QUEM FALA?!?

Back in the early 1900s the folks at AT&T gave a lot of thought to the proper use of their new contraptions called telephones. "Speak directly into the mouthpiece," explained one of the company’s instruction manuals, "keeping your moustache out of the opening." Well, we’ve come a long way from those quaint (and sexist) instructions, but telephone etiquette is still a lively topic on today’s table. I’m not talking about those strangers’ cell phone conversations we’re all forced to suffer through on buses or in restaurants, that’s another issue for another day. I’m talking about what happens in Brazil when you’re at home, minding your own business, and your telephone rings. You pick it up and say, "Hello?" And in what I can only understand as a complete breakdown of the otherwise extraordinarily lovely manners of Brazilians, the first words you are likely to hear your caller say are, "Quem fala?" (Who am I talking to?)



This quem fala is for us so wrong, so inappropriate, so rude that it never fails to stop me in my tracks. But I must say right away that every single Brazilian with whom I’ve discussed this believes strongly that they are right and we are wrong. Brazilians cannot continue a conversation until they know who’s at the other end of the line. Maybe a maid picked up the phone. Or a visitor. You have to know who picked up in order to address the person correctly and get on with the call. But what makes this such a pea under my mattress is that in our house the options of who’s answering the phone are small. Mark or Barbara. Take your pick. Male voice? Mark. Female voice? Barbara. This is not rocket science. So if you have to ask who you’re talking to, it means you’ve dialed a wrong number or you’re a telemarketer or you’re working a scam. Either way, you don’t know us! You shouldn’t be calling in the first place, let alone demanding that we snap to attention and identify ourselves.


From earliest childhood in the U.S. we learn that the person who makes the phone call is the person who identifies himself. Period. Mark and I have learned a lot from the Brazilians, and have taken many of their manners to heart. But this quem fala business? We’ll just never see eye to eye.

Here are a few strategies that Mark and I have devised over the years to deal with "quem fala." They work like a charm.

[Phone rings. Mark picks up.]
Mark — Hello?
Caller — Who am I talking to?
Mark — You’re talking to me.
Caller — What’s your name?
Mark — What's your name?
Caller — (Hang up)

[Phone rings. Barbara picks up.]
Barbara — Hello?
Caller — Who am I talking to?
Barbara — Identify yourself first.
Caller — I’m So-and-so, and your name?
Barbara — Well, who were you calling?
Caller — I want to speak with the head of the household.
Barbara — So you really don’t know me, right? You invade my house and demand that I identify myself to you, and all you want to do is sell me something? Let me tell you . . .
(By this time the caller has hung up.)

[And finally, phone rings, Barbara picks up. Barbara’s tired.]
Barbara — Hello?
Caller — Who am I talking to?
[Barbara hangs up]

Talkin' Sports

It seems in keeping with the pre-World Cup spirit at fever pitch here in host-country Brazil to talk about the way sports expressions seep into a language until they become so popular that people don’t even know where the expressions came from. English has tons of sports idioms, to the despair of people trying to learn the language. Native English speakers know that when you’re responsible for something you’re the one who has to carry the ball (football); that when you say or do something wrong you’re out of bounds (basketball); that when something happens at the last moment to keep you from doing an unpleasant task you’ve been saved by the bell (boxing); everyone hopes to ace (tennis) a competition and win it hands down (horse racing); anyone who has all the power is holding all the cards (poker); and when you’ve dealt successfully with every possible angle of a situation, you can relax because you’ve covered all your bases (baseball). I always tell my Brazilian students that if you can memorize just some of these expressions, your English will be all the richer, and whoever you talk to will be very impressed indeed!

No surprise that the Portuguese language is also peppered with sports expressions, though from what I can see they all seem to come from soccer (which I guess is also no surprise). Here are a few, which I try to use in casual conversation, just to show off. Coming to the World Cup? Or maybe you’re already here? Learn them! You might be rewarded by a huge smile, or maybe even a bear hug!

Botar para escanteio [bow-TAHR pra ess-kahn-TAY-oh] — Literally, to kick the soccer ball to the corner, or out of bounds. It has come to mean to ignore or stop talking to someone.

Driblar [dree-BLAHR] — Don’t confuse this dribbling with any basketball maneuver! In soccer, you "dribble" forwards, backwards, sideways, and upside-down, showing off your amazing footwork, to get around your opponent and get that ball down the field. In everyday living, driblar has come to mean getting around something, anything — legally or not!



