Brazil
Peter and I have survived out trip to Salvador de Bahia. It is a squalor of the highest magnitude.
Getting here was an ordeal. First, we had to rise at 5am on Monday morning. When I say rise, I mean just get out of bed, because I had spent the night almost entirely sleepless. For some reason leaving Berlin was triggering memories of leaving California and a host of conflicting thoughts and memories ran through my mind. My parents, friends, San Luis; all these and more mixing in my mind, half making me wish that that our flight tomorrow would suddenly veer westward and deliver me over San Luis airspace where I could parachute down and pretend I never left. But the truth is that I did leave, and I’ve been gone damn near a year. I decided to drown out the fantasy by assigning myself a tricky brain consuming task. So when When 5 am rolled around, instead of pining for home, I was knee deep in trying to figure out how to make our e-commerce back end work with bar codes and scanners. I hadn’t thought of Berlin, or leaving, or home, in over an hour- until Pete’s knock on the door told me it was time to go.
We hopped in a shared ride to Frankfurt, a common practice in Germany. We rode with a plump German woman named Simona who uttered exactly zero words to us while she sped along the Autobahn and worked her way through her plastic bag full of cheese and mustard sandwiches. Then it was a three hour wait in the Frankfort Flughafen, before boarding the 10 hour flight over the Atlantic.
The flight was the most surreal I have ever been on. We crossed Germany, France, and Spain, before crossing into the darkness of Africa. I couldn’t help but think of the Indiana Jones music and the little red line being drawn onto the map as he crossed from city to city that they always used in the movies. Pete and JW, intrepid adventurers of the modern age; the thought made me smile at its simultaneous idiocy and truth.
When we entered the African sky, the world fell out from beneath us. Until that point, we had been rolling above a cloudy atmosphere, where the pockets of fluff allowed glimpses and evidence of mankind living below. This was not the case with Africa. There was utter darkness below, and our jetliner, for all intensive purposes, was alone in the universe. 100% darkness below, zero horizon, like we had entered the tunnel to Perdition and gotten lost in its endless loop. Eventually we crossed over the Atlantic and the feeling was just as desolate. I thought about what would happen if our bird took a dip towards the sea. What the fuck could you do, all alone in the water, a billion miles from anything? It’s a terrifying thought that I can’t help but toy with every time I board a jet. But then I remind myself that planes want to be in the sky, and that it’s the safest way to travel, and that the German engineers are the best in the world. I think of the geniuses who built these things and the technical marvel of it makes me proud to be a human. That I can be whistling through the vapor at 500 miles an hour through some of the most desolate places on earth, yet at the same time be wrapped in a blanket, sipping bad coffee, and reflecting on the situation will never cease to be a miracle to me.
The flight was long, stretching on for what seemed like an eternity. I even allowed myself to watch The Lakehouse, which is not, dare I say, the finest piece of cinema I’ve seen in recent memory.
But eventually, the on screen countdown drew to a close and we approached the Brazilian coast. And what a coast it was! For some reason the clouds clung to the earth and the city lights, instead of burning white or yellow or green, all gave off the darkest red glow I have ever seen on a skyline. The clouds captured this light and bounced it back to the surface, which bounced it back to the clouds so the earth looked like it was boiling; a smoking stew of humidity and fog mixing in the ether. I half expected the plane to drop through it and continue onwards till we had arrived in hell itself. But instead, the plane touched down hard, threw the engines backwards, and came lurching to a halt on the tarmac. We had arrived in South America.
Our hostess, Agnes, met us at the airport. She was holding a sign that said, “Mr. Peter”. Agnes is a little French lady who talks loud and often, without worrying about a response to break up her flow. She tells us to keep 4 eyes open in Brazil, and to sleep with only 1 shut. She keeps her cigarettes in one half of her bra, the open box poking out of the top, and her papers and money in the other half. I wasn’t sure if she and the cabbie were going to take us out into the jungle and murder us, or if she’s the nicest host in the world, our surrogate mother in Salvador Bahia. (It’s now the next day, and I’m still not sure.)
At any rate, we have made it to Brazil; alive and well. We haven’t been robbed and we haven’t contracted any diseases. It’s been 12 hours.
I have a feeling I will have a lot to blog about in this place.
