Venomous snakes are too lazy to strangle

It has been raining for days now in Minas Gerais, which significantly reduces the changes of me being accidentally set fire to by our gardener. But there are other dangers still, lurking from their shelters. Snakes.

Eversince I first read the bible, I started distrusting them. But believe me, tricking the first naked female hippie into eating an apple is the least of their crimes. Worldwide they kill 125.000 people annually, in Brazil on average 272 people are bitten daily by a venemous one. The three most dangerous snakes, living in our garden:

Jararaca (See picture)
This statistically is the most dangerous of them all. Not because it is very venomous, but because bites are most common. It’s colours, according to wikipedia, apparantly range from tan to olive to maroon. So it helpful to use a pocket size colour chart whilst identifying it.

A year ago a meter long jararaca was found on the property of my father-in-law, lying in front of my new grandma’s room. Graças à Deus she did not find it herself, as she would have probably invited it in to make it three different types of coffee.

Cascavel
The Brazilian version of the rattlesnake. Which means it lies in hibernation all year underneath stones, waiting for carnaval to finally release it from its daily sorrow.

Coral Verdadeira
Most Jurassic Park of them all. Beautiful as it is dangerous. 3 mg of poison is already deadly (Cascavel 50 mg) making it the only poison stronger than cachaça known to men.

Minas Gerais is on fire

Minas Gerais, the state I am living in, is on fire. Black clouds of smoke scarring nature mark zones of human stupidity. Because frankly, that is mostly what it is.

Many mornings whilst having my watermelon and home-made yoghurt comprising hippy breakfast on an outside table in the morning sun, small grains of perfectly black ash sink down upon me. Where do they come from? I look around, I see nothing. It could be carried by the wind from fires more than hundred kilometres away. However, there has been no day so far that I did not see a single fire from frightfully close by.

Minas Gerais is situated behind a vast mountain range seperating the coastel area of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro from the inland state. Rainclouds coming from the ocean get stuck behind this mountains, meaning that winters are dry, dry and dry. In my three months here, I have only seen it raining ones. And as there are no laws prohibiting people of burning their waste and equally no laws prohibiting people from being stupid, fires are abundant.

It was only the other night, that after a party, in a forest on a hill that shapes our view, a small fire was started. I completely understand why they did it. I mean there is nothing funnier than, after a cachaça drenched, Shakaria filled night, setting your own house on fire! Not much later the entire slope was covered deep orange, making a light so bright it faded stars and illuminated my bedroom. The sound was frightening, sounding like a train of firework explosions. It did not last long until the fire brigade arrived (actually I took quite very much very long) and the fire was completely (actually not at all) put out.

The threat of apocalyptic fires is ever present, but it doesn’t seem to worry a single Brazilian. Fires are made, regretted and put out (or not) every day and night. And it is hard to say if the reason is ignorance or the indifference that characterizes the Brazilian people.

Whilst clearing a garden of my father-in-law with his gardener, something needed to be done with the sheer amount of dead leaves we collected. Setting fire to it, was the answer the gardener had in mind. “It will be very dangerous making a fire here,” he said, however, “because these trees are too close.” He pointed at them. They were cork dry. Accidentally setting fire to them could easily mean that it would spread far beyond our control. But before I wanted to tell him, in a Portuguese he reluctantly understands to move the pile, the fire was already made. Nothing happened. But it is this attitude, I believe, that causes it all.

But I am still alive. Tanned, but not scorched. (Red actually. Like all gringos).

Nero, my brother

The smartest dog in the world is, as everybody (*) knows, a border collie! The stupidest dog in the world is my dog Nero. But that is OK; it makes us relate quite well.

What kind of dog is Nero? He is black. And he has a tail. Personally I believe he is a mix of every single dog type ever invented, apart from the border collies naturally. And he is a son of a bitch, but he doesn’t object when I remind him of that.

Border collies are really smart (**) because they can execute a new order after just one example of their handlers. Brilliant. Nero however can’t follow an order even after a million examples. Even more to the point, he doesn’t want to. He only does exactly what you don’t show him to do, like eating your flip flops, smelling your… arms in public or being angry at horses for being horses. The retrieving game he does not understand. If you throw a stick at him he either looks at you upset or runs off with it to later show up begging for another.

But still Nero is my new friend. He says good morning by running straight into me. He follows me around, which  I didn’t teach him, everywhere on my father-in-law’s propriety, from the kitchen to the fishing pond, from the football pitch to my bedroom. He lies his head on my lap when I am sitting down and he keeps an eye out when we are all a sleep.  He is a stupid, but good dog. And I understand: there is nothing more infuriating than a horse!

(*) I really mean: only people to have to much spare time to spend on wikipedia
(**) I was bored, OK, not because I am actually interested in Border Collies

Futebol with the locals

People like football in Brazil. A lot. They grasp every opportunity they have to play ball on beaches, perfectly brown football pitches or dead-end streets. And no matter if you’re young, old, black or white, rich or poor: everyone can join in anytime.

(Funny then that they still get beaten silly by a nation that spends its time making Edammer cheese whilst cycling).

So on the football pitch of King Luiz Afonso, my father-in-law, every saturday afternoon at four o’clock precisely a football match is organised. (One of the few things Brazilians actually come on time for). The caddle farmer neighbour joins in, as well as the butcher from the local supermarket, the local estate agents, the son of two police officers, the local car mechanic with friends of friends of friends and ofcourse a bunch of wannabe Cristiano Ronaldo slackers who normally spend their time chatting-up fifteen year old girls whilst plucking their eyebrows. Five against five. The winner remains.