Pendurar as chuteiras
[pen-dur-RAHR ahs shoo-TEAR-ahs] — Literally to hang up your soccer shoes (as in when you retire), but generally it means to give up (as does the expression tirar o time de campo [tear-RAHR ooh TEE-mee doo KAHM-poo] or, literally, to take your team off the soccer field.

Pisar na bola [pee-SAHR nah BOW-lah] — Literally, to step on the ball, but idiomatically it means to drop the ball, or, frankly, to screw up.



Show de bola
[show djee BOW-lah] — Literally a "soccer ball show," or a spectacular soccer performance; it’s now used for everything that’s positive and beautiful.






Vestir a camisa
[ves-TCHEER ah kah-MEE-zah] — Literally, to wear your team’s shirt (we would say dress in your team’s colors), but it has come to signify a loyal supporter of a cause, or a loyal employee.

Zona de rebaixamento [ZOH-nah djee hay-buy-sha-MEN-too] — In American baseball, a major league baseball player with a bad season performance can be sent back down to the minor leagues; in Brazilian soccer, it is a rule that the four lowest-ranked teams out of a group of 20 are in the zona de rebaixamento. At the end of a season, all four teams (referred to as the Z4) are sent from, say, the A league down to the B league in their entirety! No kicking out just one or two players; the whole team goes. In a recent newspaper article about Brazil’s teetering economy, I was surprised to see this expression used by a reporter lamenting the fate of the recently-emerged middle class, now perilously close to the zona de rebaixamento.

One last expression, which — believe it or not — comes not from soccer, but from badminton:



Não deixa a peteca cair [now DAY-shuh ah pe-TEK-kah kigh-YEER] — Literally, "don’t let the birdie fall," but in popular speech it means not to waver, to keep on acting with resolution.

Driving Update

One of the principal reasons I started this blog, believe it or not, is simply that I felt like railing about the reckless way Brazilians drive. And I did so (blogpost of July 11, 2011). And, if I hadn’t been so afraid of exhausting my readers’ patience, I could have railed plenty more. But given that I’m generally an honest person, I must now give credit where credit is due. Or give the devil his due. One of those two. Brazilians do not yet drive in as disciplined a manner as the North Americans. Driving here is still in many respects a sport and, for many people, maybe even a blood sport. It calls for skill in the manipulation of a manual transmission, skill in maneuvering in tight spaces and problem roadways, skill for laser-quick judgments of times and distances. It is not yet, as it has become in the U.S., just a means of getting to and from work, getting the kids to soccer practice, and getting the groceries home from Trader Joe’s or WalMart.

"Smile, you’re being fined"

But in the twelve years I have lived in Brazil, I have seen real, positive, tangible changes in the way Brazilians behave behind the driving wheel. Much of the credit goes to government — at federal, state and local levels alike — for getting on the bucking bronco and whipping it into submission. For one thing, there are traffic-calming devices like crazy — speed dips, speed ramps, speed bumps, speed humps, speed tables and speed cushions, all of which are marked pretty clearly. You see them coming. But if you don’t see one of them and you hit it hard, ouch. You’re going to keep your eyes peeled in the future. There are also speed cameras and radar equipment like crazy (both visible and hidden). These enforcement devices may not jar your spine the way flying over a speed hump does, but they sure hurt you in the pocketbook! For example, between us and the town of Macaé, about an hour away, we’ve counted over 25 of them. And, though we ourselves drive with a cautiousness bred in the land of Driver Ed and the famous Signal 30 scare-their-pants-off film, we’ve gotten enough citations in the mail so that we don’t drive to Macaé anymore unless we absolutely have to.

To these measures, add breathalyzers, and a permissible blood alcohol level lower than you’ll reach on a single beer (0.1 mg of alcohol for liter of air expelled). For that one beer you can end up paying a large fine, losing your license for up to a year and even serving some jail time. Then add mandatory driving schools. Add rigorous practical and psychological testing for new drivers. And public service announcements on television. Add mandatory retraining for drivers who rack up over 20 points on their licenses. There’s some serious enforcement here and I, for one, welcome it!

Drive right in here, and take a deep breath

Interesting, and effective, public service campaign

When Mark and I moved here the idea that a driver might stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk was almost ludicrous. It was the motorist who claimed the right of way, and pedestrians were wise not to trust their luck. But, while we still haven’t reached Californian levels of compliance with crosswalk laws, the situation has quite unmistakably taken a major turn. It’s as if stopping for pedestrians was contagious. One person did it. Everybody else copied. Brazilians now seem in effect to take pride in the courtesy they show.

