chopp-chopp

Coming fast and furious now...

Last day of our trip, which I can't, in good conscience, call a vacation. Were that the case, I could reasonably expect to feel relaxed, refreshed, recharged... I don't. I'm exhausted. A lot of that is due to the usual, olympiad calendar of events for an expatriot returning home (my wife). There are always too many people to catch up with, parties to attend, and doctor's appointments to make in the time available, no matter how long the visit. It's been a grueling schedule for her and, other than the doctors of course (whom I have no interest in seeing, thanks), for me as well.

In the interest of journalistic integrity, full diaristic disclosure, and general protestant guilt, I have to admit there have been aggravating factors that have compounded this spent feeling I have. Namely, booze. Eastern europeans, the japanese, Winston Churchill... they've got nothing on Brazilians. As the world knows, they like a party. And they like a drink. Or 10. The best evidence of this is the national cocktail, the caipirinha. Which is mashed fruit (most traditionally, lime, but any tropical fruit will do), sugar, and the mind-numbing, lid-drooping Brazilian rum called cachaça. Cachaça makes tequila seem like a shot of wheatgrass. One caipirinha is bliss. Two narrows your field of vision radically. Three and your sleepwalking. Or running on incoherently to your future in-laws, as I did on my maiden trip to Brazil two years ago.

But other than the rainbow of flavors of the caipirinha, Brazil is still blessedly free from the cocktail fads of the US. (Though it's not for long - the Milk & Honey crew from NYC have opened up and outpost in São Paulo). Drinks are taken in fantastically old-fashioned looking bars called botequim (they all seemed to near-replicas of one original, very popular spot - sprouting like Original Ray's pizzerias all over the city). The most notable features to the undiscerning gringo seem to be lots of dark wood, ceramic tiles, sharply dressed waiters, and seemless division between indoors and outdoors. They all look very similar, and alluring, to me.

I'm still working on discerning the good from not so good, but some uniquely, Brazilian features: number one, the chopp (pronounced "showpy" - easy language, this portuguese). It's what we know as a draft beer. But one, were it poured this way in an english pub, would get the bartender beat down immediately I imagine. The two defining elements of the chopp are that it hovers just a hair above the temperature when alcohol would naturally turn to solid ice, and it has an enormous collar. Half the glass is foam. Intentionally. In fact, it was only on my most recent visit to Espirito Santo, that I observed that the foam is poured from it's very own tap. The glass is first filled with icey cold cerveja. And then topped off by the special foam tap. Rumor has it there are bars that serve an entire glass of foam. I don't understand it frankly, but the chopp goes down plenty quick, so I'm not complaining.

Another thing about bars like Espirito Santo, if you order one chopp, you're in for the long haul. Because you never, ever have to order another one. Waiters walk the tables with platters of chopps and before you've even finished half your current glass, you've suddenly got another. Each glass comes with it's own coaster, and at the end of the evening, they count the coasters, which you're usually in no shape to count yourself.

Another favor they do you in the botequims, is serve really good food, which at least helps your counting skills hang in for a little while longer. At Espirito Santo, the house special is the prego. A simple steak sandwich with melted cheese. I don't know if it's the bottomless chopps, but it's got to be one of the best steak sandwiches on the planet.

At São Cristovão, another looks-like-it's-been-there-100 years botequim that hews to a futebol theme, we had the acarajé, and afro-brazilian specialty from the northeast. This requires a little manual dexterity so best ordered before your stack of coasters gets to high. It starts with a fried ball of cornmeal that you split open and then pack with a series of various pastes, that I'm none the wiser as to what they were, and top with a whole dried shrimp.

After a couple of these constructions and quite a few more chopps, the next inevitablity is rounds of the classic brazilian bar game, palitinho (toothpick). It's deceptively simple, perfect for hustling drunk gringos. Everyone starts with 3 palitinhos and puts 1, 2, 3, or none inside a closed fist. Then it's a deductive game of strategy. Each player tries to guess how many palitinhos there are total within all the closed fists on the table. He (or she) who guesses correct gets rid of one of their palitinhos. And the next round begins. Whoever's the last one holding the very last palitinho is a gringo.

cegueira

Right... where were we? In Minas...

