Miscellaneous Things

Dear Blog,

The first Miscellaneous Thing I shall discuss today is that of religion. As you all know, today is Sunday, and that means it's time to go to church. What is church? What a stupid question, you know what it is. How did I get such idiots for friends? Anyway, my host family belongs to the Church of Nazarene, and (although my church experience technically isn't over, since there's still the evening service) there are two parts to the experience--Bible school (attended mostly by adults) and the regular service. Bible school resembles American church services much more than the actual service--it's just a person with a mic talking about very Biblical things. But one of the ways in which it's very different is that, to someone who can't tell what the subject matter is (like moi), the teacher seems much more like a motivational speaker or politician than a preacher (and I mean no offense by that comment). She has a pulpit, but most of the time they leave it to pace back and forth before the audience. She wasn't angry, but she had that resolute yet endearing air that makes politicians politic so well. But often her face would become more stern and her gestures more rigid, and I could just hear her saying, as she pointed upwards and out the window, "... And those high-rollers up in Brasilia don't know a thing about us" and her she points to the audience "and our good, old-fashioned urban immigrant values." And after that the audience would get stirred up and mutter agreements.

And here is when another difference crops up between American and Brasilian bible school: audience participation is rather prevalent in the latter. After this stir-up, one member of the audience began a very long, probably prepared speech. It seems that not only the teacher, but the audience is rather analogous to the arena of politics. The whole room seemed to feel like a caucus now. [note: at this point my blog transforms into a fictional narrative. I am 90% sure these people didn't actually say these things, but other than the specific dialogue and character backgrounds that I make up, the events are entirely accurate.] This man, I imagine, was probably some dejected politician who kept getting black-balled from the lecture circuit, and was now crashing the main speaker's party. He wasn't especially out of line with her platform it seemed--she was rather bemused by his audacity, and would smile and nod at all of his comments, and after he finished she gave a laugh that seemed to say "Well, somebody's got a lot to say, ain't he?" But it was apparent that his were the kind of views that were dangerously misinformed and unrefined, and though she tried to backtrack from what he said, another man soon piped up--the iconoclast. He began his long tirade about how the other man's views were racist and chauvenist and animalistic and catastrophic in all sorts of ways. His finishing comments seemed to say, "Well, I don't mean to vilify egregiously. I just calls it the way I sees it." The room was in another stir. People of all sorts were raising their hands. The speaker tried to calm people's disquiet a bit before calling on an old lady. She had, for her entire life until now, remained absolutely quiet on political issues, but the iconoclast's diatribe had poked each and every one of her values in the kidneys, and she was about to protect her conservative ideals with a raised index finger and mildly stressed voice. After the storm of truisms and aphorisms and euphamisms cleared, everyone seemed to have grown rather drowsy, and the speaker was able to control the room again, and she promptly ended the caucus there. [Here ends the extreme violation of what actually happened. All other falsification will be strictly limited to exagerration, distortion, and omition.]

The regular service is much closer to American services than Bible school, except that it shares a great deal in common with a variety show. It has an entire orchestra (I kid you not--I'd guess at least 60 members. About double that with the choir. But I suppose you have that kind of budget with 10,000 members. Wow.), which plays a wide variety of Christian pop songs, and the show even has guests. Sure, the minister from the Mt. Zion Baptist church from Missouri isn't quite as interesting as Robert Downy Jr., but gosh darn it, he made the rest of the service seem so much better. The rest of the service, by the way, is what I suppose would be Leno's monologue--the sermon. Which (already skirting the 45 minute mark, I'd say) seemed even longer in an unknown language. Lesson learned--I must get more sleep on Saturday nights.

The next miscellaneous thing I will discuss today is futebol. What is futebol? Yet another stupid question. I will no longer field questions from the readers, and that's that. There are few things to say about futebol, except that there seem to be a lot more fouls in Brazil. In one game I watched, at one point there was a foul I'd say about every minute on average for about 15 minutes. But I don't think Brazilian players are more malicious than other players (well, in that game they may have been)--I think it's just that Brazilians are so passionate about futebol, particularly about getting the ball, that they don't really take into consideration how they get the ball. Brazilians will slide tackle on a regular basis, which is a very efficient way to get the ball, don't get me wrong, but Brazilians are also very good at getting rid of the ball before the tackle gets there, and thus when the tackle does get there, there's nothing to get except the player. And boy are they got. I think the refs call so many fouls, not necessarily because the tackle looks illegal, but because the fall looks painful. But I'm sure if you asked a Brazilian who got tackled if he regreted it, he would most likely say, "I regret only that I had but one ball to pass off before the tackle."

The last miscellaneous thing I shall talk about today is driving. Brazilian driving is by far the most exciting part of my day. Brazilians can be best described in traffic as fearless. Two feet between one car and the next is no more significant that two feet between pedestrians. Signalling before changing lanes? Bah! One does not signal when one walks in one direction, one simply walks! And all the surrounding cars respect without question anyone who changes direction. It is almost a status symbol. But the bravest of all drivers in Brazil are the cyclists--motorcyclists, to be specific. Lanes? Bah! They will drive where there is space to drive, and there is space for cyclists to drive anywhere--in between cars, behind cars, in front of cars, underneath semis--anywhere. And if there is one word other than fearless that is most relevant to Brazilian drivers, it is this--acceleration. To them, acceleration is more than just a word--it is a way of life. Whay go slow when one can go fast through acceleration! Ask a Brazilian if he's trying to get someplace fast and he'll say, "No! Don't bother me, I'm accelerating!" One never saw a spedometer go from zero to 60 so fast--even in kilometers, it's unnerving to see.

One more frivolous comment before I log off. It is the most entertaining thing to me when people ask me, "So how many words do you know in Portuguese?" What? I don't have them filed, do you really want me to count them? And even then it's confusing--do you want just nouns, verbs and adjectives, or do you want conjunctions and articles and all the menial boring ones too? And even with with that question answered it's a rather ridiculous task--I know English as well as anybody, but I would still be hard-pressed to list all the words I know in English. Even if you narrowed it down to a subset, like all the words pertaining to furniture, it is nigh impossible. So whenever asked what words I know in Portuguese, I'd just say "Good morning, good afternoon, good evening," and then count to six. And then for the next ten minutes I would rack my brain trying to think of all the words I actually know so I can tell them later and then they'll laugh and be impressed at my precocious learning abilities, but I can only ever think of numbers 7-20, and how weirded out would you be by some exchange student randomly counting from 7 to 20?