A month in Brazil

For years I had thought about visiting Brazil. Finally, at the age of 73, I headed there for a stay, Aug. 6-Sept. 5, 2011.

Brazil was different from other Latin countries I’d visited in that you had to obtain a visa prior to getting on an airplane (Chile lets you pay for the visa when you land in Santiago) and you had to have a definite destination which could be verified by the authorities.

Checking what schools were available for studying Portuguese, I found that a school in Maceió was the cheapest at $2,000 for four weeks, including room and board with a local family.

I downloaded the requirements for a visa from Crazy Monkey Passport Services (14781 Memorial Dr., Ste. 112, Houston, TX 77079; 832/715-0693), and the school e-mailed me the information needed to complete the application.

I filled out the forms and mailed them to Crazy Monkey with two US Postal Service Money Orders, one for $160 made out to the Brazilian Consulate and one for $99 (for rapid handling of the visa application) made out to Crazy Monkey. Within a week I had a 10-year visa. The folks at Crazy Monkey are excellent!

I had used the National Registration Center for Study Abroad (Box 1393, Milwaukee, WI 53201; 414/278-0631) to find the Maceió school. They were extremely helpful at each step of the process and advised that a driver would pick me up at the Maceió airport to take me to my host family.

I paid about $1,700 to American Airlines for the round-trip ticket from El Paso, Texas. In Dallas, before boarding the direct 10-hour flight to São Paulo, I bought $100 worth of Brazilian reals, in case I needed cash.

As my plane circled the airport at São Paulo, I looked down on what appeared to be a veritable sea of small houses all jammed up against each other. I had never thought that so many people could live in one place at the same time.

On arrival, I got through Immigration, picked up my bags and rolled them to the domestic terminal in the same building.

The airport terminal at São Paulo is one of the most chaotic places I have ever been. Also, I had no assistance from American Airlines (AA), and no one in the terminal spoke English or Spanish. Strangers helped me find the desk of my connecting airline, GOL Airlines, which was on a different floor.

AA also provided no guidance nor even any paper for the GOL flight. Luckily, I had the original printout that I made when I purchased the flight, and it indicated the GOL flight number.

At the GOL desk, I showed a copy of my AA itinerary and they took my bags and handed me a ticket. I boarded the 737, and about 3½ hours later I was in Maceió.

There was no driver from the school waiting for me at the airport, but the terminal was clean and calm by even US standards.

I found a taxi kiosk, showed the clerk an address, paid about $30 in reals and entered a very clean, air-conditioned, new taxi driven by a very friendly gentleman. Because it was Sunday, there was almost no traffic and we arrived in about 30 minutes at an apartment building, my home for the next four weeks.

I had a private room adjacent to the bathroom, and all of the appliances and fixtures worked perfectly (always a concern in South America). The place was immaculate.

The head of the house was Esmeralda, a very sweet widow of about 65 years of age, who lived with her son. Normally, when I travel, I eat only breakfast with the host family, but Esmeralda’s food was so good that I also had dinner with them every night.

Our apartment was three blocks from my school, Fast Forward Language Institute (Rua Dep. José Lages, 507, Ponta Verde, CEP 57035-330, Maceió, AL, Brazil; phone + 55 82 3327 5213, fax 82 3337 2737), which also has a school in São Paulo.

I went to class every morning from 8 to 12. My teacher, Marcia Vanessa Dos Santos de Souza, was a 24-year-old with a smile that could light up Manhattan. Perpetually in motion, she was also the school coordinator.

Unfortunately, on the second Friday she announced that as of the following Monday she would no longer be my teacher. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement.

My next teacher was a very nice lady, but it took me three days to begin to understand her Portuguese (she was a southerner), and by that time I was not the serious student I had been for the first two weeks.

In the beach area of Maceió, everywhere I looked they were erecting 10- to 15-story condominiums. They will sell for between $300,000 and $1 million. These buildings all looked very nice, but the construction worried me. In none of these facilities did I see any evidence of supporting steel reinforcement. They were just stacking stone on top of stone.

A mile from the beach, the people were dirt poor.

It was difficult to find anyone in town who spoke anything other than Portuguese. It was other foreigners who knew English who introduced to me to one special place.

With my home in the Texas desert, adjacent to Juárez, Mexico, I can’t begin to tell you how great it was to spend every afternoon in Maceió 10 feet from the Atlantic Ocean, sitting in my favorite restaurant on the beach Ponta Verde, Clube dos Pirates, reading Brazilian newspapers (if you can read Spanish, Portuguese is easy), drinking Heineken beer and eating calda de feijoa (bean soup).

RALPH McCUEN
El Paso, TX

More from Ralph next month.