But let me go back to where I started. Driving here is still neither as disciplined as it is in the U.S., and neither is it consequently as safe. But most new drivers in the U.S. had parents who were drivers and probably grandparents who were drivers. Driving as well as car-ownership have long been routine in the U.S. Here many drivers are first-generation drivers, and widespread car ownership is a function of the only recent emergence of a vast middle class. I don’t know the Asian countries. But, if what I hear about driving in India and China and Vietnam is true, Brazil may still be some distance from U.S. standards of behind-the-wheel prudence, but it’s at a far greater distance from the amazing mess you see in this picture from India. And this pretty much reflects just where we stand on the development scale. Down here in Southeastern and Southern Brazil, we’re not yet 100 percent First World. But we’re getting really close.

Rua das Pedras

When my husband Mark and I came to Búzios 12 years ago, we used to walk up and down the Rua das Pedras, or Stone Street, in the evening and say to each other, "Guess we’ll be walking up and down this street for the rest of our lives." This is in fact not exactly the way things have panned out. But, first, what exactly is this Rua das Pedras, or Stone Street? And why would people walk up and down its short length, saying its name in such hushed, awed tones? Well, the Rua das Pedras has been to Búzios what the Boardwalk has been to Atlantic City, what the Via Veneto has been to Rome, what Fifth Avenue has been to New York, and so on. With allowances for scale, obviously.

The Rua das Pedras is a pedestrians-only thoroughfare of extremely irregular paving stones — hence the name — fairly dead during the day when the locals are working and the tourists are at the beach but lively bordering on the frenetic in the evening when the beaches hold no allure and people on vacation are looking for a good time. Most bars, restaurants and stores on the Rua das Pedras don’t even open in the afternoon, let alone the morning. They tend to open around six or seven and then stay open, the stores included, well into the wee small hours or, as they say here in Brazil, until the último freguês — in other words, until the last customer is ready to call it quits.

Getting crowded . . . time to go home!

Actually, the Rua das Pedras was never where any resident of town would be found during the peak of high season or on holidays, when Búzios was packed with visitors and the Rua das Pedras was reminiscent of a subway car anywhere in the world at rush hour. But in low season, which is more than three quarters of the year, it was great. You’d run into your neighbors. You’d run into your friends. In other words, the ratio of locals to visitors on the street would be high. You’d sit down with people, impromptu, and have a drink. Sometimes you’d have two drinks, three drinks. Those were memorable evenings.

So what happened? To simplify, two things. One, Brazil got rich. Or at least a middle class popped up virtually overnight, and people who used to scramble to make ends meet at the end of the month all of a sudden had money to spend on pleasures. Two, thanks to the glamorization of Búzios in a prime-time soap opera, thanks to the press and the town’s own promotional efforts, Búzios came to be the place people thought of first when arranging their once-in-a-lifetime vacation.

The Rua das Pedras got kind of dumbed down. The unique Rua das Pedras institutions — the crazy Takatakatá Bar (run by an even crazier Dutchman), the Czech adventuress Brigitta’s tropical chic restaurant, the old Pousada Colonial with its restaurant serving excellent homemade German sausages — have all disappeared. The brand-name chain stores came in in their place. A few of the old-line places, like Sonia Persiani’s Cigalon restaurant held on stubbornly, but increasingly the commerce on the Rua das Pedras was hard to distinguish from what is encountered in a Rio or São Paulo shopping mall. As for the serendipitous and usually extremely agreeable encounters with neighbors or friends, well, our neighbors and friends aren’t going down there in the evening any more than we are. And, to the extent that any of us are still going down that way, we’re not running into them. We’re all lost in the crowd.

The old Takatakatá Bar, with its papered-over windows, the better to hide what went on inside!










Brigitta’s Guest House and Restaurant, once a Búzios institution







Fortunately, other places to go in the evening have come into existence and one of them, the Porto da Barra, is no more than a ten-minute walk from our house. But it’s actually not just Búzios that has been through a sea change these past 12 years. Mark and I have also changed. We can’t handle those three-caipirinha evenings anymore. Don’t sleep well. So even if the Rua das Pedras had not changed one iota, we would probably still have given up our nightly strolls to stay snug at home, re-watching old Hitchcock movies.

24 Days to the World Cup

One fine specimen, this Fred . . .

It’s official! The Brazilian 2014 World Cup soccer team has been selected! World Cup fever — always high in Brazil  — is now in overdrive, given that this year it's Brazil that's hosting. It's all World Cup, all the time, on television, on the radio, and splashed in newspaper headlines. But the question begs, at a mere 24 days to opening day, will this super-young, super-cute (if not outright handsome, I mean just look at Fred!) team have any stadiums to play in? Will their hotels be ready? On second thought, forget the Brazilian team, which will be as coddled as a team has ever been. For that matter, forget all the soccer teams, because FIFA has special, hand-picked employees in charge of the players. It’s the fans we should be worrying about. Will visiting fans, both foreign and national, be able to negotiate the airports? Will they find their way around the cities? Will they be okay?