This produces a fair mix of football players, with skills ranging from nearly brilliant to nearly pathetic. The best goalkeeper of them all, or golero, the gardener of King Luiz. With the gardening gloves he normally uses fot charts ranging to weed plucking to painting bird cages, he stops shot after shot after catlike dives in every far corner of the goal. Shots mostly coming from a fat guy called Andre who believes walking on a pitch no bigger then 40 by 25 meters is utmost unnecessary and therefore, leaving his teammates somewhat crossed, time after time tries to score by shooting for goal from the other end of the pitch.

Another example of the nearly pathetic (but nearly brilliantly funny) is a big black guy called Kissuco. He arrives 45 minutes before the start of the first match, just to make sure he is on time, wearing a perfectly suited (but very fake) AC Milan football kid. But as soon as the first match startes he takes of his t-shirt. I imagine he does not want it to get creased. His tactics are simple: if you run towards the goal of the opponent’s, you’ll get closer to the opponent’s goal. And not surprisingly, it works!

And whilst executing his strategy, his main way of avoiding his opponents is running straight at them, hoping that they will move asside out of sudden fear. Which, also not very surprisingly, does not always work out well. Either resulting in him losing the ball to Andre (who then shoots for goal after which the gardener gives the ball to Kissuco again) or in a painful collision that, if we all were children, would end in tears.

Also one of them is a lost Dutchman wearing his worn-out Oranje shirt, on many occasions successfully defending to afterwards equally unsuccessfully attack by mixing up the players of his team with those of the opponents. One player his does know for certain is his team member, his father-in-law, who, even on age 54, frequently outruns him.

It all lasts until six, when a perfectly orange dusk sets in, all the players rush home Brazilian style (which means no rush at all) on their bycicles, motorcycles, in the back and on top of pick-up trucks to start another week full of far less important things.

Learning to speak Brazilian

Although I, whilst still in the Netherlands, went through all the steps of “Teach Yourself Fluent Portuguese in only 10 days”, I did not understand a word of what the locals said after I arrived in Brazil. Obviously everyone in Brazil must be speaking Portuguese incorrectly.

(I mean: I went through all the chapters! I even learned how to count to 21. Ridiculous!)

So, somewhat disappointed, I decided to then try to parrot the locals as good as I could: “Beleza, beleza, beleza, cerveja, né?” (Hello, hello, hello, beer, ain’t it) was the first thing I learned, which turned out to be an extremely successful sentence in the great kingdom of my new father-in-law Luiz Afonso the First. After only my first hours in Brazil, I discovered that the presence of the words “genro” (son-in-law) and “cerveja” in the same sentence almost always meant that I was kindly requested to bring King Luiz Afonso a new can of beer. After a week I also understood: “para você tambem!” (take one yourself).

But where many men would argue that this means you comprehend a language sufficiently, I pressed on to learn more. Not in the least place because Portuguese is spoken by 190 million people worldwide, and in Brazil, which houses 89 % of the worlds Portuguese speaking people, almost by everyone apart from some cannibals in tree-houses in the Amazon and sun-burned Englishmen in hotel rooms on the Copa Cobana. (This paragraph is only added to this story to give it some weight).

So every day (apart from the many days when I am playing football, fishing or getting my “sogro” [father-in-law] beers), I memorise sentences from my Lonely Planet Phrasebook, I read Brazilian children books, I watch a score of Brazilian telenovelas and consult Google Translate for some extremely inadequate translations. Or I speak to my new five-year-old best friend Artur, who is only to be understood by the most proficient of Portuguese speakers. Not necessarily because he speaks academical Portuguese, but mostly because he lifts the art of speaking rapidly whilst pronouncing every ‘L’ as a ‘R’ to a whole new level.

Arriving in Brazil

As I normally easily manage to get shamefully lost in the London Underground (famous for being easy to use) it is quite an achievement that I made it to Brazil in one go, without first stopping in Shanghai, Johannesburg and back home again. During the early morning of the 29th of June 2010 I arrived at Belo Horizonte airport.

First impression of Brazil: they have a lot of airplanes. Second impression: they have a lot of men and women wearing ugly purple ties, comparing the photo on your passport with your face, finally concluding you are probably not planning to overthrow government and installing Diego Maradona as President. Third impression: lost count…

Why did I go to Brazil? To live with my Brazilian girlfriend. Who I met in Spanish class. In London. She planned on leaving the U.K. in June, after living there for five years, in the same way she did not plan on falling in love with a Dutch boy in May. And so after a stormy last month of London and first month of relationship, she decided to import me.

Looking cute as ever, she picked me up from the airport, more preoccupied with the fact she was one minute late than I was. Straight away she gave me new blue Havaiana flipflops which, I concluded after staring at Havaiana equiped feet frantically making their way to their terminals, are the first necessary ingredient to successful integration into Brazilian society.

Luckily enough, after of course meeting the parents, she took me home. She showed me her house, the ten million hectare of land belonging to it and her hyperactive dog, Nero, who after subjecting it to some fierce scent tests, decided to run of with one of my flipflops.

That was one month ago. Exactly. But it feels like much longer. The flipflop has been returned to me, several times, and just like me, it has quite many long stories about many great adventures to tell. So stay tuned, more to follow…