Space: The Final Brazilian Frontier

It’ll be a shock getting behind the wheel for the first time only a few months from now. To get around here in Belo I’ve been walking, taking buses, the metro, or taxis, or getting rides from friends. We’ll have to see if driving a car is “just like riding a bike.” I’ll come home out of practice to say the very least.

There are certainly times I’ve missed having a car here in BH. Just read my last post and you’ll understand why. While I’m all for a greener world—politicians, if you’re listening, the time is now to invest in efficient and clean public transportation, even in sub-100,000-population cities like Iowa City—there is no beating the freedom a car can give us. (Meaning politicians, if you’re listening, the time is now to invest in more fuel-efficient cars and raise CAFE standards well beyond the provisions of 35mpg per fleet by 2020 set by last year’s Energy Independence and Security Act).

Anyway, yes, though it'll mean increasing my carbon footprint, I’ll thoroughly enjoy having my car back. And not only because I won’t have to worry about catching or missing a bus that comes only twice an hour. I’m certainly not going to miss the Brazilian ritual of getting on a bus.

Bus stops in Belo are laid out about every hundred meters or so on main roads throughout the city. Some stops only serve several lines, and sometimes only one line in more remote areas of the city. Others, like most in the heart of downtown, serve 10 to 20 lines. These stops tend to be packed with people. When a desired bus approaches, those who want it to stop stick out their arm to signal it to do so.

The elements in this ritual that are certain: which lines stop at which stops, and how to make the bus stop.

The uncertain element: exactly where the bus will come to a stop, due to a combination of the driver’s speed and the volume of both bus and car traffic around the stop at any given time.

Thus, when worn brakes squelch a bus to a stop, chaos is destined to ensue. Let’s say I, along with 7 other strangers, want to get on bus 9410 at a major downtown stop in order to head back toward Coração Eurcarístico and PUC. The bus stops about 10 feet away from where the 8 of us are huddled in a bunch. From here, it’s survival of the fittest: whoever has the quickest reflexes that start her off toward meeting the bus door by the time the bus stops will more than likely get on first. Behind her the rest of us group up. And it really is group up, not line up. You don’t line up in Brazil to get on a bus. You get in a cluster and anarchically clamber into the door and up the steps. And if you want to assure your place in the cluster, you can’t give up an inch of space. If you do, that’s just a window for another to jump in front of you. Kindergarteners would cry if someone “cut in line” in such a way. Here, that’s not the case.

Just as with time, as I wrote in the post below, you can’t claim that Brazilians don’t have “respect” or “regard” for filling space in an orderly fashion. Order might be on the Brazilian flag, but it's not necessarily in their cultural vocabulary. Or, better, we don't share the same idea of order. Like time, space is a cultural impasse between Brazilians and Gringos. We Gringos like our personal bubbles, and we don’t like it when they’re burst. We march through elementary school hallways in straight lines, and we’re scolded if we jump out or cut in front of someone else. When we line up at a lunch counter or to get on a rollercoaster, we will deride and then shun someone with the nerve to jump ahead of those of us who had been patiently waiting.

The first shall always be first, and the last last in America. And perhaps not just physically speaking…

The orderliness of our persons translates into the orderliness we Gringos practice—generally—on the roads. If someone cuts you off, he’s apt to get a horn and a finger. Lane lines are strictly obeyed. It's illegal for motorcycles to pass between lanes of cars. We may not always come to complete stops at stop signs, but only crazies fling themselves halfway into an intersection before proceeding through or making a turn.


In the end, our behavior in going to great pains to order ourselves amongst ourselves within a given space, be it walking, driving, or riding a motorcycle, is based on our mutual respect for one another’s personal bubble, and on our shared manic fear of anarchy.

