Dia Siete: bem-vindo ao o selva (welcome to the jungle)

Day seven now and finally finding the great city of Belem to be a beast worth reckoning with. My Portuguese is improving daily, and I think my english will be inversely proportional. Already I make reorders of my words and do slight mistakes with things, tenses and such. Hope I don´t wear it too plainly. I am with my host family now, they are great people, and I anticipate quite the stay. In Brazil, light family conversation bobs and weaves around topics like sexual encounters, etc without a glitch.

The telenovelas have half naked women and names like 'caminho de indias' in which brazilian actors proffer their best approximation of Indian culture, and at least one person gets hit by a car per episode. Speaking of counts, the tarantula count is now at 5, including one massive one I found in the middle of the night in my room.

Prior to Belem, we spent 7 days in a 'sitio' a small farmhouse 70 km outside of the city, where we spent our days generally getting oriented and relaxing in redes (hammocks, pronounce hey-jay). Less relaxing was the ´drop off´, where we were booted out of the dependable volkswagen ´combi´ vans and given simple tasks to complete.


My minimal Portugues made it difficult to find out where farinha, (manioc flour) was produced. Eventually a extremely nice woman and her son Leo showed me that the staple was produced not half a mile from where they sold it in their store. I saw the whole process, beginning with the grating and processing in a chipichi (woven from palm), to the final stirring and cooking. Manioc contans cyanide and must be cooked for 7 days in its natural form.

Also a great experience was harvesting açai, which grows on a palmate tree Euturpe Oleracea,
and is a staple fruit of the Amazon and is another staple of Brazilian life. The fruit is borne about 60 feet above the forrest floor, and its harvesters climb to the top, cut the bunch of berries from the tree and then jump to other trees 10 feet away. The harvester (along with pointing out many important varieties of flora) showed me how to fashion a pescoina from palm leaves, a simple durable loop that somewhat fastens ones feet to the bole of the tree. The harvest was extremely strenuous, and made the emulsifying of the berries into an act of sweet sweet vengance.

Leaving the sitio was a bittersweet goodbye, until I realized how cheap the beer is in the city! Brazilians obviously perfer beer cold so they can cope with the equatorial heat, and often the carafes will be half frozen when you buy them. Not exactly beer, almost totally flavorless. MMM flavorless refreshment.

By the way today marked my 3rd anoversário in 3 days, people are suprised if you dont accept a beer or drink, and the blowing out of the candles is marked by an intense clapping. I am beginning to think that the biggest meal of the day is called Birthday. And the Samba...oh the samba.

Off to catch up on my dever de casa (homework), I have 16 hours to finish T.C. Whitmore´s An Introduction to Trópical rainforests... not exactly harry potter. Thank god for the great brazilian coffee.

-F