Friday night sleuthing

Dissertation research - call it "fieldwork" - is a lot like detective work. That is, I feel like a one-man detective agency, save that a) no one has died, or has asked me to investigate a case, b) other people might not find the cases interesting, c) my life is in little danger, and no television producers are calling or d) I don't smoke, and I don't currently have an office. In all other respects, it's like playing Dick Tracy.

I certainly didn't expect the following sequence:

I need to talk to Mr. Smith. He worked at the agency back in the late 1990s. Mr. Smith, by all accounts, lives in Rio de Janeiro. But he is now retired, and the last two times he appeared on the Google, he was 1) first in line for tickets to a Roberto Carlos (the Neil Diamond of Brazil) concert last year, and 2) asking a members-only car aficionado site how to fix his power windows, in 2005. Yet I really need to talk to Mr. Smith.

So tonight, Friday night, I joined the members-only car aficionado site, so that I could send a private message to Mr. Smith about the possibility of meeting to talk. Maybe we could meet at the beach on a Wednesday morning; that seems to be what retired people do here. We'll see if he responds. Hopefully his email address hasn't changed.

At least I have live music while I work; there's another concert on the balcony of the Modern Art Museum across the street. The last concert lasted until midnight last night, with no regard for noise ordinances. It was quite loud. Thankfully, they covered some songs I like, such as Minha Menina by the Mutants.

Finally, a photo taken from today's evening run in Flamengo, the famous crying coconut:



The caption encourages people to, at the end of a beach day, put their garbage in the trash can. Each hour, half a ton of garbage is abandoned on the beach. And you don't want to be responsible for making sad garbage, now do you?

Still Life with Paper Towels

The pineapple ("abacaxi" - ab-uh-ka-SHEE) sells for US$1.25. Fresh, cheap, sweet fruit is one of the highlights of this country.

Meanwhile, back home

Things Adam Forgot in the States

1. The digital camera (but remembered the peripherals)
2. The other half of the printer power cord (but can use Chris's laptop's power cord in the meanwhile)
3. USB thumb drives (side note: the Brazilian term for this is "thumb drive;" they haven't made a point to aportuguesar it yet)
4. Non-windbreaker jacket
5. New business cards
6. Photos of family and friends to show to curious Brazilians
7. Birth certificate (in case of lost passport)
8. Prescription antibiotics for food poisoning woes
9. Sewing/patch kit
10. More than one jar of peanut butter
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.

Things Adam Remembered to Bring

1. All the unimportant stuff
2. The laptop
3. Anti-malaria pills


[extra spaces reserved for future frustrating "Oh crap, where is that? Don't tell me I left it in..." moments]

A good summary of the Sarney scandal(s)

Former President of the Republic (and current President of the Senate) Sarney has been embroiled in scandal since the beginning of the year. I could say that these scandals seemed to be leaving the headlines, but that statement might be wrong tomorrow. Some new dirt might be dug up and be on the front of Folha de SP in the morning.

There are a few (relatively) honest and admirable Brazilian politicians on the national scene. Sarney (who actually switched states to win his current seat in the Senate; he now represents an even poorer and more underdeveloped state than the one in which he was previously governor) is not among them.

As a side note, there's a joke in Brazil that involves Sarney. Sarney ran as the vice-presidential candidate under Tancredo Neves, who won the first democratic presidency after the 20-year-long military dictatorship. One month before Tancredo Neves was to take office, he died, thus retaining his default title as the greatest president Brazil ever had.

Tancredo Neves's grandson, the current governor of the state of General Mines, is a possible vice-presidential candidate for next year's election.

UPDATE BEFORE SLEEP: I was wrong. The online headline of tomorrow's Folha de Sao Paulo has Sarney accuse his enemies of plotting a "Nazi campaign" against him, and denying that his apartments in Sao Paulo were gifts from a construction firm. (Construction firms are notorious for being the chosen way of laundering money here.)

Some other time, I'll summarize the scandals that brought down the preceding President of the Senate. Those scandals broke when I was here in 2007. Scandals are one reason someone once quipped that, behind football, politics are Latin America's second-most-watched spectator sport.

First Impressions, Rio de Janeiro

I'll begin by noting that these aren't properly my first impressions of Rio. I've been to this city twice before. The first time, I felt very afraid of the city. (For interested readers, I was sufficiently narcissistic to post my first impressions, long ago, here.) The second time, Bethany and I stayed in this same apartment and I attended a congress of regulators down in São Conrado.

So instead, a distillation of the first four days in Rio:

Centro has less activity on the weekends than I remember. The Middle Eastern restaurant now closes on Saturday and Sunday. However, the crowds at the beach have grown larger; for the last two days, running down Praia do Flamengo, I had to weave to avoid people multiple times.