In Brazil, that personal bubble lies about a millimeter off the surface of your skin. Men and women great each other with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Both friends and strangers commonly touch you on the arm to emphasize a point their trying to make with you. When I first met my friend Adriano shortly after arriving, I thought that he was gay because of how much he touched my forearm while talking to me. Now that I've become acculturated, I touch him, and other friends, back. Beware friends back home…

Instead of being subconsciously focused entirely on not bursting another’s bubble or wasting time with the formality of lining up for anything, Brazilians are tuned into making efficient use of every last shred of space. That juicy inch in front of me, which I’ve grown up conceding the person just ahead of me, would go to waste if someone just to my left didn’t pounce in to claim it, whether at the bus stop, the copy counter, or the lunch line.

I won’t lie, it’s hard to keep my blood from boiling when this happens, accustomed as I am to my own country’s version of “order and progress.” Two deep breaths and reminding myself about the values of cultural relativism usually do the trick to calm me down. It’s not disrespect I’ve been the victim of. It’s ingenuity. Forming a line immediately before getting on a bus takes twice as long as the Brazilian method. We may actually be too stuffy on this one. The Brazilian way may not be pretty, but it appears to get results.

We're like the Red Coats who quickly learned that they couldn’t fight a war marching in a single-file line, beating drums and blowing bugles, after French and Indians hiding in trees picked them off mercilessly and with ease.

So, when it comes to space, Brazilians may have the edge. But there is one sense of spacial consciousness that I cannot give Brazilians even the slightest bit of cultural relativist sympathy: their practice of filling space vocally. I already wrote about this phenomenon in a previous post.

No other manifestation of my Brazilian culture shock has been so shocking as the impunity with which students converse with one another while a professor or a peer is addressing the class, or when grown adults overtly show that they’d rather not listen to you speak by talking amongst themselves. Professors may hold up a hand and shush the class if the noise gets out of control, but almost always to no avail. Even when one of my most vocal professors screamed over the din of a particular class, pleading for silence, not everyone took her seriously. Some still continued to talk in the back of the room, the so-called fundão. Of what they’re discussing I have no idea; I’m too busy straining my ears to tune into the one channel of Portuguese that actually matters.

Sometimes students will shush their peers when they have an interest in hearing what a prof or another student has to say. But then and only then. These students are just as likely to talk to one another when they don’t have the slightest interest in classroom material.

I am currently taking a course on the political economy of Africa with a professor who is half Greek, half American, yet conducts the course in nearly perfect Portuguese. I gleaned from him that he did his undergrad at Denver University, and so he’s most certainly used to the American classroom behavior of respecting your teachers with silence. If you don’t want to pay attention, you tune out, and the loss is yours alone. You don’t keep fellow students who do give a hoot from enjoying an atmosphere conducive to learning. Hence my empathy for Professor Yeros when he has to clap his hands and scold students a good half-dozen times per class for talking in the back.

Really, that vacuum of silence is to Brazilians students (not all of course, but certainly most, and, as I mentioned above, adults are just as apt to do this) as that inch-wide vacuum of space is for that person next to me wanting to get on the same bus. It has to be filled. Keeping quiet right next to your best friend in the fundão would be a waste of precious talking time. Indeed, life is short, so we should tell the ones we love as soon as we can that we love them. Or that it’s their turn to buy the beer this weekend.

Thus, because this behavior shares cultural roots with the practice of piloting your body around in space, I should probably just accept it as it is. Yet, I can't in all good consciousness do such a thing. I’m sorry, but just because you could do something like talk in the middle of class does not always mean that you should. That’s why we have no smoking signs in certain public areas. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, but don’t pollute my lungs along with yours. You smoke in designated areas. You talk to your friends when class is over. The classroom is meant for learning, and any talking should be directed to that purpose alone.

But then again, what do I know? I'm just a Gringo sem graça.

On Brazilian Time

There are some things in life that will always keep this planet a house divided.

