A touch of homesickness

Happy New Year!

I hope that you had a great NYE celebration, but aren’t paying for it too much today.

As for me, I had a quiet night in with friends. I’m now back in North Carolina at the home of my friend Sean, where I’ll post up for several weeks before heading back to Brazil and moving to Paraty. (For some reason I just flashed on the opening to The Beverly Hillbillies. “Come listen to a story about a guy named John, a crazy-ass gringo who just couldn’t settle down…”)

So where was I? Oh, yes. I’m getting settled in. Readjustment to the US is superficially easy – after all, I grew up here – but there are little things.

I woke up around 5:00 this morning to relieve myself of some New Year’s Eve LaBatt’s brews, and realized in a groggy haze that I’d been dreaming in Portuguese. (Sorry, can’t recall details – something to do with food.) This is interesting, because I only remember dreaming in Portuguese once before. I interpret this as a sign of homesickness. It’s been almost 3 weeks now since I’ve spoken Portuguese, and I miss it.

Food is another thing. While I’m fine with a hiatus from rice and beans, I do miss the Brazilian coffee, though it sometimes stands my hair on end. And I miss Brazilian fruit. I just ate a banana here, and it simply lacked flavor. How to explain this? Yes, it was a banana, and tasted like a banana, it was just less banana-y than a banana in Brazil. Not surprising really: The peel was still tinged with green. Now, assuming this banana came from Latin America – and quite possibly from Brazil, which according to Wikipedia produces over 7% of the world’s bananas – then it was picked while still quite green. Here’s what Wiki says about bananas imported into the US:

Bananas must be transported over long distances from the tropics to world markets. To obtain maximum shelf life, harvest comes before the fruit is mature. The fruit requires careful handling, rapid transport to ports, cooling, and refrigerated shipping. The goal is to prevent the bananas from producing their natural ripening agent, ethylene. This technology allows storage and transport for 3–4 weeks at 13 °C (55 °F). On arrival, bananas are held at about 17 °C (63 °F) and treated with a low concentration of ethylene. After a few days, the fruit begins to ripen and is distributed for final sale.

This is what we eat for breakfast here in the States, folks. By contrast, food tends to be fresher in Brazil – although there’s decidedly a trend these days toward frozen, shrink-wrapped, processed and dyed foods. Sigh…

Which reminds me. (Sorry, folks, let’s just see where this post goes…) It’s absolutely astonishing to me the amount of trash that an American household produces vis a vis a Brazilian one. Trash cans here are much bigger, with good reason. Most of the trash is packaging of one sort or another, with food packaging seemingly the primary component. This disturbs me. “You are what you eat,” I was always taught. So what the heck am I eating?

Breaking away from food, I am also readjusting to the social mores here. For example, I’ve caught myself a couple of times as I went to air kiss a woman that I just met. That’s what we do in Brazil when greeting a woman. Sometimes its one kiss, generally it’s two, one to either cheek. Do that here, and you may get a look of pleasant surprise, but more likely you’ll get a look saying, “What’s your problem?”

Which leads me to a related topic, which I’ll try to address delicately. I find the Brazilian women somehow more, for lack of a better word, feminine. How to explain this in any kind of meaningful way becomes difficult. If you’ve spent any time in Latin countries, then you probably know what I mean. If you haven’t, anything I write is likely to be more confusing than enlightening. Perhaps I’ll tackle this knotty issue in a later post.

Of course, there are things that I enjoy here. The infrastructure and creature comforts here in the US are without parallel anywhere else that I’ve traveled, which tallies about 25 countries. But in truth, these things don’t mean too much to me. Give me a clean, comfortable place to sleep and a fast and dependable WiFi connection, and I’m pretty well set.

What I love about Brazil is, as I’ve written so many times, the natural beauty of the country. Paired with that, I love what I see as a more basic, natural way of living. It’s changing in Brazil, as Brazil becomes more modernized. You gain something, but you lose something. Is it really a good thing to be able to buy every fruit any month of the year? Or maybe the old way of eating what’s in season locally has its merits?

I worry that my mono-cultural readers won’t understand this post. But I know that there are those of you out there that do (and your comments are welcome). Yes, new and modern and shiny and convenient is seductive, but it isn’t always better.

Confused? Go visit Brazil for a couple of weeks and maybe you’ll begin to see what I’m trying so awkwardly to convey.

So enough rambling. I wish you the very best in this new year. Be healthy, be happy.

Wherever you are.

John
Currently in North Carolina. Go Duke!

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