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Brazil: Stolen Computer
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By Stephen Thompson
July 17, 2007
When my laptop computer was stolen at Shenzhen railway station last week it took me a while to count my losses; I couldn‘t get to sleep the first night thinking about the photos, stories and contacts I had lost. Among these stories were three which I was planning to publish on Gringoes.com soon. It will take me a while to rewrite these stories and I don‘t know whether I will have time now. As time goes on, there are new stories to write and rewriting a story is like seeing the same movie twice; never as much fun the second time. So maybe other gringos can help out by providing some inspiration to rewrite them.
First was a story called "That Sandwich Feeling" about Brazilian English. I was inspired to write after hearing my wife tell our local sandwich shop guy, who happened to be out of bread, that she just wanted "that sandwich feeling" when what she meant was "that sandwich filling". I confess I have had years of laughs from hearing my wife try to speak English, and should have kept notes of these mistakes in the early years when they were often hilarious. These days she makes fewer mistakes, and I can‘t remember the last time she called her hat a rat, for example. She still can‘t be bothered to use the impersonal pronoun, so after finding some cold dinner in the fridge the other day, she told her friend, that her I would heat up, which was kind of amusing. If you have any nice funny English mistakes, please mail me.
By the way, "Como Nao Aprender Ingles" written by a gringo who spent many years teaching English in Brazil is a very funny review of some of the funniest and commonest mistakes that Brazilians typically make when they try to English. I used to have a multiple choice quiz for my students when I taught English, based on these errors, but I can‘t remember at what point it went the way of all things digital and disappeared into cyberspace. Losing my laptop with all its data reminded me of the advantages of writing things with a pen and paper: much less likely to disappear into thin air.
Another piece was titled "Am I crazy?", which was inspired by an email someone‘s mother-in-law sent to them. Apparently this person‘s wife, who is a Brazilian, is not too happy to have her mother‘s drug dealing, gun packing, pinga drinking, free-wheeling, hell raising lifestyle youth publicized, maybe because that youth hasn‘t ended, even though mother-in-law is 67. So they asked me to put it online for them. (If you believe this, you will believe anything) I can‘t really be bothered to rewrite this story, so if you have any favourite Brazilian-mother-in-law-from-hell stories, please mail me and I‘ll create a collection, anonymous of course. By the way, if you haven‘t yet acquired the liability, you should be aware that by law, children are legally required to provide for their parents, and if you marry a Brazilian, you will be legally required to bail out your in-laws financially if they need it.
A Brazilian friend of mine has a father who sold his restaurant and gambled away the proceeds, secure in the knowledge of this financial fallback. My friend was relieved when his dad, in his late sixties, for some inexplicable reason, decided to go to London to wash dishes.
The third story was about my attempts to get fit in Brazil. I had a lot of fun hiking in beautiful places like the Pico da Bandeira, or cycling in São Paulo; but took about a year before I got the nerve to face the traffic. But I had even more fun playing football. I have always been useless as a football player and finally decided to have some lessons when I was in Brazil; I didn‘t get much better but I learnt some football expressions such as "fazer uma saia", which means to kick the ball through their legs, ( I think the colloquial English is to "nutmeg" someone) and "pedalar" which literally means either pedalling or paddling and describes that confusing dance players do around the ball.
Yesterday a Brazilian football coach neighbour of mine invited me to a "pelada" which means a kick about, and I warned him that I have two wooden legs (dois pernas de pão) but that I would "dar um chapeu nele", which means to cleverly kick the ball over his and run around to pick it up. But I didn‘t show up - "eu deu num cano nele". If anyone has any good football stories then please send them to me.
I also wrote something about my doomed attempt to become a "capoerista". Capoeira, that unique mixture of dance and martial art, can be very beautiful and exciting when it is well done but I started learning it in my late 30s and my physique is more suited to playing chess than spinning cartwheels or doing back flips. By the way, São Paulo is also the best place I know in the world to play chess, with a fabulous two floor chess club in the Rua Araujo, which crosses Reboucas in Centro. You meet all sorts of people there. I once made friends with a man who escaped from the Nazis by hiding for three years in the freezing forests of Poland after seeing almost his entire family shot. He was bitten by dogs and got badly infected, but luckily for him worms ate the infected flesh and the wound healed up nicely.