Besides the outside of some amazing churches, the best thing we saw in Minas was a remarkable art collection, open to the public in a kind of sculpture park format, except that it's more a collection of installation art than sculpture.  In any case, it's an amazing destination, the personal vision of a Brazilian metals magnate, Bernardo Paz, called either CACI or Inhotim, depending on who you ask - Gisela, or everybody else.

If you're going to visit Inhotim, you have to really visit Inhotim.  It's not a quick excursion from São Paulo. Or from Rio.  If you're basing your Brazilian holiday in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais (and third largest city in Brazil), then, sure, it's a day trip.  An hour and a half's drive to the small town of Brumadinho.  And, after the amazing food I had in Minas, I'm certainly not going to dissuade anyone from setting up camp in Minas...

The most immediately impressive thing about Inhotim is the landscape.  It's surrounded on all sides by lush, green hills, and the grounds themselves are all designed by the legendary Brazilian landscape designer, Roberto Burle Marx.  The man is a genius.  Probably best known by gringos for his design of the public walkways along the beaches of Rio, particularly the iconic paving stones, his gift is to turn the whole weird catalog of tropical flora into a modernist palette, creating from plants the landscape analog to the distinct sultry modernism of Brazil's great architects (Niemeyer, Mendes da Rocha, Bo Bardi).

Even if there wasn't an incredible contemporary art collection, Burle Marx' landscape would be worth the price, and distance, of admission.

What was interesting about the art of Inhotim is that most of it is not, as I mentioned, sculpture, which you would assume is the form best celebrated in a wandering landscape setting.  Instead of sculpture, Inhotim peppers the landscape with architectural pavilions, each of which is built to primarily showcase whole installations.  Some pavilions are in fact solely dedicated to an individual artist.  It is the kind of art that you always thought was "uncollectable", something which only museums or entire municipalities could exhibit. Which it is, unless, of course, you are a metals magnate.  But thanks god for metals magnates that have this kind of bright idea for their profits.

As with the churches, you were going to have to settle for exteriors and flowery description because photos aren't allowed inside the pavilions.  I never quite understand these restrictions - it seems to me that, as with free downloads of music, trafficking of amateur photos of these works would only serve to advance the celebrity of the artist, to the benefit of both artist and collectors.  And, more obviously, amateur photos are never, ever going to come close to simulating the experience of experiencing these works.  Even really good photos (the kind I would have taken for sure...) would merely encourage gringos and brazilians alike to make the pilgrimage.  But, since we weren't as fortunate as the NY Times to run into Sr. Paz on our visit and I couldn't therefore engage him in a spirited discussion, I had to come up with a clever way around the embargo.  Thus, some of the highlights of Inhotim... enjoy:

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster:

Janet Cardiff:

Janine Antoni:

Doris Salcedo:

Olafur Eliasson:

Cildo Meireles:

Helio Oiticica e Neville D'Almeida:

a portuguesa

This adds nothing to the insights of being a gringo in Brazil, but it's too good not to share. Gisela just checked the Google Analytics again and here is the search term that one person entered at Google when they found my blog: "my wife is charming to everyone but me"...

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.

broken springs

For anyone who's thinking of driving in Brazil, here's a handy tip: they are crazy for speedbumps (lombadas) here. Seriously, there are millions of them. Which, in the city, is fair enough, even if it simply means they just go through brake pads that much faster.  Most Paulistas, I've noticed, drive pretty much like they're descended from Napolitanos, which, not surprisingly, many are.  If yours happens to be the driveway immediately adjacent to the lombada, I guess your a wee bit less likely to be flattened by traffic when pulling your car out - for everyone else it's a crapshoot.

