Logbook 5 - Porto Alegre
The end of my trip, trying to escape the winter cold, and the emotional impact of travelling is intense.
Graham Douglas
I took the bus here mainly to escape the cold weather, thinking of going on to Florianopolis, but in the end, I ran out of time and just stayed here for a week.
The journey by bus from Montevideo required a passport check and I must have been in a suspicious mood because I decided to present mine in person instead of handing it in to the bus driver. So, at about 1 AM, half asleep and impressionable, I accompany the driver to the passport control, and they are not happy. The agent immediately starts shouting at me for not staying on the bus, then grabs my passport and having checked it he raises his hand above his head to its fullest extent, before slamming the stamp down on my passport with as much force as he can muster. For one surreal fraction of a second, I get a very small hint of what it might be like to live under a dictatorship.
Crossing to the Brazilian side of the border things could hardly be more different, friendly chats with the border agents about where I might be going, do I like Brazil, “Er yes very much so far”. Back on the bus it is time to sleep, and in the morning the Uruguayan steward is friendly as if he wants to apologise for the frontier experience, and we get to talking about the closed border with Argentina at Fray Bentos. He tells me that it is all about politics of the stubborn kind. There is a dispute about the Argentinians building a paper mill and polluting the river; he says that the Swedes sent some scientists, and they found no pollution, but that blocking the bridge is really more about spoiling the tourist business in Uruguay.
Arriving in Porto Alegre early morning, my first impression is of a rather run down metropolis, with flyovers and industry and a port. Next to the bus station is the tourist office where I go first for a map and some advice. The lady is very friendly and speaks in that lovely lilting Portuguese accent of the region, as if there has been some Welsh influence.
This is not how my Brazilian friends in Lisbon speak because they are from Sao Paulo or Rio, but it still makes me feel almost at home, and at the same time reminds me that I am actually a very long way from home - the way unconscious needs kick in sometimes in the most unexpected ways when you are away from home a long time. I have never been a great drinker of Coca Cola, and I remember my surprise when I had been several months in Sudan teaching English and we were marking exams on the roof of a hotel, when I suddenly had this almost childish desire for Coca Cola when I saw it on the menu. Why? I think because it was a symbol of something familiar even though a different part of my brain was not pleasured by its taste. I guess this is how people suddenly freak out with girlfriends or with officialdom to everyone’s surprise after long periods of cultural dislocation.
Anyhow the lady is explaining that I should avoid the city’s market area after dark, and then which bus to take to visit the German villages. I have already spotted a bus that goes at a more convenient time, and she says, “sim mas ele vai pingando”. A word I have never heard but which I immediately understand thanks to the Pingo Doce supermarket in Lisbon: it is a dropping bus that lets people on and off at every little village.
Porto Alegre makes a strong impression - after a few days of doing what I often do abroad, just wandering through the places where people are, and finding a juice bar to watch the street from. One night I am walking through the bus station, ignoring the lady’s advice, passing a drunk who seems quiet sitting against the wall, but he suddenly jumps up punching me in the stomach as he moves to the next platform and collapses once again. Like a cat hit by a car that can still leap a wall we have surprising reserves of energy close to death.
The market wakes up before 7am and keeps going usually about 12 hours, so you tend to see the same faces every day when you walk through, and somehow in Brazil I feel much more connected: life is public, in your face and at your elbow, your reactions register in others the way theirs do in you, people talk and not just in order to sell. The ordinariness of work is my enduring impression and the ordinariness of emotion, and with it the tiredness that comes from endless daily repetition. Porto Alegre is a harsh noisy place in business terms, but I sense that this is capitalist reality in Brazil, and the market is like a factory machine that consumes its workers a little more each day. Time passing is the root of all human sadness, slowly we all wear away, wear down and wear out.
Why I feel this here I don’t know, because the garbage recyclers who go out every evening with a horse and cart in the Microcentro of Buenos Aires are surely in worse condition, and Argentine people are friendly enough, maybe it is just my emotional cycle reaching its monthly peak and it happens to be here.
An interesting concept that, to travel with time in mind, the internal rhythms of our emotions. If you want an intense appreciation of a city, keep a diary until you are familiar with your emotional highs and lows, and then make your plans. In fact, it will be that way in future, and enlightened bosses will not miss the opportunity to improve our productivity. There is already a new science called Chronobiology, waiting for its collective Eureka moment to burst into the public consciousness. Time is the fabric of our internal experience as Kant noted, and as he didn’t say, the conversion of time into space is the experience of labour, the tyranny of the clock under the factory system replacing the lived experience of a flow of entropy through our consciousness.
These are seriously beneficial things too though, drugs work more effectively at certain times of the day and heart disease is influenced by the variations in the earth’s magnetic field. Well, if you don’t believe me just open this little window in cyberspace curated by Franz Halberg: www.scholarpedia.org/article/chronobiology.
Porto Alegre has two interesting museums, one for science which is instructive and interactive, even if not very modern in appearance, and a city museum which had an exhibition on the history of slavery. The statistic that I found most surprising was that only 4 to 5% of African slaves were taken to the US, the vast majority ended up in the Caribbean and South America, principally Brazil. It seems surprising because the history and literature of Civil Rights, and of Blues Music is so associated with the US, but the figures tell a different story.
The square next to the market is also full of feelings, from the local musician singing and selling CDs, a woman offering company for 10 Reais, and especially the family who are singing hymns while blessing members of the public with a laying-on of hands: Karaoke with a religious punch. I also notice their nice 4-wheel drive in the background.
On Sundays in winter the whole town comes out and it is nice to walk among people beside the river (heavily polluted) and drink Quentao, the mulled wine being sold from stalls, and to visit the converted power station which, a bit like a small Tate Modern, now houses an art gallery.
Buenos Aires in the Snow
On my return I have just a couple of days in BA before the return flight and I visit the small museum of Spanish Culture, which has some of the most beautiful carved wood furniture I have seen anywhere. When I come out for a coffee across the road I can’t get served because it is snowing for the first time in 90 years, and all the waitresses are in the doorway taking pictures of it.
Buenos Aires - again the familiar sound of the buses that wheeze from their airbrakes as they pass – or Montevideo on a Sunday when one person in three on the street is walking along drinking hot Mate tea from their little metal cans with tubes, that look like a musical instrument - or Porto Alegre with its emotional intensity. I could make my home in any one of these places, and it would grow on me, and I would grow into it. For now, I am going back to London and to Lisbon, but this Europe that is not really Europe across the ocean leaves a deep impression.