Many of humanity's thousands of cultural wedges are petty and cause us to simply chide and tease each other: Coke vs. Pepsi, Iowa vs. Iowa State, the chicken vs. the egg. Others lead us to take up arms: pro-life vs. pro-choice, Israel vs. Palestine, Shiite vs Sunni.

And then there are those culturally-constructed hurdles that we can laugh and joke about when we find them in our way, but leave us nonetheless frustrated when we struggle to get over them. They are not so serious as to make us want to kill each other, but there are times when they can make even the most sensitive cultural-relativist harbor an ethnocentric thought or two. In a nutshell, whatever leads to a feeling of culture shock falls under this category.

Between Brazilians and Gringos there are several such barriers that make cultural rapprochement difficult if not virtually impossible. I plan to focus the next several posts on such impediments, starting today with one of the most evident: time.

The snag lies in our respective appraisals of a minute. We manic Americans inflate a minute's value. "Time is money" is the metaphor we live by. We "spend time" with friends. We "budget our time," lest we "waste it," and the most expensive of all minutes to spend or waste is a New York one.

In Brazil, you "passa tempo" (pass time), as if the act of moving from one minute to the next were as natural as breathing, and time itself as abundant as air. Indeed, for those looking for the antidote to the New York minute, Brazil in general, and the state of Bahia in particular, is the place to go. Two years ago when I studied in the city of Salvador (in Bahia) a bunch of us students ordered a round of beers at a bar on an island that our program was spending the weekend at. The entire island had been in a blackout all day (not a rare occurrence we found out), and we begged the server to find us some cold beers, not expecting at all that they would even exist due to the power outage. "Um minuto baiano," he lilted in reply, "Just a Bahian minute." About 10 minutes later we got our beers. And yes, amazingly, they were cold.

Good things come to those who wait. An axiom for cultural reconciliation?

In the U.S., everything starts when we say it starts: classes, work shifts, events, the end of happy hour. (The one exception of course is that bohemian jazz hole in every major city where a gig always starts 30 minutes late or more.) We get marked tardy if we arrive to class so much as 5 minutes late, and now businesses have made computers that will prevent a cubicle-dweller from logging in if she doesn't do it by 8am sharp. Should she get to her desk at 8:05, she'll have to confront her supervisor, who will log her in using a special supervisor's password before writing her up for being late to work.

In Brazil, on the other hand, your 7am class won't start until 7:15 on average, and some professors may not even show up until 7:30. A party doesn't start at 9:00, rather more like 10:00 or 10:15. This extra allotment (whoa, easy there, metaphor!) of time functions as something of a cushion, allowing people to collectively move relaxedly from one place and time to another in healthy accordance with their customary pace, as well as accounting for any unforeseen obstacles that could arise: traffic jams, running into an old friend, etc. This custom is not necessarily a conscious action. Sometimes Brazilians just lose track of time completely. One night I was out with Ricardo and some friends, and by the time midnight rolled around Ricardo turned to me and asked, "Hey Brett, what time is it?" When I told him midnight he was shocked that it wasn't in fact 11:00 as his internal clock had presumed.

Yet Brazilian tempo isn't uniform across the whole fabric of society, and this disparity can lead to conflict. Buses are a good example. A city bus in Belo Horizonte will follow its itinerary to the minute. During the week this isn't that big of an issue; if you miss your 8:10 bus due to an unhurried breakfast, you can still catch another in the next 8 to 15 minutes. On weekends, however, many buses only pass by certain stops once or twice an hour, behooving Brazilians to put a little more pep in their step, which can prove a to be struggle, as I experienced on a Saturday evening a little over a month ago.

