Cidade Maravilhosa

I'm finally in Rio! This city's beautiful; I don't even know how to explain it. It's this awesome combination of metropolitan and tropical. Parts of it remind me a lot of LA (Westwood, Beverly Hills, etc.), but Rio's more urban and less car-fixated. But that's just my impression from the first few hours, I can't wait to get to know this place over the next month.

So, on to my homestay situation. I'll start with the good: I'm staying with another Yalie who's hellbent on learning Portuguese so I don't feel like I'll be speaking too much English, but it's nice to know that there's someone I can turn to if I need it. She's also a lot more outgoing than I am (i.e. she never stops talking), which is nice, because it's letting me settle in while also fending off any awkward silence or weird pauses in conversations with our host mother (I'll get to her in a second...). We're staying in Ipanema, of "A Garota de Ipanema" fame! All of the neighborhoods in the Zona Sul (the rich, beach area of the city) are nice, but Ipanema's beaches are supposed to be the best. More good stuff: Jazzmin's literally a 2-minute walk from where we're staying! Now for the great stuff: We're a seven minute walk from Le Boy, one of Rio's gay clubs and a 20-minute subway ride from The Week, the latest, gayest, and most up-scale in Rio's queer scene (or so I've been told). Not to mention the gay beach that's only a few blocks away (as well as the Posto 8, a stretch of beach popular among the younger, hotter, straight crowd). GLS (Gays, Lesbicas, e Simpatizantes) housing sure did not fail. Oh! I saw two guys holding hands in the "Hippy Market" that they set up in this plaza across the street from the apartment--I've been so deprived of queerness that it just made me super happy (even though one of them had some pretty gnarly adult onset acne...)

Okay, so now to my host mother... She's nice. But also insane. I'll break into a semi-stream-of-consciousness depiction of how we met her:

So we unload our suitcases and stand, nervously, outside of the gate to the apartment. A tiny woman appears, white pajama-like pants/leggings and a baggy orange sweater--I really dug her look, super bohemian--and glasses. She strolls out, looks at us, and then turns to the driver, "It's a boy and a girl? It was supposed to be two boys..." After some confusion (and mild terror), she kept saying she was supposed to have "Ryan and Edward not Ryan and Diandra!!!", she ultimately calms down and welcomes both of us into her home. Not gonna lie, she is one intense little woman. She offered us cake that she baked for a student that had been living with her for the past six months--he left this morning. She also told us how she cried for hours after he left... Then after a whirlwind tour of the (tiny) apartment where we'll be living for the next month, she tells us, "I don't look it, but I'm 60. I don't work outside the house, I live off of exchange students. So if you don't like it here and want to leave, let me know soon because I need the rent money." Um... Nice to meet you too? Then she sits us down and starts to ask how we're planning on paying her. That, too, was really scary because before we explained that we'd paid the university, I half-expected her to throw us out onto the street because we didn't have 950 reais on hand. Her super hip bohemian outfit has completely fallen apart by now--sweater off, faded Precious Memories t-shirt on, and the (horrifying) revelation that those "pajama-like pants/leggings" are actually see-through. While avoiding looking at her clearly-visible, sagging grandma panties and simultaneously trying to figure out how to work the (electrically heated) shower, we're also informed that we're not supposed to flush toilet paper down the toilet. What? Excuse me??? I know I sound like an ugly American, but that shit doesn't fly with me (pun only mildly intended). Admittedly, that was the rule at the Pousada, but I didn't actually follow it. But she was pretty adamant that any toilet paper in the toilet (god forbid) would lead to a 100 real plumber visit. This was also the point in the conversation where she awkwardly searched for the word "period" when she tried to tell Diandra not to flush tampons down the toilet--despite the fact that Diandra tried (multiple times) to interrupt the unbearably awkward anti-tampon-flushing lecture with assertions of, "Sim, senhora, eu entendo, não produtos femininos no vaso sanitário, entendo!"

Then came the explanation of her "work." She's a numerologist. And a kabbalah practitioner. She works, primarily, in "the human profile using numbers." I have no idea what that means. But her living room is filled with books about astrology, Greek myths, the Hebrew alphabet, and I Ching. And, she told us, we're not to interrupt her when she's with a client, but luckily she'll close the door (we have to enter through the back kitchen door so as to avoid being seen).

Alright, so that was a pretty lengthy and kind of overdramatic reaction, but it was definitely not what I was expecting. She really is nice and seems like she genuinely cares about the students living with her (though, that might be because we're her main source of income). I've had a couple of nice exchanges with her so far, especially after I gave her the Yale mug and postcards I bought her. (She was fascinated by the Hebrew letters on the Yale crest--she said they were good luck). And I could tell she wasn't from Rio from her accent (which made me ridiculously happy); she's from the Northeast, where some of their pronunciation is a lot more like Spanish than Carioca (from Rio de Janeiro) Portuguese. Unfortunately, she speaks English fairly well and sort of defaults to that when she thinks we don't understand but hopefully that's just for the beginning.