But we just spent the better part of the day driving through the countryside of Minas Gerais, an interior state of Brazil that borders both São Paulo (state) and Rio de Janeiro (state).  And here, on what appeared like fairly remote country roads to me, the speedbump seemed like it might just be counterproductive.  Because when you're enjoying the ups and downs and rights and lefts of the idyllic farm country of Minas as it whizzes by your windows at 80 km/hr, a quebra molas, as it's called around here (literally - no joke - "breaks springs"), will do a lot more than break your shocks if you don't notice to slam on the brakes in time.  It's a small wonder you don't see the occasional Volkswagen wedged into the upper fronds of a palm tree, having been ollied there by an unforeseen quebra molas.

And they're not exactly what we would call "well-marked".  There are not, for instance, signs posted a few kilometers in advance that say something as mindful as "Do Your Coxis a Favor and Slow Down Now".  Instead you learn to quickly recognize this roadside symbol ahead in the distance:

Which, roughly translated, means "There is a Quebra Molas Right... HERE!".

comfortable shoes

We were in Rio for 4 days. That was the real reason for the dead blog air. And I was working even, which feels nice to pull off, international shooting. Fortunately camera menus and such are still in English down here...

Although she's born and raised Paulista, most of Gisela's family is actually from Rio. And when we arrived in Rio, we had a big lunch with her grandparents (vovó e vovô, two of the hardest words to differentiate, or even pronounce, in the portuguese language). Her grandparents are themselves from the Northeast, which is a little like being from the South in the US, as far as remarkable hospitality and family warmth go. And the eating, nossa senhora... It was lunch on a Monday and we might as well have been having Christmas dinner - roast turkey, bacalhau, rice, farofa, salads, orange cake, pudim de leite, ice cream, etc., etc. Plate after plate of delicious food. And I had to beg to stop.

We were met at the door, straight from the airport, by Gisela's grandfather (vovô, for those taking the correspondence course in portuguese) who told us to drop our bags because we had to quickly come help him pick out a gift for a gringo who was just learning the nuances of Brazil. Which was me of course. So we went to the Havaianas store on the corner - the entire shop full of havaianas, and only havaianas, growing like weeds from the walls, the ceiling, every surface covered with flip-flops.

Sure you can buy Havaianas anywhere these days, even New York. But Gisela's got me hooked on the Tradicionais - white soles and baby blue straps - and these are not so easy to find. She tells me they were the original and only style, worn by everyone from doctors to construction workers. No idea if this is true but I love the thought of the guys building the six zillion new buildings going up in São Paulo climbing 40 story scaffolding in nothing but flip-flops. Maybe they make steel-toe versions for them... Dig me and my tradicionais (Brigado, avós!):

Because I was working, we did nothing touristic in Rio this trip. And it rained, pretty much non-stop. Even still, Rio de Janeiro is the most insanely beautiful city I've ever seen. Whatever pictures you've seen, or stories you've heard, it's better. Much better. My favorite spot in the city is the Jardim Botânico (Botanical Garden), which, true to form in Rio, has to be one of the funkiest botanical gardens anywhere. And, finally... monkeys...

maintenance

Gisela has reminded me that if I don't post regularly the audience will dry up.  I thought every four or five days would be plenty regular (and frankly more than anyone could stand), but the collective attention span of the internet is mighty brief I guess.  What with all the choice options competing for your eyeballs - like this, or this.  I am not going to even try and compete with this.

Gisela knows these things because a) she's a professional b) she's younger than me and c) she's internet wizard enough to have installed Google Analytics on my blog (in my blog? under my blog? As if portuguese weren't hard enough...).  This means that I can get exacting demographic details about you people.  Or rather Gisela can tell me the exacting details - I still have no idea how to access it.

It's pretty alarming actually, and puts paid to the idea that the internet is "anonymous".  I can pretty well tell who's reading and who isn't (and what you've just been reading - that should make you nervous...).  Some interesting details: of the hundred-some-odd visitors, 13 are in the US.  Which means my amusing observations are just like soccer, or futebol - a phenomenon everywhere but the States.  That's like 2% readership on my home turf.  Or basically just my parents.  Gisela also pointed out that the average length of the visit for US clickers is 3 minutes, versus 1 minute for the rest of the world.  So at least they're actually reading, my parents.  I think everyone else gets as far as the fancy picture at the top.  All of which is not so encouraging, but I will soldier on in the face of all this virtual yawning.

