Years of Poems and Spirits

We had our longest day in Brazil so far. We didn’t arrive to our next stop, Foz Do Iguacu, until 4am the next morning.

The day started pleasant enough: we said farewell to Andre and the driver who drove us to Bonito several days ago is driving us back to Campo Grande. Valdemire (or Vladimir as the former Peruvian intelligence chief?) and us tried to struck a conversation on the road but it was as difficult as it was funny. Other than some basic words, we are not sure what he said. Now I found myself carefully purging from my mind what we learned (or we thought we learned) from our conversation along the way.

It is fascinating that I have been reading Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures along the way. In this book, Geertz mentioned that cultures are “public” or transparent, but are expressed through different symbols and in different frameworks. I am not sure I understand Geertz very well but in our encounter with locals who speak little English, we certainly have experienced first hand the phenomenon of public meaning and private expression. Sometimes, immediately after seeing something together with us, Valdemire would excitedly say things to us. I couldn’t help but felt funny at how what he said was at once so “obvious” and so unintelligible.

We stopped at a little town to have lunch. The road side restaurant was very clean. People are very friendly. They don’t look at us Asians as if we are some strange creatures from Mars. I remembered when we toured the monasteries in Meteroa, Greece, a group of high school students from Croatia studied us with such guarded curiousness that they made me very uncomfortable. In contrast, the Brazilians are mostly nonchalant about our presence. I am not sure that is because there is a large Asian population in Brazil.

Valdemire took us to the travel agency who arranged our trip, Open Door. It is a small office without air condition. We met the founder Gerald who lived in Brazil for many years. He and another guy, Jan, helped us to finalize our schedule in Rio. They sure would have made Weber proud: Gerald told me that even when they are on vacation they had to attend to their client’s needs.

In the airport, we learned that our flight was delayed by at least an hour. Interestingly enough, a German family we first met in Bonito is on the same flight. The son, Tim, is studying in Brazil and his parents are spending Christmas with their only child and his host family in a southern town close to Port Alegere. Tim is a very pleasant and intelligent young man. He is more serious than most 17-year olds I have seen (he’s already declared himself atheist).

The connecting plane was delayed again in Sao Paolo. The airport felt like a refugee shelter. Tired travelers were lying all over the floor. We chatted with the Tim and his parents and killed time that way.

Our flight was supposed to take off at 11pm but it didn’t until 3pm. When we landed in Iguacu, it was way past 4am in the morning. Tim looked pale and exhausted but he still had the presence of mind to say Goodbye before we parted ways.