Barring a trip to São Paulo, this is the most cosmopolitan city I'll visit, for the entire trip. Therefore, it would behoove me to eat Japanese cuisine and visit art galleries while I can. Beyond these borders, it's rice-beans-meat for a long, long while.

The exchange rate hurts. However, I cannot recommend the Capital One credit card enough. Whereas my HSBC card charges me 3% for ATM withdrawals, and the B--- o- A------ (too disgusted to say it; it's the bank that helped rebuild San Francisco after 1906) card would charge me 5%, the Capital One card converts the currency and charges no additional fees. (Thanks go to my lovely and helpful girlfriend for securing the card for me.) The only drawback so far has been a rejection at the Sendas supermarket, and the fact that the Lojas Americanas clerk wouldn't swipe it because I didn't have ID. It's odd that I'm rarely asked for ID in the States.

My roommate is great; he's been in Brazil for more time than I have, but we have complimentary knowledge about the country. He knows the city's history and all about football, and I have stupid anecdotes about recent politics.

Research starts in earnest this week. I plan to go to Eletrobras's headquarters and leaf through the proprietary studies on restructuring the Brazilian energy industry that they have.

I think Faustão is trying to lose weight. I saw the show tonight, and he looked thinner, or slender enough to be wearing jeans.

Finally, because every good post needs pictures, here are some shots of the running route (of Praia do Flamengo in general) that I stole from someone named Fabio Barros. Apologies Fabio!

And it was going so well!

Twas the night before customs...

Two additional thoughts on packing:

1. In the future, pack your suitcase before you pack up the apartment. Otherwise, you leave many of the items you think you'll need out and available. When it comes time to pack the suitcase, exasperation sets in: "Agh! I don't need ALL these pairs of khakis!"

2. In the back of my mind, I know that all of the technological gadgets that I'm taking down there are going to fry in the heat and become useless. I give them all until Halloween. Any gadgets that survive Halloween will be finished off by the summer heat of Salvador.

Homage to Home

The countdown is two days until the flight to Brazil. I’m simultaneously packing the apartment for B’s eventual move to Palo Alto, and packing suitcases for my year-long trip abroad.

In a sense, this move is more than another change in addresses. B will be on the job market this fall (good vibes!), and when I return, we may no longer live in the Bay Area. Her top choice positions are all at schools outside of California. (This is by necessity; there’s at least a year-long hiring freeze across the UC system, and Stanford won’t hire their own. No word from other universities in southern California so far.) We may be returning in August to pack our items on the Peninsula into a U-Haul and drive wherever work takes us. (The current options range from Chicago to College Station to Princeton to Williamsburg.)

I have become, thus, a little nostalgic about my brief four years back in California. We have a list of activities to do in San Francisco that will remain incomplete. We might not miss the high rents and the high cost of living, but we’ll certainly miss the cheap, local, and fresh produce. I have memories of winters in Washington, DC, in which the only fruit options at the grocery store were hormone-addled apples, oranges, and bananas from October to March. We won’t miss crazy people babbling to themselves or trying to get your attention on the bus, on the street, and in the stores. I will miss the curiosity of seeing people of all stripes and thinking, ‘well, I never considered that alternative.’

I’ll miss the running routes through the hills, and the views that are your reward for summiting, for descending, for coming around the corner. I felt a little bit of pride, that I was passing the torch, when I took Neal running today and showed him all the various route combinations of the Upper, Lower, and Back Jordan Fire Trails above campus. Now it’ll be someone else’s turn to discover and huff and puff.

Most of all, I’ll miss the people. Some friends will still be in the Bay Area when I return; some won’t. A colleague moving to Hanover, NH, for a job remarked, “We’re out of here. See you at conferences, I guess.” Just as in college, the coming end of graduate school means that people will spread across the country, to be reunited for conferences every so often.

In short, I feel melancholy. B’s currently in Oslo for two weeks. I do have the good fortune in that it’s easy to cheer myself up. I just remember that someone else is paying me to spend a year in Brazil, and how fantastic that is. Brazil is a remedy for many of the above maladies: the fruit is delicious and exotic, the people are friendly, and until January I’ll live near the northern tip of Parque do Flamengo and its running path.

On the Friday night red-eye

In honor of this blog potentially adding a second reader, I should add a personal note.

Bethany left for Oslo for two weeks tonight. When she comes back, I'll no longer be in California. We both hope she can make it to Rio, or to Curitiba/Florianopolis over Thanksgiving. We've always discussed retiring to Floripa one day, somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Why? Take a look.

I could write a long digression about my feelings, but putting those thoughts on a blog is narcissistic. Instead, I'll note that Gilberto Gil does a great version of Bob Marley's No Woman, No Cry. I miss her already.