Paulista Pride

Who knew that the 3rd largest city in the world would be so friendly, fun and inviting? My friend tisa and I had a blast in Sao Paulo in our 2 two short days there last weekend. We went shopping, checked out the museu de lingua Portuguese (a really cool museum that examines the Portuguese language in Brasil and the diasopora. It looks at history, slavery, colonialism, music, religion and writers, songwriters and authors. Neither of us had been to anything like it before), checked out the Liberdade neighborhood which is the Japanese area (brasil has the largest number of Japanese in the world outside of japan), ate sushi (yum – sushi I miss you!). And of course we did gay pride. Saturday there was a small but spirited dyke march that of course ended in a street party. After we went to one of the best lesbian bars ive been too – food, live music and samba dancing. Why cant we have more of these kind of spots everywhere??? And Sunday was the hugest march ive ever been too. It was estimated to be 3 million people. Wow is all we could say for the entire day. After that I came back to salvador and went back up to cachoeria to do some filming with the irmandade. I’ve connected with this American professor who has been studying and writing a book about them and about afro-brasilian religion, politics and identity. He has been coming to cachoeria on and off for the last 5 years. We realized our purposes converged and I have started filming him interviewing the sisters. I will be going up again this week then off to rio for the weekend for another Fulbright conference. The language learning curve continues, at a glacial pace sometimes and other times by leaps and bounds (well no not really - it usually feels glacial.) One of the things I realized is that I tend to use the same vocabulary over and over again because they are words that I feel confident about and can pronounce. Its like im a 5-year old all over again. I spent yesterday morning learning the past-imperfect verb tense with my language teacher. (Yes, in portuguese three are three ways of conjugating the past depending on the circumstance your talking about. crazy!) and then last night I spent out trying to use it- with limited success. And for the first time last week I started feeling like ive been away for a long time. And its only been a little more than two months.
Im missing ya’ll hardcore.