The extent of my own savvy for assessing internet metrics is to just type "everyone should have a brazilian wife" into google and see if it even shows up.  It doesn't.  But the top result that Google returns is for mail order brides from Brazil.  So now anyone can have a brazilian wife.

Which leads me to say something about the title... I quickly came up with it under intense pressure from my wife who was creating the blog in a real hurry.  So not a lot of thought went into it is my point. But it's been interesting to gauge the reactions, roughly organizing into four groups. Obviously it's big hit in Brazil, for the average Brasileiro who is, or will be, married to a Brasileira.  They concur.

I have also learned that this blog (or basically just the title) is being used (entirely without my authorization I want to stress) as an instrument of none-too-subtle pressure against other gringos who are currently dating, but not yet married to, Brazilians abroad.  My brother can hopefully help out with the technical terminology for verb tenses, but I believe in this specific instance it's being read as (or, more accurately, read by brazilians to their gringo boyfriends) the imperative.  As in: "You should have a Brazilian wife.  Agora."

Then I've met a few Brazilians who are married, but to a gringa.  I can tell they're amused, but also a little annoyed by my precocity.  I also imagine that, as married life can occasionally be especially in a multinational couple, they have probably thought to themselves at some point "Nossa, I should have married a Brazilian wife."  That's like the V8 tense...

And then the other 13 readers... the Americanos.  I suspect the title sounds a bit boastful.  And, é verdade, I am very proud of minha mulher.  But, as in the similar case above, there are also those times, very few and far between to be sure, where I mean to say "You should try having a brazilian wife"...

But, of course, most of the time it's all água de coco and samba...

Sunday Night

At the risk of having my own citizenship revoked so soon after Gisela was let in to the US, or at the very least not being welcomed back by Mayor Mike, I have more traitorous news. The pizza in São Paulo really is good. I'm not going to be an idiot and say it's better than in New York - the wedding thing was for a good laugh (and curry Brazilian favor - I'm here for two more weeks), but taking sides in things truly religious, such as pizza, only ever ends in tears.

I do remember nearly choking when Gisela first told me she wished most of all she could find a pizza in New York as good as she missed from São Paulo. We hadn't known each other long, but she hadn't given any indication of being totally unhinged prior to that. I mean if she had been from Italy I might have understood. But who'd even ever heard of Brazilian pizza?

And when I asked, just to humor her, what made it better, she said "It's just different. And better." 2 and a half years later and on Sunday night, the night Paulistas, or at least the Gueiros', eat pizza, I was craving pizza. So, at the very least it's habit forming then. But I have to agree - again, not that it's better than New York's - but that it's just different. Totally different, in fact. It's still dough, cheese, tomato sauce. Round. But different. I went tonight with the forensic intentions, but I'm none the wiser as to what exactly is going on.



For one thing, the place they always take me, Camelo Pizzaria, is a classic. Kitschy classic - with a dropped ceiling, anti-mood lighting, and occassional tile murals depicting cartoonish Arab scenes. Half the allure of the pizza may in fact be Camelo. I think it's cool like Rao's is cool. But I've never been to Rao's, so it's cool like my idea of Rao's. Which is probably cooler than Rao's actually is. Camelo's is like that - one of those places where you imagine people who you think are cooler than they actually are, would hang out. Like Dean Martin. Frank Sinatra loved Brazil. And I'm imagining he would hang out at Camelo. So you get my point.

About the pizza, I can't get all chowhoundy. But in broadstrokes: the dough is thinner; the sauce is thinner, and rosy pink, so maybe it's raw; the toppings are applied in mountains. Our order: Calabresa (sausage & onions), Margherita, and Argentina (toasted garlic). The Argentina is genius - it's like a carpet of garlic. Everything brown in that second photo - garlic.



And I've yet to see corn on a brazilian pizza. Even though that's the preferred way to dismiss it among gringos. São Paulo has 800,000 Japanese people, so that's who the corn is for. Then there's the cheese. That's where all the mystery resides. Risking monotony - it's different. It's still mozzarella. But it's kind of sourer. And there's tons of it. Strictly fork and knife.

