Speaking of funny, I hope everyone read the comments for the previous post. Gisela's father left a classic joke about quebra molas. Which is not surprising. Not just because quebra molas are inherently funny, but Carlos has such an unbelievably vast repertoire of jokes he could have his own circus tent, where people try to stump him with impossible subjects. "Toasters!" "Lee Iacoca!" I'm sure he knows a joke with both toasters and Lee Iacoca.
But what he left unstated in the quebra molas joke, because it goes without saying if you're Brazilian, is that the butt of the joke, the guy who reads the "Slow... Quebra Molas" (remember it reads "Slow... Breaks Springs") sign and thinks "Well, in that case, I'll go fast", is Portuguese. Brazilians make Portuguese jokes like we make Polish jokes, except they make thousands more of them. According to Brazilians, the Portuguese are completely immune to nuance. Everything is to-the-letter literal. Which does make for excellent humor. My favorite so far is the guy who thinks his rear blinker isn't working. He asks his Portuguese friend to go behind the car and check it. "OK, is it working?" "Yes... wait, no... wait, yes... no... yes... no..."
It seems to me to be slightly against the grain for the colonized to mock their former colonizers. You usually imagine the French condescending to North Africans, or the Spanish to Mexicans, or Brits to the better part of the globe, but here it's reversed. And it's not just some kind of archaic vaudeville format. It's a simple matter of fact that Portuguese are thick like that. I was shooting in an artist's studio last week and one of her assistants was Portuguese and, even with my remedial portuguese, I could tell they were just murdering the poor guy. Even the mention of his name, Hugo Maria (very Portuguese, that), makes Gisela crack up.
But it can also be a case of the apple not falling too far from the tree, the Portuguese leaving behind more than just a quirky romance language. Last night, Sunday night, we arrived in Ouro Preto, one of the historical cities of the Estrada Real, the old route the Portuguese used to carry out the gold and silver that they were finding in the Brazilian interior. In fact, Minas Gerais, the state where Ouro Preto and much of the Estrada Real is, translates literally to "General Mines" - to keep themselves from being confused, I suppose.
Ouro Preto is a beautiful colonial city with incredible baroque architecture. It's built into a complex of steep hillsides so that the cobblestone streets, and the accompanying white-washed building facades, are forced up and down in severe scissor angles.
The prize attractions of Ouro Preto are 10 baroque churches, almost all of them designed and decorated by Aleijadinho. Ouro Preto was Brazil's first UNESCO World Heritage site as a result. The interior of the churches are the real draw, spectacularly ornate and encrusted in gold and silver. One nave alone holds the largest collection of gold and silver in all of Brazil - 1000 pounds of gold, 900 of silver.
But you'll have to settle for these exterior shots. Because every church in Ouro Preto is closed on Monday. The entire city is basically closed on Monday. We missed lunch because it was Monday. So we came to visit Ouro Preto on a Monday... very Portuguese.
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