oi brasil

I leave Buenos Aires for Brazil in 14 hours. That is wonderful. Guiliana, my nanny for 5 or 6 years when I was a toddler, has since moved back to Rio and will be my host when I´m not with the group. She´s already making plans to bring me to her sister´s house next weekend for a big rodizio (grill out). The group is really excited, especially to get into some warmer weather. It´s been between 32 and 60 degrees here and in Montevideo, depending on the fog and wind. But Brasil looks like sunny and 80 degrees the whole next week for sure. Big.

I did a crappy job with Montevideo. I don´t know that city at all. Little disappointed because it seemed like it had a lot to offer. I only got to know our section near the center, a little of the coast area, and a tiny bit of the colonial port. I feel like there was so much more to see, but rain and seminars and other things kept keeping me from exploring.

One area I wasn´t expecting to see was an illegal squatter settlement on the fringes of the city. Techo para mi país, a multinational NGO, agreeded to lead us around on Friday afternoon. It was a muddy, isolated, intensely poor area. The residents arranged their plots of land through a political broker who occassionally gets them food or medicine if they´re struggling. The crazy part is that only 60% of the residences in the center of Montevideo are occupied, but the owners refuse to sell or charge high rents. So these 100 families live in one of the 400 squatter settlements around town. It would be impossible to catagorize and interpret my feelings about how these people live and what the material poverty they experience means to them and to Uruguayan society. Suffice to say it was thought provoking.

I got a 14 peso ($4.80) haircut today. Random, but interesting that it costs 14 pesos to get a haircut here and 54 ($18) to pay an airport tax to leave the country. This is a meaningless paragraph.

I´ll write from Brasil, d