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4/18/03:

Living in Expatria - a now-retired weblog written between 2000 and 2001 chronicling a Canadian's days in Sao Paulo - will definitely be good reading in my poor saudade-laden purgatory of familiarity 'til I can swim back down to Brazil's magic coast this summer.

Edging on two months now. Back in the land of English and peanut butter and cheddar cheese and the ability to navigate my way around the city in my trademark brain occupied fashion. Two months and I hardly feel as I was ever away. Two months and it seems hard to remember what Brazilian sun felt like on my skin. Funny how life is. When you're someplace you know, someplace that knows where you fit into its stride. where you know how to walk in step with it... it seems like time wizzes by. Brazil seems like stolen time now...

Boy howdy. Say that, but add my depression. I still can't get used to Chicago feeling like a one-light town now - only three millions people? Walking home from the train down Division late at night, stores and bars closed, lights out, no one else on the street and a car or two whizzing by like urban tumbleweed - and this is a city? In Rio, there was never silence, and always people around, no matter the hour. And sometimes dangerously large crowds. But there was always a vibe. Yeah, there was definitely danger there too...

[update: 19.4] I've learned from Expatria this quite cool and slightly-untranslatable Portuguese word - Jeitinho - meaning "the creative and legitimate ways of getting things done in spite of bureaucracy".

posted by jeremy @ 7:19 PM