Escape Characters

Do Not Forget

Josh, you're going to need to remember some things.

In a few months, people are going to ask you, "So how was Brazil?" and "What was it like?" and "Do you speak Portuguese now?" And, you're going to have to be prepared. After all, you spent 9 months in Brazil. There ought to be something that happened in three quarters of a year that is worthy of an answer. It will be unacceptable (socially, politically, neurologically) if you do not have some answers at the ready.

Therefore, here are the things you need to remember. They are in no particular order. But you do need to remember them.

For those more interested in photos, we've got our collections over here:

When you first got to Brazil, you started taking notes. You named those note files things like "Brazil Day 1" and "Brazil Day 2."

It turns out the habit did not stick and there was no "Brazil Day 3" file or any "Brazil Day X" file that followed.

Instead, you wrote a little program that told you when you started, and when you were coming back, and where you were at on your Brazil Day X timeline.

Here is an example of its output.

3/24/2023
6/24/2023
12/14/2023
Brazil Day 92 / 265
34%

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You'll note, Josh, that this example output represents the 92nd day, which is the same day that you wrote your little program. Which is to say that time went very fast in Brazil, so much that it was a full three months before you realized you hadn't taken any notes that would actually be useful upon your triumphant return. Oh dear.

You had such a bad accent when speaking Portuguese. A cashier asked you, "What method of payment?" (in Portuguese) and you responded (in Portuguese), "Credit card." After which she nodded, punched the right key sequence, and then gave you her heartiest Spanish thanks of "Muchas gracias!"

This wasn't out of the norm. Your Portuguese was, and is, garbage ("lixo"). But even Kristen, who usually did most of the talking, would get some quizzical looks and guesses. Venezuelan? Argentinian? Northeastern Brazil? Kristen's reply of "United States-ian" or "Alaskan" always came as a surprise. Brazilians don't often see folks from the U.S. and where you lived was not a tourism town, so even less. And, geographically speaking, a guessed "Muchas Gracias" makes a lot of sense, given that Brazil is entirely surrounded by Spanish-speaking countries.

But you certainly weren't the only ones who knew English. Some other people heard you speaking English to each other. Or they would read the English writing on your t-shirts, which was just normal-ass English saying things like "2019 Mayor's Half-marathon Finisher" or "Baranof Brewing, Sitka, AK", and not the cool English that is included on cool Brazilian designer clothes.

And they would nod, and delightfully try out their English with a "Hello!" or "Thank you very much!" Many Brazilians had to learn English in school, but not many end up with a very conversational grasp of English (to be fair, neither did you, Josh, with your short two years of high school Spanish). But even with short, introductory-level English phrases it was great to hear. And you grinned like an idiot and told them "Great job!" because you were so starved for being able to comprehend anything at all.

But some people were very good at English, either having grown up with English-speaking parents, or being enrolled in English immersion schools from a young age, or they themselves taught English, or they just worked professionally with English-speakers in their day-to-day, or in one case, they just really got into the Spiderman movies when they were younger. These people were also great to talk to in that you could easily converse, and you would also tell them how good their English was, and they would tell us how difficult it is for them to understand Adele's accent.

For being functionally illiterate for the better part of your trip, it was some of the best conversation you had (outside of, of course, your conversations with Kristen).

3/24/2023
9/29/2023
12/14/2023
Brazil Day 190 / 265
72%

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You thought it was weird that so many of the houses and buildings had a sort of "castle mentality" with how they were built.

To clarify: there would usually be the main structure (a house, an apartment building, a business, etc.) that was set at the center or at the back of a lot. Then there would be very high walls or fences, usually made of concrete or metal bars. They were very clearly there for security and not for aesthetics, as often there would be barbed wire or broken glass at the top of the fence to discourage would-be climbers.

This wasn't just around the poorer areas, or just the richer areas, but everywhere (even in other towns and cities you visited). It seemed normal to the Brazilians you asked about it, as it was just assumed that someone would want to climb the walls and break in. For many that you asked, this was already a thing that had happened and to them the need for the walls and fences and broken glass were self-evident.