It's possible the best thing about brazilian pizza, or at least Camelo, doesn't have to do with pizza at all. It's Frango à Passarinho. Which translates roughly to Chicken Mini-Bird Style. I have no idea what that means either. But it's rough chunks of chicken fried with garlic. A lot of garlic. The Argentina is a light sprinkling of garlic compared to the Frango.



Like I said, I'm not taking sides in this one. Which might be as useless as not taking sides in the health care debate. But at present, my craving is satiated, my hangover is gone and I'm breathing fire...

noivos

Went to my first Brazilian wedding last night. It's not really all that different. The bride doesn't ride in on an elephant. They don't fire rifles into the air. No monkeys involved in anyway despite what you may have read. All night, though, everyone kept saying "It's much better than American weddings, neh?" Maybe they think at every American wedding you have to take a number at City Hall like we did. Or else, it's always like in the movies when one of the bride or groom decides to cancel at the last minute.

One difference in Brazil is the bride always arrives an hour late. Which is why Brazilians always miss the ceremony at our super punctual American weddings and wonder what happened. But the ceremony itself looked very familiar. It's true the priest could have been invoking winged fairies during the ceremony which would have been different, but I couldn't ask him "Repete devagar, por favor" so I'm guessing it was pretty standard text.


Besides the wedding party being arranged in much less martial, boy-girl order (and being allowed to dress themselves instead of wearing bride or groom team uniforms), the most noticeable difference I could see was that children seem to play a strangely intimate, intermediary role.


As far as I could tell, those kids just wanted a better view. They weren't bearing rings or flowers or turning the pages for the priest. Just leaning on the altar imagining themselves getting married. Or joining the church.

The other thing you'll have noticed is the prime positions allowed the paparazzi. The children were at least rapt with attention - the stage was crawling with cameras. By my count there were five photographers and videographers scampering around the altar, but they were bobbing and weaving so fast it was hard to be sure. Posterity takes priority clearly.

Where Brazilians really improve on matrimonial tradition of course is after the ceremony. The party is miles better than we can even conjure. And once the ceremony's over, the party is on. There's no highly choreographed order to the proceedings. No reception line. No seating plan (which you have to figure means far fewer fights between mother and daughter). No Wedding Planner. There's just food spread everywhere. Cocktails being passed on trays like at a casino. And the dancing starts immediately.

And that of course is why Brazilian weddings are better. There's no bad music and there's no bad dancers. I'm sure there are both - bad music and bad dancers - at Brazilian weddings. But it's like the minor and major leagues - the worst Brazilian wedding music and worst Brazilian wedding dancers are assuredly better than the best American wedding music and American wedding dancers. I was the September call-up, just happy for a brief stay in the Show... Another excellent reason to have a Brazilian wife... and a Brazilian wedding...

Speaking of Aliens

Blog chronology is a bit awkward, no? My brother could write a post or 40 about this. But that artful transition in the title, Speaking of Aliens, as I was last post, works much better in book format. Or better still when they make the movie.

As to aliens... Gisela is now a resident one. We managed to pass our greencard interview with flying colors. Sort of. My portuguese is coming along slowly, and it often takes repeating things before I can comprehend them. I now know "O Thomas respondeu tudo errado" cold. It's not true that I answered everything wrong. Everyone should have a brazilian wife because that kind of impassioned exaggeration is mostly very charming. And also because that charm often more than compensates for when I'm not exactly helping our cause. It is true that I was the weak link in our team.

In my defense, they really tighten your strings before hitting you with the interrogation. There's a well-worn sign posted at the counter when you check in for your appointment that says "On average it is a 2-3 hour wait ONCE you check in for your appointment". Someone had pencilled in "It's True" right underneath that. Everywhere else you look: "No Eating, No Drinking, No Cell Phones".

And it's only fluorescent lighting in the waiting room, which means there are 2 or 3 tubes up there somewhere in the ceiling that are throwing off their last photons or whatever and making, in this case, a very sinister buzzing noise that sounds like an arc welder is being put to inappropriate use. Added to this (and who knows if this was all just part of the funhouse script) but we ran into another lawyer on our way up and he just gave us one bad prediction after another, warning us especially about an Officer Green.

