Planes Where We Meet

I’ve never been a good tourist – I lived in Florence for eight months and am embarrassed to admit that I never made it to the Boboli Gardens, which covered ground mere steps from my apartment next door to the Chiesa di Santa Felicita (featuring some badass frescos by Pontormo). I’m not sure what I was doing. . . huffing photo chemicals during hours spent in the darkroom, guzzling espresso and timing my visits to the focacceria perfectly in-synch with the emergence – in all its salty olive-oily perfection – of the bread from the oven at 4pm everyday, chasing French boys on bicycles, learning to walk on cobblestone streets in stacked heels . . . There were all sorts of useful activities taking place, but I failed to tick a few critical items from my to-do list for the well-cultivated junior abroad in Florence. I like gardens, too – it’s not like I was avoiding it. Who knows. . .in any case, I’ve moved on.

The point is that I can enjoy myself as a traveler in decidedly non-touristy places – in fact, the less touristy, the better. I’ve been sling-shot from the relaxed residential graffiti-endowed splendor of Sao Paolo’s Pompeia neighborhood to the booming South-Beach-reminiscent hullabaloo of Ipanema over the course of one day’s travel on a bus. I luxuriated in the hours, staring out the window at verdant hillsides and daydreaming, listening to music and drifting in and out of consciousness. Everyone I met in Sao Paolo – and I ended up meeting quite a few people, wondered why I had made it a stop on my journey. It seemed like a logical choice to me: while perhaps lacking in obvious tourist attractions – which I might not be that interested in anyway – Sao Paolo is home to what is perhaps the greatest attraction to this citizen of the universe: interesting people.

As Facebook is wont to remind us, one person leads to the next. . . and before you know it, you’re both sleeping in a dumpy hostel located in one of the former homes of Antonio Carlos Jobim (of Bossa Nova fame) in Rio de Janeiro and also randomly hanging out with his grandson, who is a musician. Just when I was resigned to having an early first night in Rio, recovering from the trip and relaxing in my unremarkable though (thankfully) private room with a bottle of water, I was beckoned out into the streets by another friend of a friend, Karine, and the aforementioned Jobim to see a friend of theirs giving a reality show-related concert of ‘axe’ (ah-SHAY) music from Bahia. Axe, from what I heard last night, is sort of virtuosic rock-funk with some Brazilian party flourishes. Imagine Stevie Ray Vaughn and Flea taking ecstasy with Bob Marley, and then the whole lot of them getting massages from members of Os Mutantes. It was kind of a fascinating experience – several levels of security (made more complicated by me not carrying ID), every short muscle-bound woman in Rio in a clinging minidress, my hosts alternately grimacing and greeting members of their social community, all who seemed to be at this show. The featured artist was this guy Davi Moraes, who apparently is also some Brazilian musical Brahmin. I need to look him up. It seemed to me he had chops but I wasn’t feeling his style – of course this is a question of taste. My non-cachaca imbibing friends were a little embarrassed -- this wasn’t their scene. I reassured them that it was interesting for me and then we repaired to a ‘bibi’ (open-air juice/sandwich joint) in Leblon (where they mentioned having seen Madonna recently) for some late-night acai juice (my first time) before returning me to my hostel – where Daniel’s grandfather used to live.

My week in Sao Paolo couldn’t have been better. Sandra and I talked for hours in the comforting lounge-like atmosphere of her cozy apartment in Pompeia as various friends came and went; I went to a contemporary dance class and interpreted the rather esoteric instructions in Portuguese that involved things like finding eights within the body and initiating movement from that shape. I visited several art galleries – both of Mauro’s galleries as well as one owned by my friend Flaviana; I ate and drank in botecos (open-air pub-like places), visited the farmers market in the street outside our apartment, did yoga with Sandra on her patio everyday, hung out with photographers and journalists from around the world, went to a film in the documentary film festival and discussed Iranian political history in a mish-mash of Italian, Spanish, English and Portuguese. I managed to drag Sandra out of the comfort of her popular domestic clubhouse one night to hear music at Jazz Nos Fondos, an unlikely locale in the bowels of a parking lot in the Pinheiros neighborhood. Though the music was not mind-blowing, it was a fun scene.

I watched people being in, falling in, and falling out of love, slippery slope that it is – tolerating each other, forging bonds in daily Skype conversations and erasing memory with various dissipating vices. Relationships seem to be more or less the same wherever you go, and probably always have been. Although we supposedly look for security, we also mock it like defiant teenagers. Maybe being slightly uncomfortable – whether an organic or calculated effort -- is just a way of staying awake. Perhaps making friends with tension and discomfort and insecurity is simply a way of being at peace with the ever-changing magically tragic nature of things. Or maybe we just visit different planes of experience, existing on one until it’s time to get on a bus and head to another.