmeiras banner: A tradição continua. (The tradition continues.)

A funny thing about football matches in Brazil: it's actually illegal to sit in the home team's sections as a fan of the road team. The road team fans get their own little section, surely as a protective measure. So naturally, whenever Palmeiras scored, their fans went to the edge of the Ponte Preta section and... made less-than-friendly gestures, as you can see in this video shot by Luigi of a penalty kick.

Palmeiras won 3-2.

Estádio do Pacaembu, after the game.

I met a number of other very interesting friends of Julia's through Taciana: a physicist at Universidade de São Paulo named Claúdio, a newlywed couple Felipe and Cecilia, Felipe's sister Julia, an economist named Rafael, two visiting Italian girls Marta and Serena, and of all people to meet in Brazil, a half-Persian half-Indian girl from England named Miriam. Among other things, they took me to out to a bar/steakhouse in the trendy part of town, to the Pateo do Collegio (School Yard), the Parque Ibirapuera (a more tropical Central Park), and as the grand finale, even a Brazilian McDonald's! (I had promised to meet Rafael for lunch and it was all we had time for.)

The Pateo do Collegio is more interesting than a typical schoolyard: it's actually where the city of São Paulo was effectively founded, and the center around which the city was built. It started as a hut covered with palm leaves where some Jesuits celebrated São Paulo's inaugural Mass, became a school for evangelizing and educating the indigenous peoples, and then it was secularized by settlers who wanted to use those same indigenous peoples as slave labor instead. Finally, in the 20th century it was reconstructed into a colonial-style church, where we could once again attend Sunday Mass. Unfortunately, I lost my camera after this, so I don't have pictures, but its history was the most interesting thing about it anyway.

I remarked to some of my new friends that São Paulo felt strangely familiar. I realized after awhile that it felt a lot like Manila, Philippines, but cleaner and with better drivers. (São Paulo drivers are still crazy, just not five-lanes-of-traffic-on-a-three-lane-highway crazy.) The palm trees along the streets, the colonial history, the Catholic presence and majestic churches, the stark contrast between the financial shopping district and the nearby slums, all made me feel as though I could've magically transported into Manila and not have noticed until hearing someone speak Tagalog.

A final anecdote about my departure from São Paulo. I took a R$160 cab ride to Guarulhos airport, and stuck in traffic, I started to converse with the driver. He didn't speak a word of English, but I was starting to feel emboldened in my Portuguese. At one point, he turned on the radio to a station playing American pop music. I asked him if he knew what the lyrics were about. He of course replied no, and asked me to translate. Flustered, I replied, "Uhm.... Eles querem que vou à (uhhh) clínica de drogas (???), e digo, 'Não, não, não!'" ("They want me to go to the (awkward pause) clinic of drugs (???), and I say, 'No, no, no!'") For those who of course recognize Amy Winehouse's "Rehab", I obviously didn't know how to say "rehab" (turns out it's the easily guessable "reabilitação"), so I went with "clinic of drugs". I wasn't sure if that sounded like a rehab clinic or a clinic to go get more drugs. But more than anything, at that moment I realized something about Brazilian hospitality. As hard as it was for me adapting to Brazil and speaking Portuguese, it was just as hard or harder for him to speak English and adapt to me. All these people working hard to show me around, to work on their broken English, and to order things I didn't know how to order, were treating me like an old friend they had known for years. I couldn't help but be struck by this generosity.