So we sit there for hours, nervous, starving, thirsty, a total communication blackout, trying to rub the white noise out of ears, and everytime we think they're going to call our name, we have to panic "Christ, is that Officer Green?" By 3:30 I was ready to tell them where Osama bin Laden is.

Finally an Officer Kustarova does call us in, and she's young, Russian, all smiles and polite. But as soon as we're seated she's drilling me with questions. No "Let me just take a minute to review your file" or nothing. "When did Gisela first arrive here? Under what Visa was she travelling? Did she tell you why she was coming to the United States? At what point exactly did she enroll in school? Do you know when she applied for the student visa? Did she apply here or in Brazil? Is she currently working? Was she working while enrolled in school?"

After the CIA techniques in the lobby all I could think was - just tell them the truth and maybe they won't hurt us. So I did. Which caused Gisela to turn blue. My answers weren't really jibing with what we had filled in the application. My wife was understandably assuming that the Border Police were now on their way.

Officer Kustarova seemed to be having a pleasant time though. When she finally got around to the questions I had prepared for, she was trying to make it easy for me. "Do you know where her father was born?" "Yes. Natal. Rio Grande do Norte. First child of 5. Amazingly his father, Clarindo, is the last of 15. Fifteen! Imagine that." "You can just say Brazil" she told me.

It was a long time before she even bothered to ask Gisela any questions at all. And Gi was so freaked out and pissed off by then that it became like a weird couples therapy session. "How does Tom spend an average day?" "He leaves and goes to work in the studio and then he comes home and stays on the computer all night looking up nerd things on the internet while I wait for him in bed."

Ultimately I suppose the fact that we were nearly divorcing on the spot was the most genuine thing we could do because Officer Kustarova was beaming by the end and concluded by saying "You didn't hear it from me but... Congratulations! You passed!" Then she took Gisela's passport right away to recommend the Supervisor stamp it. Which they did, veja só. And as a sign of our gratitude, with the ink still wet, we got on the next flight to Brazil.

Chegamos

We arrived.  And thanks God I have a blog now.  Everyone should have a brazilian wife because they know the ways of the internets, including how to set up a blog for you.  What's more with Brazilians, she just went ahead and did it. No waiting around for me to agree (imagine all the things she'd still be waiting for).  But like I said, thanks god, because now I finally have the soapbox of my dreams to publicly shame Delta Airlines. What a clown shop.  My list of grievances over the years with them is running towards Infinite Jest length, but they're nothing if not persistent about outdoing themselves.  I spent my last frantic day in New York with one comfort - that once we got on the plane to São Paulo, I could unfurl in the wide open spaces of the exit row.  I'd even cross-referenced with seatguru when booking (I know a thing or two about the internets) to get the best seat possible in the leisure class.  But at check-in we got 17 D & E - two of the middle three in the 2-3-2 layout.  And because Delta only hires ex-Soviet bureaucrats, no one expressed the mildest remorse at our hard luck, never mind throwing us a bone to make up for it.  One especially skill-less employee actually offered this condolence, "I don't know what you must have done."  Nothing like being told it's your fault the system has up and screwed you.  The usual displeasantries of the flight crew were just more salt in the wound, although I have special memories of the charmless frigate who threw the moist towelette at me.

 So, owing it all to my brazilian wife, vengeance is mine. I'm going to harness the power of you, my huge audience, to start organized disobedience to make Delta pay.  I implore you: no more boarding when your zone is called.  Insist that you ordered the Halal meal and they damn well better turn one up.  Carry on a steamer trunk.  Accidentally inflate the life vest.  Lean on the flight attendant call button and ask for connecting gate information for made-up cities.  That's what these blogs are for, right?  A call to arms.  Like saying "No" to Granny Death Panels and keeping the highest office in the land free from aliens.

First post

"This takes more thought than I can give right now", I told my wife when she asked me what the first post was going to be...