Destination: South America
Drinks on Plane: 4
Round-Trip Airfare: $100
Total Time Spent on Planes (RT): 26 hours
I've taken a month off to travel to Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina to see the countries and meet my girlfriend's family. As you may remember from my day 28 post, my brother is a pilot for Continental Express, and I get his travel benefits. While this is great, I spend half the day in San Diego trying to catch standby flights. I arrive in Houston and anxiously await at another Continental gate to find out if I've scored a seat for my ten hour flight to São Paulo, Brazil, where my girlfriend's parents and brother live.
I'm ecstatic when the gate agent hands me a ticket with seat 3K on it. First Class. I'm even more excited when I settle in, order a Jim Beam and ginger, and then realize no one is even going to sit next to me. As the coach passengers file past, I get that weird privileged feeling again, thinking the passengers must be speculating about my occupation and ability to fly first class. In my mind, I usually pretend to be a famous author, but I know when I walk through first class to the coach seats, I don't think anything about the first-class passengers except that they're wasting money.
I get the usual perks of first-class (the hot towel, the free Heinekens served with a real glass, the real silverware, plates and cloth napkin with dinner) but this time we're presented with a restaurant-like, four page dinner menu that spells out the five-course meal, and includes four main course choices (I choose the Southwest stuffed chicken breast). During the salad course, I'm asked if I'd like lobster on my salad. Of course I would. After the main course, they present me with a cheese and fruit plate, then, get this, roll out a metal dessert cart with all kinds of ice cream options. Even though I'm already stuffed, when they announce all the available toppings for the ice cream––sauces, nuts, whip cream––I say, "Yes, please." The flight attendant also asks if I'd like a cognac with dessert. Why not? Pass the Courvoisier. The downside to all this overindulgence is that my sinuses are three-quarters stuffed, so I'm only experiencing food textures (the lobster wasn't such a good idea), an occasional strong taste, and I'm now totally bloated. Which means I can't sleep almost the whole flight, am too tired to read, and end up watching The Time Traveler's Wife and flight data between cat naps.
I also experience a fair amount of flight anxiety, not about the flight itself or the idea of crashing, but from knowing when I land I'll be in a foreign country, thousands of miles from home, where I've been told it's dangerous––my only reference point is City of God––and I don't speak the language. I experience this feeling even when I return to countries I've been to before, like Mexico and Italy. And when I land, I'm usually fine. (Strangely enough, the only time the anxiety never went away was when I landed in a place that I do speak the language: Australia. But that had more to do with my recent divorce at the time than the country itself).
When the plane turns for its approach into São Paulo, and I see the size and extent of the city, my anxiety kicks up a notch. But when I land, like in Mexico or Italy, I instantly feel relaxed and fine, and my girlfriend and her mother are there to greet me. After spending almost two weeks in this massive, traffic-choked city, I realize something. People here are living out the human tragedy/comedy the same way they do all over the world. People fall in love; they make wedding videos; they divorce; they eat meals (especially meat, lots of meat); some people are rich, many are poor; people go to hospitals for hurt fingers; that woman is sleeping with that other woman's husband; people die from natural causes and car crashes and murders; some people rob other people; a man spreads his seed, and when he dies he leaves children all over the continent . . .
In a massive city like São Paulo (population, 11-19 million), though, life is altered by fear of violence, and the contrasts are magnified. Those with money hide behind taller fences, gates and armed security guards; those without live in shanty towns (favelas), their houses constructed of pallets, scrap wood and tarps. Those with money don't usually flaunt their wealth like in the States, instead choosing to drive modest, compact cars. Those without money take whatever they can from those that have money, usually by force. This makes the rich prisoners of their own wealth. But like anywhere else, the everyday people are kind and generous and gracious, and they live out their lives walking the streets to work, relaxing in the parks, or eating (lots of meat) at one of the many restaurants.
While I spend a short amount of time in a wealthy man's house, a business friend of my father's, I never spend time in a favela; I only see one or two from the highway. But I learn something very interesting from that business friend; he says many earnings reports in Brazil are fictions, and it's unwise to invest money here. Own a business, fine, but don't invest, because he's been at board meetings where the financial officer went around the room asking the executives their expenditures for the year, and that's what the financial officer reported as their earnings. Cover what you spent. The rest isn't the government's business. They do nothing for us.
America has it's own business fictions, such as Enron, Arthur Anderson, and the recent bank failures, and I sometimes feel investors are unwise gamblers at the mercy of wrongly motivated executives, many of whom are more interested in their own wealth than the company or country's economic health. And even those these types of fictions and corruptions are just magnified in Brazil, they're coming up as a country (not to mention they have the Soccer World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016).
I also spent time in a young couple's nice, high rise condo, where I ate a wonderful pasta meal and sipped red wine a few blocks away from a favela. And that young couple, their son asleep in his crib, had an infectious optimism and sense of hope for the future. My girlfriend says this is the spirit of the Brazilian people, that no matter how bad things seem or are, they have hope. And they keep on living . . .
Loved this post, Eric! I lived in Portugal for 14 months and have always wanted to visit Brazil, as a result. I met someone in Mexico who traveled around the world visiting only Portuguese speaking countries. I think I have a new goal . . .
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