But getting back to Capoeira - you "play" rather than do, that is "jogar capoeira" - it requires a combination of balance, agility, speed, flexibility, strength and confidence, which only the young can have. On the other hand, if you just want to do the basic steps then there‘s no reason why you can‘t do it when you‘re older, but then it doesn‘t look that good, at least not to me, you would be better off learning to ballroom dance.
If anyone has managed to get highly proficient at capoeira in early middle youth, as we euphemistically call it these days, please let me know! I need some inspiration before joining the local "roda" here on Lamma Island, in Hong Kong.
There are great gyms in São Paulo, or "academias" as they call them in Portuguese, and surprisingly professional personal trainers. I was reminded of this when I met Mark, Brazilian physical fitness expert and former Brazilian Olympic Team coach, in Shanghai last year. Mark is trying to start up a personal training service, hoping to persuade the Chinese to leave their karaokes and their 8 course banquets and start working out. Mark is taking time getting his enterprise off the ground and could probably do with some more investment, so if you know anyone who is interested then let me know and I will put you in touch. I think it is an excellent idea which could work. After all the Chinese have had three revolutions already in the last century.
I got a lot fitter by training with a personal trainer in Brazil, but some people who would think nothing of spending large sums of money on hospital bills seem to think that this kind of cost effective health promotion is a sign of a decadent lifestyle, to be lead only by the super rich. In fact a lot of people just can‘t face working out on their own and I don‘t think it should be something to be ashamed of. After a while fitness training becomes a habit and is much easier to maintain without this kind of support. I would recommend anyone who is out of shape and not so well motivated to have at least a few sessions with a "personal", as they call them in Brazil. It costs about the same as a private English lesson and is probably more effective. You get to learn a lot about fitness.
But since I moved to Shenzhen I haven‘t found a good personal trainer and my fitness level has declined. Life here is all about eating and there are no weekends - if you know where I can find a good personal trainer over here then please let me know.
Readers comments:
Very nice article. I fully understand his sentiments.
I‘m rather fond of my wife‘s "portuglish" - wherein she routinely speaks a few words of English before randomly inserting Portuguese, starting first with simple things like ‘com‘ or ‘para‘ before advancing into full-blown native language!
-- Christopher
Stephen Thompson is a fortysomething English gentleman who liked to learn languages (and already speaks some Portuguese and Chinese). He was briefly the owner of a small restaurant business in Sao Paulo, which lost a lot of money. He is married to a Brazilian and has one Portuguese/English-speaking daughter. He enjoyed living in Sao Paulo for five years, but he now lives and works in Shanghai, China, as a token foreigner for a variety of local companies, and is hoping to avoid a real job. He would be interested in meeting up with other former or current Gringoes, to share the strangely interesting experience of living in Brazil. He still rents a large, nice old style apartment in Pinheiros for which he frequently needs to find sub-tenants/roommates to share the rent.
He can be contacted @ stephenthompson at hotmail dot com. (no spam please).
To read previous articles by Stephen click the links below:
My First Business Failure in Brazil Part 2
My First Business Failure in Brazil Part 1
Getting your Brazilian Steak Fix in China
Brazil: Birth and Dying
Imaginary Voyages to Brazil
Brazil: Probably the Best Country in the World to Live In
Great Brazilian Inventions: The Kilo Restaurant
Brazil: Things you wanted to know... and will never know!
Brazil: Expensive, Trendy, and Extremely Beautiful
Brazil: Not Really British Enough
Package Holidays to Brazil are Back On Track
Brazil: Reverse Culture Shock
Brazil: The Legal System
Brazil: Saying Goodbye to a Bilingual Kid
How to get Brazilian Citizenship
Getting Work in Brazil
Acquiring and Running a Small Business in Brazil
Brazil: To Free Or Not To Free
Brazil: Trail Biking in Chapada Diamantinha
Brazil: So Near, but So Far Apart
How to Get Into University in Brazil
The Pleasure of Driving a Car in Brazil
Brazil: The Bairro of Flamengo in Río de Janeiro
Brazil: The Information Technology Law
Managing a Brazilian bank account
Brazil's Middle Class Ruled By Political Apathy
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7/17/2007
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