Five friends and I had decided to go see a movie downtown (movies also are exempt from adhering to Brazilian time), and the only bus that would take us from near my apartment to the movie theater passed by only once every half hour. Approaching the time when the last bus that would get us to the theater on time was to pass by, my Brazilian friends were still lounging around, watching TV and chatting. I had to play the part of the annoying American: "We're gonna have to leave in 5 minutes," I announced to everyone. Really it was more like 10, but I adjusted accordingly. My friends got up leisurely and declared their need to brush their teeth and go to the bathroom before heading out. One friend casually talked to his brother while brushing his teeth, making the process last almost the entire 5 minutes I had "afforded" him (there's that metaphor again...). Finally walking out the door with what I thought was about a minute to spare before the bus would come - and with a 3 minute walk to the bus stop ahead of us - I seemed to be the only one worried that we would miss the bus and thus miss the movie. As it turned out, the bus arrived about 10 seconds after we did, and to my carefree friends it was as if this stroke of sheer luck was ordained by the natural and proper flow of time. Had we arrived 20 seconds later, it wouldn't have been our fault. "We were just following our natural rhythm; it's the bus company's fault for not offering more buses on a Saturday," my friends would have complained.

One would think that after a little over 7 months living amid this climate I would have grown accustomed to it. I sort of have. Old cultural customs are hard to break. Gringoisms still dominate my identity, preventing full Brazilianization. Take this past weekend for example.

Sunday, September 7th, Brazil celebrated its 186th Independence Day. My friend Adriano and I had planned to meet up downtown in the morning to take in the parade commemorating the holiday. Adriano told me to meet him at 8:30, which, of course, meant something closer to 8:45 or 9:00, said my Brazilianized side. Working backward from 8:45 or 9:00, my Gringo side came up with the following plan: Of the 4 buses that I could take from my neighborhood to downtown, I would have to find out which one stopped a few blocks from my place between 8:15 and 8:30, as the trip would take 30 to 40 minutes depending on the route (there it is again... for us trips take time, for Brazilians they demora (last) time). I consulted a timetable online and found the perfect plan: Bus 4111, stopping at 8:20, 35 minute ride. Brilliant!

In very Gringo fashion I left the apartment that morning at 8:10, giving myself plenty of time (yet again...) just to be sure I didn't miss my bus. It just so happened that as I was walking out of the entrance to my building, I saw the Sunday edition of the Estado de Minas newspaper lying on my neighbor's doorstep, and on the front page was an article about foreigners living in Minas Gerais. My impulsiveness kicked in; I just had to buy a copy and read about how my fellow foreign brethren were faring here. The nearest banco de jornal (kiosks on the street that sell a variety of newspapers and magazines) was about twice as far away as the nearest bus stop, yet it itself was only half a block from the next nearest stop. I calculated on the spot that I had enough time (...) to walk to the kiosk (6 or 7 minutes), pick up a paper, and walk to the nearby stop in time to catch Bus 4111.

By the time I got to the banco my watch read 8:18. I approached the owner of the stand, a short, squat, hunchbacked man with a scrunched face and dark yet graying comb-over, as he was undoing bundles of the day's newspapers: Folha de São Paulo, O Tempo, Super, and of course, "Um Estado de Minas por favor!"

"Um momentinho," came the little man's reply. Or at least that's how I perceived his mumbly , heavier-than-normal Mineiro accent. He proceeded to slowly lift up one bundle after another, read the invoice, comment on something incredulous about it, and arrange the papers on his stacks. I looked at my watch. 8:19. Within a few minutes 4111 would pass by, and although I was within 100 feet of the stop, I wouldn't be able to see the bus until it had continued on its way due to a building blocking my view of the stop. In other words, I wouldn't be able to wait for 1) my little friend to sell me a paper, or 2) the bus to show itself and prompt me to ditch the effort at the last second and run to catch it. I tried to take control of the situation:

"Could you just grab an Estado de Minas for me please? I'm kind of in a hurry to catch my bus."