One angry Blatter

FIFA has been badmouthing Brazil for months now, at the same time that they are apparently enjoying the highest profits EVER from a World Cup event. Life is full of such contradictions, right? FIFA’s president, the grumpy (but rich) Joseph Blatter, has harsh criticisms about all the stadium delays (four out of twelve stadiums have still not been completed), and he has gone as far as to blame these delays on the "sluggishness of the Brazilians." He really hit hard on this issue at a recent press conference, particularly since Brazil had — count them — seven years to prepare. Okay, hard not to concede his point. Blatter also criticized the lack of safety for the workers at the various stadium construction sites, and made sure to relieve FIFA of any responsibility for the ten deaths that have occurred. (By the way, have we heard one word, one whisper of a possible criticism on FIFA’s part about the 1,200 workers that have already died while building stadiums in Qatar for the 2022 World Cup?)

So where are we? We’ve got FIFA withholding 7% of ticket sales because they have no idea if the seats they’d like to sell will actually exist. (Installation, or rather, non-installation of seats seems to be the abiding problem at the four incomplete stadiums.) We’ve got FIFA unable to conduct the usual and necessary tests of lights, cables, communication setups, Internet, security preparations, food services, bathrooms — in short, everything that has to be tested before opening to the public. FIFA is livid. Want to move on to airports? We’ve got some beautiful new terminals, but if you peek behind the curtains you see roofs that leak, air conditioning not yet working, unfinished parking garages, no lobby seating areas (what is it with Brazil and seating?) . . .

One of Brazil’s most respected and award-winning journalists, Míriam Leitão, wrote a scathing article in last Sunday’s Globo. She wrote that a country should be going after two wins when hosting a World Cup, the game championship itself and the unparalleled opportunity of being a showcase to the world. Míriam gave sharp and well-reasoned opinions as to why she thinks Brazil has already lost its showcase opportunity, and is now merely "patching up its damaged image." The best Brazil can hope for now, she continued, is the actual World Cup trophy. That was one depressing article. But who knows? Maybe Brazil will actually pull it off. Just a few more days and the whole world will have the answer.

No stadium seating? There's plenty in the lakes!

And even though Brazil has not yet f@#&ed up the 2014 World Cup, people are already writing off the 2016 Summer Olympics as a terrible disaster. Rio de Janeiro is waaaay behind in its preparations. Just as one example, one of the solemn promises Rio made to the Olympic Committee was that it would clean up the lakes in Barra da Tijuca and Jacarepagua (where most of the Olympic events will take place). But these projects haven’t even begun. We’re 806 days out, and word is that even if they were to begin working today they wouldn’t be finished until after the Olympics. Here we go again.

That End-of-World Feeling

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the mini-metropolis of Cabo Frio, immediately next door to the much smaller and much more cosmopolitan resort town of Búzios that my husband and I have been living in for 12 years. But suppose you pass through downtown Cabo Frio, you hang a left at the traffic rotary where the VW dealership is, you pass the campus of the Estácio de Sá University (with its main entrance looking kind of like a Las Vegas convention hotel), and then you continue on, cleaving as close as you can to the coast, through the increasingly high sand dunes on either side of the increasingly sand-swept road. What do you come to next?

What you come to next is the town of Arraial do Cabo, most of which — same as Búzios — is situated on a peninsula extending out into the South Atlantic. A map will show the way these towns line up in relation to each other in a nanosecond. But you could also just think of Búzios and Arraial as the two front claws of a crab, with Cabo Frio as the crab’s useful, but slightly ugly, snub nose.

I really love Arraial do Cabo. Or maybe I don’t . . . I’m never sure. I wish I could resolve this in my head. We started driving down to Arraial back in the early months of our sojourn here when we were still in that hey-what-do-you-think-is-over-that-hill? mode. On one of the principal beaches we found and embraced a funky restaurant called the Narcose Dive Bar, where we were once gifted with a Narcose Dive Bar plate that has served us ever since as a soap dish. Next door was a surprisingly good Arab restaurant, with great hummus and great baba ganoush and tabouli, and every time we went in the owner would pump us as to whether we thought there was a market for a similar place in Búzios as well. That was always entertaining.