This seemed strange to you, especially in your first few weeks. Despite everyone having these castle walls, somehow everyone had a story about someone getting over them. You had been warned that thefts and muggings were common, especially in the bigger cities and poorer areas. And your lifetime of exposure to U.S. news media coverage and Hollywood depictions of "other people" in "other countries" being dirty, poor, and dangerous, it made you wonder about how safe you really were in walking around your city.

You were, of course, an idiot. Yes, there is crime and poverty and fear. But as the meme goes, "We've already got that at home." You feel the same way walking around your own neighborhood at home. The only difference is probably that the U.S. building codes and HOAs don't allow a single family home to be defended with broken glass.

By the end of your trip, though, the prison bars and high castle walls just became the norm. An architectural choice, as much as it is to have an arctic entry in an Alaskan home.

You played so, so many video games, Josh. An unreasonable amount. Like, hundreds of hours of video games. A part-time job's worth of video games. Zelda. Wildfrost. Subnautica. Dead Cells. Sea of Stars. Half-life. That weird monster puzzle one where you push over logs.

You played so many video games that you started tracking them in an app that's just for tracking video game playing. You became a person who needed to track their video games. You played so many video games that Kristen got so depressed and bored that she started to get very concerned about finances and about the future. (To be clear, the future and the finances are fine, but you were playing so many video games it sure seemed like they were not).

You were in a beautiful foreign country, with time, money, and the ability to explore. And you played so many video games instead.

It was about August when you and Kristen started to get homesick (a little more than halfway through).

It might have been that this was when the comfortable winter temperatures started turning towards the scorching spring and summer.

It might also have been when you had our longest stretch of having no visitors, and the place that you were staying at had a pretty severe bird poop problem (and as a consequence, a bad insect problem), which made living there pretty uncomfortable.

Kristen started longing for the experience of fall (or as you started calling it, "Gourd Season," or "Gourdmas"). Kristen got on Pinterest and started collecting pictures of cute ghosts with pumpkin mugs full of some sort of hot seasonal gourd-inspired liquid. Kristen Pinterested so hard that they initially banned her for "suspicious activity," and she had to write them to ask that her account be reinstated.

(Brief, IT-related aside: a ton of U.S. websites and U.S.-based IT security tools consider Brazil to be, for whatever reason, "sus." Kristen doing Pinterest so hard that they blocked her was probably less her zeal for gourds and ghosts and more because a common and naive method of 'blocking the bad guys' is to tune your firewall to mistrust anyone who doesn't look like they're coming from the U.S. or a U.S. military ally. As someone who had to live in Brazil but work and pay bills in the U.S., this was very annoying, and I'm very much more sympathetic to people who use VPNs to get around silly IT security policies.)

The homesickness may have been because you had developed a routine, eating at the same four or five places, going for walks around the same three or four destinations, and generally staying at home on the weekends.

You tried to venture out and find different restaurants and different types of foods. You started missing Mexican food, and made the 45 minute walk to a place called 'Tacoss' (yes, with two s's).

You were, uh, a little disappointed. But you still went there. In fact, you went there three times, thinking you would have different results. And none of those times did they have proper chips and salsa. Or guacamole. Or jalapenos!

Oh. You forgot to mention, Josh: Brazil really hates spicy food. As an American, with a poor sense of geography and world cultures, you tend to lump Brazil together with other Latin American countries. And so you assumed that, like with other Latin American cuisine, you'll have some level of spice in the form of chili peppers, maybe some jalapenos, some habeneros, maybe a little cilantro.

Not so! Brazil food is mostly meat, beans, and rice. And cheese. And really, everything else that you normallly eat, except pathologically without spice.

And, as it turns out, Mexican food without spice or cilantro is just meat, beans, rice, and cheese. So, all the same the Brazilian staples, but with the convenience of a tortilla wrapper. Alas.

You probably felt the same way about Brazilian Mexican food as actual Mexicans do about United States Mexican food: betrayed, defeated, but eh, it sort of tastes like home, so I guess it's good enough.

You and Kristen started a list of places you had to eat when you get back. Mexican food is definitely on there, along with Korean, Thai, Indian, Ethiopean, oh man...

