iowa, 4 days before the caucuses

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*BEEP*

this made my day

From Delta’s website:

Checked Baggage

You can check two bags per passenger free of charge.

Each bag must:

• Weigh 50 pounds (22.5 kg) or less.
• Not exceed 62 inches when you total length plus width plus height.

Exceptions:

• Passengers traveling to or from Key West and Marathon, Florida are limited to only one checked bag.
• The free weight allowance is 70 pounds (32 kg) for tickets purchased in Brazil, or for tickets purchased in Japan when traveling to/from Brazil.

For once, the fine print is working in my favor.

Rocinha v. Middle America

– Americans are sort of crazy, aren’t they?

The question came out of nowhere at dinner last night to celebrate my last day of ESL teaching, and it caught me a little off guard.

– What do you mean?

– Well… you know, there are a lot of unbalanced people. And then one day someone goes into the mall and just starts shooting. It’s not like that so much here.

– So, um, you’re saying that Brazil is more… tranquil than the States?

– No, not exactly. But you know, it’s just so easy there to get guns. And everyone has a computer, right?

– I guess, most people…

– … So they all have computers and they play a lot of violent videogames. And well, maybe the culture is different, too. It seems like there are a lot of messed-up people.

Considering that most of my blogging of late has dealt with the question of violence in one form or another, this conversation was definitely food for thought. It’s always a little strange to me to hear how the States are perceived abroad, and interesting to see how some things make such a (to me) disproportionate impression on foreigners. But the most extraordinary thing about this conversation is that the person involved has lived in Rocinha his entire life — and if you’re worried about gun violence then Rocinha is not particularly safe even by Rio’s lowered standards.

So I was left wondering: Rio has its share, and more, of corrupt cops and shoot-to-kill bandidos — but is it somehow comforting that the motivations for the violence are relatively straightforward, and that there are, to some extent, “rules of the game”? A horrifying number of innocent people are killed every year in the drug wars, but is it somehow less frightening because it’s often from stray bullets rather than direct fire? Are the isolated shooting incidents in the US that much scarier precisely because they’re so random, so senseless, and so devastating? Because they happen in places — malls, churches, schools — that should be havens rather than targets?

I tried to say how incredibly rare these disturbed-individual gunfire incidents are in the US, but there’s no denying that they’re more common in the States than in other places… and if even one is unjustifiable, then the number that we’ve had is terrifying. All I know is that if someone who has grown up in Rocinha — a neighborhood that’s seen NUMEROUS people injured and killed in shootouts this year alone — is saying this, we in the States need to do better.

score: thieves, 2000000; plucky British beachgoers, 1

I cried laughing when I heard this story, so even if it loses a bit in the retelling it will hopefully still be amusing:

My friend was at Ipanema beach and had brought along a backpack with a couple of books. For the purposes of the story, I should note that she’s British but living in Rio, is about my height but skinnier, and speaks excellent Portuguese. Anyway, she had staked out a spot and was lying down in the sand with all her stuff when she was momentarily distracted by a vendor trying to sell her something — and while she was looking the other way a guy grabbed her backpack and sauntered off.

She realized it was missing as soon as she turned around, and immediately saw the guy walking away with her backpack. She was so angry she didn’t even think, she jumped to her feet and literally sprinted across the beach in her bikini to chase the guy down. She ran up behind him and punched him, grabbing at her backpack and trying to wrestle it from him. “It’s not what you think,” the guy said. This made her furious. “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, IT’S NOT WHAT I THINK?!? You are bloody HOLDING my bloody BACKPACK!!” she shouted at him. At least I think that was the general gist of an impressive tirade in Portuguese and English, combined with some even more impressive smacks across the face. The guy was taken totally by surprise. My friend looked around for a police officer (“they harass me all the time when I’m doing nothing wrong, and where are they when they could actually be useful?”), but failing to find one, wrenched her backpack free of the guy’s grip, then grabbed HIS backpack and took that as well. She smacked him a few more times — his glasses had been knocked into the sand by that point — swore at him a bit more, and finally turned around and stormed away. Still furious. But carrying both backpacks.

She never got her cellphone back — it had somehow disappeared from her bag — but, as she noted reflectively, she now has a whole bunch of Brazlilian-made handicrafts as new decorations for her flat. It was an insanely stupid impulse (DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME) but the mental image of a 5′6” girl in a bikini beating up a beach thief is too good not to share. Apparently, I’m not the only one who thought so: she got an actual round of applause from the bystanders at the beach.

it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

… and by “beginning,” I mean that Rio de Janeiro’s merchants have been ready for Christmas since sometime before Halloween. I sometimes find the mid-October rush to out-Christmas one’s competitors to be sort of grating, but this year, I’m mostly just confused. Attention, holiday decoration suppliers: Rio hasn’t seen a white Christmas since, I don’t know, EVER. Stop pretending that evergreens and reindeer are necessary to celebrate the holiday. You can keep Santa, but please get the poor guy some climate-appropriate attire. Do you really want me to look at Santa sweating in his fake beard and wonder what he did to get on his own Naughty List, and whether maybe wearing one of those red felt suits for several hours might not actually be quite a bit worse than having to put coal in his own stocking?

The display that best exemplifies the Southern Hemisphere Christmas Identity Crisis in all its conflicted glory is the nativity scene on the front of the Botafogo Praia Shopping mall. Raindeer cavort in a forest, and there is a light dusting of snow on the evergreens. Next to a straw manger stand giant squirrels (easily half as tall as the trees)… and enormous bright-orange mushrooms rise out of the forest floor.

Ah, Christmas.