In Brazil, "hurry" is a dirty word. Using it was a last resort. The little man shot a glance at me, shook his head, shrugged, and said something in completely unintelligible mineirês. Probably something to the effect of, "I'm going as fast as I can, let me do my job, I've been doing this the exact same way for years, you ain't gonna change me, missing the bus is your problem." I looked at my watch again. 8:20. If I bailed now the worst that would happen would be my not having a paper to read on the 40-minute bus ride, a paper that I could always pick up later. If I waited another minute, I risked missing the bus, a good chunk of the parade, and having an even grumpier newspaper stand owner on my hands. I gringoed out, erring on the side of caution. "Obrigado," I said, "I'll stop by later." An unintelligible goodbye shot back as I was already walking away.

Astonishingly, the bus didn't come for another 5 minutes. Thus, I probably could've waited for my paper, but then again, hindsight is 20-20.

Instead of reading about foreigners living in Minas, I used the 40-minute trip (one last metaphor sighting) to reflect on the life of this particular foreigner and what had just happened to him over the course of the last 5 minutes, the last hour, the last 7 months. In the U.S., treating a customer as this newspaper stand owner had treated me would be the first ticket to losing your newspaper stand. Time is money. Asking a customer to wait on you for the sake of routine amounts to wasting time, wasting money. Yet maybe there's something to be said about routine; if routine means following a healthy rhythm of life, and a healthy rhythm of life leads to greater longevity, then perhaps my not receiving my paper that morning was a good thing for reasons greater than that very moment: this man would live longer, he and his friends and family would be happier, as would the friends and family of his friends and family, and so on and so forth. Strange logic? Fuzzy math? Definitely. Such a philosophy is as foreign to us Americans as eating large lunches of meat, rice and beans and taking a sesta (Portuguese for siesta) afterward - we'd be wasting time eating anything more than a sandwich, an apple, a Coke and some chips, which would only keep us from stoically withstanding our 30-minute or hour-long lunch breaks. In Brazil, such cultural behavior may not be good for business, but it preserves the fabric of Brazilian society as well as (and perhaps better than?) our on-demand culture preserves ours.

As for my elaborate plan this morning, it was further proof that any Brazilianization of my Gringo mind was hopeless. While I had adapted to the habits of my hosts, it was that adaptation itself - or rather my particular calculating way of adapting - that kept me from truly being baptized Brazilian. To be perfectly native, I'd have to leave the house at 8:30 and show up at the bus stop with the vague hope that the right bus would soon come. If it didn't, I'd take solace knowing that one would come eventually, and that I'd get there when I got there.

I won't lie, I've missed American efficiency over the last 7 months. Following the like-clockwork rhythm of society, as if you yourself were a sprocket in the works, may seem cold and inhuman, especially after living this long outside of it. Yet that is my home, and I could never be parted from it.

I think we've reached the time when the sterility of pure post-modern cultural relativism has become fruitless and inutile. We can deconstruct a culture and say that it's different from ours because of x, y, and z. But to what end? To simply be satisfied with the knowledge that it's different? Maybe academics can afford that luxury, but the rest of us need to understand that in this ever more connected world there is so much we can not only learn from one another, but allow to change one another for the sake of improving our own societies and strengthening the ties that bind one culture to the next. It would be easy for us Americans to say that Brazilians need to respect the value of a minute if they ever hope to advance economically to our level. I'm not going to deny that that's not true. But what we haughty Americans must also do is respect the Brazilian value of a minute. The efficiency of our society doesn't have to come with a more stressful marking of time, nor the heart disease that follows. Does that mean allowing students to show up late to class should they choose? Not necessarily. If anything, we show up on time for class out of respect more for education than for the sake of being on time. What I believe we can take from the Brazilian concept of time is the ability to laugh and be happy even when efficiency breaks down. When traffic makes us late for work. When it takes us a minute longer than normal to get our morning pick-me-up from our local coffeeshop. We shouldn't get mad at ourselves when finishing the last page of that gripping novel makes us miss our bus and "sets us back" 15 minutes.

Time may indeed be money. But it can be so much more. It can be the key to a happier, healthier life, if used wisely. If used Brazilianly.