Your grandmother passed away while you were in Brazil. It was early April and you had only been away from home about two weeks.

You had a feeling this might happen. She'd had a stroke back in January, and you remembered feeling guilty for losing track of how many strokes she'd had before.

The timing was awful, but you were lucky, you supposed. Back in October, you got to visit her in Arizona. She was staying with your parents for a short while so you and Kristen went to visit.

You should mention: for a few years your parents and your aunt and uncle had become your grandmother's caretakers. Being 90-some years old, a fall, and hip surgeries meant that she was bound to a wheelchair. And as her dementia and short-term memory loss progressed she required more and more care for day-to-day things.

And because it had been this way for a few years, you knew what to expect. Conversations tended to be a little repetitious, and she didn't like to wear her hearing aids so there was way more noise than there was signal. But you still got to hang out, talk, cook, eat, and nap throughout the day, which were the things she enjoyed doing the most.

Four months later, you got to do a video chat with your grandmother a few weeks before she passed. Your sister was with her and she had set up the call, and did her best to translate when the audio compression and the quiet speakerphone couldn't quite do the trick. Your grandmother was in a hospital bed, likely uncomfortable, but otherwise in a fair mood.

You asked your grandmother how she was doing.

She answered, "Well, what you see is what you get."

You don't remember the rest of the conversation.

Her memorial service and celebration of life was in August. You were still in Brazil, playing too many video games and eating bland Mexican food, so you missed that, too. But you know that she's buried next to her husband on the military base. You can go visit them when you get back. Say hi. I'm sure they'd love to hear from you.

You should really try to balance out the good and the bad, Josh. You don't want all of the things you tell people about the trip to be the things you complained about. It's a bad look. And Brazil probably deserves better than that despite all of the whining that you did.

Sure, yes, Brazil doesn't like to do spicy. But they're big into sweets. You were a big fan of brigadeiros ("brigadiers" or "soldiers"), which were carmelized condensed milk balls covered in chocolate and sprinkles. Then there were beijinhos ("little kisses") that were similar, but instead of chocolate they were covered in coconut shavings.

Oh, and the coconuts. Tell them there was fresh coconut everywhere. In particular, they would sell agua de coco ("coconut water"), which was just a young, still-green coconut that had a hole drilled into the top so you could drink the coconut juice inside with a straw. They were great. The coconut water you get in U.S. stores is just not the same. It might be that we pasteurize the coconut water, or that we add preservatives so that it doesn't go bad during shipping. Or maybe it just hits different when it's 90°F outside and the agua de coco comes out of a refrigerator. Who can say.

And cheese bread. You should definitely talk about the cheese bread. You felt like Brazilian pão de queijo ("bread of cheese") is what brings the country together as a people. Sure, the country is huge, and there are many, many social, economic, geographic, and cultural divides that threaten to tear the country apart. But they all seem to agree that adding bits of cheese into bread as it's baking is where it's at. And you couldn't help but agree.

You had to get your hair cut a handful of times. You found a decent place across the street. They had a picture of a lion with a thorned crown above the reception desk with a bible verse overlaid. Kristen would make you and her an appointment so you two could go together, given that you would never have been able to adequately describe a hair style in English, much less your broken Duolingo Portuguese.

Brazilian hair style places aren't all that different than ours. Some specialize in men's hair, or women's hair, or black people's hair, or they focus on the salon experience, or the spa experience, or do nails, pedicure, all that.

Our particular place had a divider wall down the middle. On the left was where the men got their haircuts. On the right was everything else (read: for the women). You, a man, would get shuffled off to the left, and Kristen would get shuffled off to the right, despite Kristen being your translator.

It wasn't a big deal, though. You usually got a guy named Bruno. He was cool. He was super excited to hear that you were from Alaska. We did our best to use Google Translate if he had a question. He asked if it was cold ("Yes, very cold"). He asked how long you were staying ("Nine months"). He asked what you did ("Computer programmer, and Kristen teaches at the university"). He asked if we had any episcopal churches in our home city ("I don't know," you said. We probably do, you just didn't want to get into it, what with the Jesus-Lion poster on the wall).