The main thing about Arraial, though, is this one very special spot at the top of the great mountainous formation called the Atalaia, which means watchtower or lookout, way out at the very end of the peninsula. Stand there and look down at the ocean churning underneath you and you get that incredible feeling of being at the very edge of the known universe. Beyond it . . . nothing . . . except, somewhere far off to the east, Namibia. This is a feeling I know from only three other places in our world, the Pointe Ste.-Barbe out at the westernmost tip of France (in the department of . . . well, they don’t call it Finistère for nothing), Sagres in the southwest corner of Portugal’s Algarve and Ushuaia at the bottom tip of Argentina. But people who have been in South Africa tell me that there are places where you get a similar chill there. And I’m sure that there are dozens if not hundreds of other such places around the world. But this one is ours.

On the dizzying approach . . .









Once on my birthday we checked into a pousada in Arraial, even though it’s not more than an hour from where we live. The idea wasn’t just to give me a treat, the ostensible idea was that we’d be able to go out and have dinner at one of the more serious Arraial restaurants, wash it down with a drink or two, and not have to risk a breathalyzer on the way back. But the birthday was really just an excuse. Arraial keeps pulling me back, and I think it’s that end-of-world feeling up on the Atalaia that’s most responsible, that feeling of standing right at the edge of the abyss, which is frightening and exhilarating, depressing and seductive; it’s 45 minutes away and on occasion, it’s just too chilling for speech.

For those who are interested, the remoteness of Arraial do Cabo is vividly caught in this short men-against-the-sea film from 1959. No titles, but you don't need them.

Seriously Now — Where Would We Live in the USA?

"This land is your land, this land is my land,
From California, to the New York Island,
From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf Stream waters,
This land was made for you and me."*

Two blogposts ago I joked about the difficulty that eventual repatriation to the United States might present. I said that one of the obstacles to moving back was just plain not knowing where in the U.S. a person would repatriate to. There’s a lot more serious truth in that than just the jokey attitude I took in the blogpost. Sometimes when it’s late at night, and friends with whom we’ve shared a few bottles of wine have left, and Mark and I are alone on our terrace with our nightcaps, we get to talking. "Let’s say we had to go back," the conversation starts . . . (By the way, the motive for returning is never spelled out in these hazy dialogues in the dark. Have to go back? Are we being deported? We don’t ever explore that issue.) Okay, back to where we were, under the influence of a little buzz. "Let’s say we had to go back . . . where in the U.S. would we go?"



We’ve read all the articles, like The Ten Best U.S. Cities to Retire To, The Ten Cheapest U.S. Cities to Live In and The Ten Most Beautiful Cities in the U.S. We recently read America’s Ten Most Miserable Cities, too, thinking what the hell, maybe we could get a great deal on property! Anyway, it’s a big country, and you’d think we’d have no trouble choosing a new home. We’d just be looking for some place affordable, where the quality of life is high, and where there is excellent medical care (we're getting on in years). A big plus would be easy access to an international airport, for I suspect a steady stream of Brazilian friends would start to visit immediately. What seems to happen, though, is that instead of coming up with some easy, obvious options, we end up thwarted by an exhausting process of elimination.

We can’t go back to New York, it’s too expensive, too fast, too stressful. And what would we do, spend the rest of our days going to the free movies at the Museum of Modern Art? I’m pretty adamant about avoiding snow and ice and freezing wind, so that rules out the entire top tier of the United States, including Alaska. Let’s see — I was born in Florida and that state always looks enticing, but Florida is hurricane territory. My mother’s stories of her standing at the front door with a shovel, killing snakes as they slithered into the house after a hurricane, still reverberate. California, here I come** is fun to sing, but do I really need to test my earthquake survival skills? We’re thinking we should also avoid the entire tornado belt running down the middle of the country. Hawaii looks promising, until you start thinking about tsunamis. Not much left to the United States once you consider weather.

Around Cathedral Rock, photo by Bo Montenegro

Years ago we took a car trip around some of the southern and south Atlantic states, just to see if anything grabbed us. Nothing did, but I suspect our hearts weren’t really in it. Lately, we’ve been talking about a similar trip around the American southwest. A Brazilian friend of ours lives in Sedona, Arizona, and his gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous photographs have stimulated our interest. (Check out more pictures on his Web site, http://www.bomontenegro.com) It’s very tempting, but there is that little problem of Arizona being a Red State . . . I don’t know. For right now, we’ll keep thinking and talking. We’ll keep on staring out from our terrace, which just happens to be in a place where the quality of life is high and where there is excellent medical care. There’s also pretty easy access to an international airport. So, wait . . . what’s the problem?

*Woody Guthrie, music and lyrics
**Buddy DeSylva and Joseph Meyer, co-authors