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10/14/03: Everyday is like Sunday

Last weekend I and Dr. Wex - who is every bit as hilarious as his target="_new">Wexfiles.com would suggest - took a small weekend trip to target="_new">Fl?rianpolis, a small-ish state capital /college town that is an apt
reward for the brutal 12-hour bus ride that's required to get there from S?o Paulo. Wex
was looking for a house for New Year's Eve. I'm just incredibly curious. Half the city
is the gateway to Ilhe de Santa Catarina, an island of sleepy beach communities whose
populations treble when the summer comes. It takes about an hour to drive from one end
of the island to the other, which we did often, wandering about two dozen beaches, and
picking up every hitch-hiking surfer, each of whom both knew someone who was renting a beach
house, and always with a very detailed argument for which beach here is the most perfect.

Ilhe Santa Catarina

Living in the landlocked Midwest my whole life (I'd never seen an ocean until last March),
I pretty much learned the whole criteria for picking out a beach - lots of people, no
people? high dangerous surfing tide, low snorkeling tide? little local bars, or a big,
crazy main drag? soft sand? warm water? does it smell? is the water really as clean as
it looks? In Chicago, they fill the marshes off of Lake Michigan with sand - there's your
beach.

Praia Arma??o

Actually, all the spots along Ilhe de Santa Catarina were well-varied and all
unbelievable, oddly empty on its off season, and southern Brazil's many little hills and
mountains are as complicated and fascinating as the big city streets. The people tend
toward the intimidatingly attractive beach people persuasion, especially next to my skinny, pasty
Midwestern-ness, but cool and generous and who speak a clear variant of Brazilian
Portuguese that I can actually understand. Wex and I were housed and fed by Karina and
Paulo, two unbelievably gracious law students who we'd just met through a
friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend. One day I'll learn to be that cool.

Praia Brava

Apparently the second-largest Oktoberfest, next to Munich's, is in Brazil in a town called Blumenau. It took us a two-hour ride in a van full of drunken German backpackers
to get there. And there had to have been about ten thousand people there in this pastiche
of lederhosen-clad carnival that also oddly resembled a typical American state fair turned Island of Lost Boys. Unfortunately, unless you and your friends wear the same
costume, you lose each other immediately and you're left to wander alone through the dancing and playing and falling and puking and fighting and all that other good stuff. And even at Oktoberfest, the beer in
Brazil doesn't get much better.

As I'm no longer texting from a chilly East Ukrainian Village kitchen, but a chilly Boca do
Lixo hotel room, a newer older wiser about page is
appropriate. And Boca do Lixo means "garbage mouth" and is the best nickname I've
heard for the somewhat red-light-esque part of downtown S?o Paulo where I've been
staying. I'm crossing my fingers on a very cool little place in the Jardins by the end
of the week. Let's see...

posted by jeremy @ 7:27 PM