When the time came to figure out what to do with your hair, you had a picture on your phone of what your hair looked like before coming down. Like a professional, he looked between the photo, your head, the photo, your head, and gave me a hearty thumbs up. Twenty minutes later, you had the same haircut again.

At the end of the haircut, he asked if it was okay to take a picture and post to Instagram. You said yeah sure. So now your goober face is on their Instagram.

Goober

Translations:

3/24/2023
10/11/2023
12/14/2023
Brazil Day 202 / 265
76%

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Your dryer. You were looking forward to using your laundry dryer when you got home.

To be clear: you had a clothes washing machine (thank goodness). Most, or at least, many of the homes in Brazil have a washing machine. But a dryer, a dedicated machine that dries the laundry after having it washed, is reserved for laundromats and the very rich.

So, that was a fun and novel experience for you, an American who had never hung a single article of clothing unless it was your wool socks that would otherwise shrink in the dryer. In your apartments in Brazil you had a clothes drying rack, which would be cleverly attached to the ceiling and could be ratcheted up and down with a fun pulley system.

Honestly, hanging your clothes up makes way more sense from an energy use perspective. In a climate that is hot all the goddamned time, why would you ever put your clothes in a rotating space heater when you can just hang your clothes up and let them dry by themselves? For free? And it's not like the workflow of laundry has changed at all. You still have to take out the laundry. You still have to fold the laundry. Move it to the closet. Try not to wrinkle things. There's an extra step, yeah, and you do have to wait a couple of hours for things to dry, but it's not bad.

But the in-home laundry dryer appliance is a testament to American love for technology and the hate of having to wait for anything ever. A machine that has your bedding ready in one hour instead of six? You're pretty sure you read about the inalienable right to a laundry dryer somewhere in the U.S. Constitution.

The same was for dishwashers. You came to miss your crappy, ancient dishwasher. The one that with every passing day is more and more likely to spring a leak and flood your basement again. The one that makes it hard to hear anything in the rest of the house when it's running. Whose bizarre, sharp protuberances love to catch under the unwary fingernail when reaching through the stream for your glasses on the top.

Outside of commerical kitchens and restaurants? Nary a dishwasher in sight in Brazil. So, normally a begrudging chore, only to be undertaken in the most desperate times of a malfunctioning dishwasher, you scrubbed and liberally applied dishsoap every morning, noon, and night.

And like everything else, you just got used to it.

Weirdly enough: you both rarely got sick in Brazil. And you never got food poisoning, either from your half-heartedly hand-washed dishes, or your frequent visits to your favorite grocery store sushi buffet.

3/24/2023
10/28/2023
12/14/2023
Brazil Day 219 / 265
83%

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Brazilians don't much care for how Americans shut car doors.

Said another way: Americans, apparently, like to slam car doors. You were asked multiple times, by multiple Uber drivers, to go easy. Sometimes it was after we had already shut our car doors with an American amount of force. Or perhaps it was before, like if someone had just gotten the car and they were trying to go easy on the brand new seals.

But otherwise? You were treated pretty well for being Americans.

Kristen, of course, was the biggest hit. An American who speaks fluent Brazilian Portuguese? Que legal! ("How cool!"). It's pretty rare for an American to speak Portuguese unless they have family from Brazil, have dual citizenship, or are somehow related with state or international work. When they would hear that we'd only been in the country for a few months, they would be amazed at how well Kristen could speak (across the board, everyone spoke about how difficult Portuguese is as a language). Kristen would then have to confess to her having lived in Brazil for a few years when she was younger, which explained her accent (she learned Brazilian Portuguese with a distinct north-eastern Brazil accent). Kristen got very used to this conversation by the end of your trip, and you could interpret the key points of the transaction well enough to follow along.

But when the eyes really got wide was when we'd say we were from Alaska.

You've had this experience before. Even before coming to Brazil, you knew that people were way more likely to treat you well if you said that you were from Alaska than just saying you're from the United States. Sure, some people were less interested ("Too cold, yeah?"). But most had heard of, or seen pictures and video of Alaska.

You, Josh, can probably name only a handful of states in other countries. Of those, most will probably be Canadian. And if someone said, "I'm from the state of Chihuahua, in Mexico," you would have no idea where that state is, beyond being somewhere within the borders of Mexico.

Maybe it speaks well of the Brazilian education system to give its students such a strong grasp on world geography. Or maybe it speaks well of how Alaska's tourism industry markets its particular brand. Or maybe people have just always wondered what that weird part of the United States is that's on the wrong side of Canada.

But, in a weird way, and so much so that it weirded you out a bit, Brazilians were fond of the United States. They like our fashion, our technology, our educational system (well, maybe not how expensive it is). They like our movies, our sitcoms, our pop stars, our celebrities. They like New York, and Las Vegas, and Florida. Everyone wants to visit some day.

(To clarify: the overwhelming majority knew of Alaska, but at no point did we convince anyone that they should visit Alaska over any of our more famous attractions. I can't blame them. Orlando is, like, 10 hours away, and it's hard to compete with Disneyworld.)

You thought, Josh: "Well, maybe they're just being polite." That maybe they were just humoring their foreign guests, trying not to damage their delicate American egos. We tried explaining to our friends that the U.S. has some severe problems. That nothing is as prosperous or rosy as our movies and television and news media makes it out to be. And that many of the social, political, and economic ills of our country we saw happening or developing in Brazil as well.

Alas, the Brazilians we talked to still insisted that we had it better in the U.S., and that Brazil was still too behind, still too poor, still too corrupt. They were proud of their country, though critical, and very embarrassed by it some of the time.

It was maybe in that way, and in many other ways, you felt a kinship with the people of Brazil.

Fun restaurante name: Same Same, But Different

3/24/2023
11/19/2023
12/14/2023
Brazil Day 241 / 265
91%

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You got a weird opportunity when you were in Brazil. You were contacted fairly early on by one of the UEM professors from their Computer Science department. They said that as a software engineer and IT worker living in Brazil that you might have some interesting insights for the C.S. undergrad and graduate students, and they asked if you would be able to give a presentation.

You asked what kind of topics they would like you to talk about. They said to paint an overall picture of work, education, and life in the U.S. and Alaska.

So, you collected stats, cost of living estimates, pictures of snow, charts, and graphs. You had slides talking about your career, your projects, and the good, bad, and weird things about living in Alaska. You tried to find something important to communicate to another generation of C.S. students, in another country. You tried to be a respectable representative of your profession, your country, your state.

You spent 6 months working on a slide deck. It was at least 100°F on the day of your presentation, so you looked like this.

Goober in front of CS students

You think it went well. It was about an hour. You got through your slides and there were a few questions. You were told that there were some positive comments afterward.

Your code for the "Brazil Day X" countdown clock program broke on your last day.

As an experienced and dilligent computer programmer, you knew that the unstoppable forward march of time would mean that you would start calculating more than 100% of the duration of your visit. So, when the time came you wired it up so that if the program found that the trip's duration was exceeding 100% that it would simply override itself and say that the trip's duration was at the maximum of 100%.

But you didn't test this condition. You declared some variables wrong, and your override tried to assign a value to a variable for which assignment was not allowed and you woke up on your last day to find your script was broken. You like to style a lot of your little doodad, one-off, single-function apps with a flat black background and white monospace text (reminiscent of the character terminal interfaces of yore).

So when you woke up on your last day and opened the "Brazil Day X" bookmark like you had been doing for the last ~6 months, instead of the neat little box of text you just saw an empty black screen.

It was a little jarring. And a little depressing. The day had come, the trip was over, the screen was blank, and it was time to go home.

You got out of bed, fixed your program, and now it looks like this:

3/24/2023
12/14/2023
12/14/2023
Brazil Day 265 / 265
100%

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Repeated from above, our photo collections from the places we lived or visited in Brazil:

During our visit, I made a point to drop a pin on every place we stayed or attraction that we visited while in Brazil. Below are maps with those locations (after anonymizing and filtering to avoid privacy weirdness), centered on the general cities or regions that we visited.

Maringá #

Recife #

Rio de Janeiro #

Brasília #

Londrina #

Foz de Iguaçu #

Brasil (overall) #