Heels in Brazil

Fashions in Brazil — at least the southernmost state, where I was — are almost aggressively casual. At a big conference, before an audience of thousands, speakers wear jeans and t-shirts. However, the waiter, who comes sometimes from the back of the stage with highly necessary bottles of ice water, wears a formal white jacket and tie.

Once the matter of fashion makes its way into the conversation. A woman walking past on the street is wearing a fairly ordinary pair of pumps.

1: “Why is she wearing heels? During the day?”
2: “Yes, what will she have left to wear to a party? Silver ones? What about when she goes to Paris, does she have them in solid gold?”

I am suddenly glad of my decision not to bring out the cute little burgundy suede heels that I sometimes wear with business clothes; say nothing.

 

H1N1

The Swine Flu had more of an impact this June and July in Brazil than it did in the United States. Schools closed up for weeks to prevent the spread; and even now, when the threat has died back, everyone carries everywhere a little bottle of hand-sanitizer, clear gel in a small clear bottle. Sometimes for the sake of conversation they will swap bottles and invite one another to compare the smells: like offering around your snuffbox, I suppose.

In Brazil there is also a kind of artificial dieter’s sweetener. It comes in liquid form, clear liquid in a small clear bottle.

No actual mishaps resulted that I saw, but I did double-take when I saw an acquaintance hand-sanitizing his coffee.

 

Brazil airline priorities

In the US and Europe, I’m used to those signs that allow priority access for security lines to people with airline memberships or who paid princely sums for their tickets.

Brazil prioritizes in a different way: “Priority lines for disabled, elderly, pregnant women.”

 

Not in Kansas

Next month I’m attending a conference in Brazil. This is an unexpected treat, and something I’m really looking forward to. But I find that it’s a step up in travel challenge from anything I’ve done before.

I need a visa. All my previous international travels have been happily visa-free jaunts around Canada or Europe. Getting a visa for Brazil requires mailing away your passport (something I am not at all comfortable doing: my passport is the most important document in my life), together with a host of additional documentation concerning your birth, parentage, employment, plans in Brazil, ability to support yourself there, and entry and exit plans. “Some visitors will also need a yellow immunization card,” the website informs us coyly; but I am very relieved to see that my destination is not among the places so designated.

The process of applying for the visa requires stepping carefully through the website of the Brazilian consulate. The program that handles this is actually fairly robust, and allows you to go back and make modifications if you have chosen your options unwisely, and to review the Receipt document you get at the end (important, because you must print and mail this document). What it doesn’t do is seem robust. There are lots of instructions, scattered over many different pages. Sometimes you think you’ve read all the pertinent instructions about a particular thing (e.g., the requirements for the sort of photo to be submitted) only to find that there are more instructions, on another page, more specific than the first. Some of the instructions are apparently contradictory unless you apply fairly legalistic thinking to exactly what they might mean. And don’t call the consulate for clarification: you’ll get a voice recording that tells you to email with any visa-related questions. (I did so, but the email went cheerfully unanswered.)

It’s obvious that they’ve gotten complaints about this website because it comes with a document you can download that claims to give you step-by-step instructions on filling it out. Said document basically reproduces the web forms… and the step-by-step instructions that appear on those pages. More of almost-the-same information, but absent is the sort of feedback and glossing that might be reassuring — such as

(1) being told how your entry on the ‘purpose of visit’ drop-down relates to the visa categories listed elsewhere on the site (two different purposes of visit seemed applicable to me, and I had to try both before determining that the second corresponded to the correct visa);

(2) being assured that you will be able to come back and correct errors, should you make any;

(3) being given the option to email yourself a copy of your registration number and receipt, to prevent the loss of data (or better yet, having that happen automatically, as your email address is among the information they require you to submit).

Also unnerving, and in this case justly, are the warnings that the processing time will be four business days unless, by chance, it isn’t. In which case it will be longer, without warning; you can’t pay for expedited service. The whole site inspires me with fear, on the one hand, that something will go wrong and my travel will be made impossible, and rueful sympathy, on the other, for the perhaps harassed and overworked people who have had to write all these things to fend off importunate and unreasonable visitors to Brazil who expect instant service.

We’ll see how I feel about this in two weeks’ time, shall we?

---

Subsequent update: I was right to be worried, for on the first occasion the consulate returned my whole packet without visa, on the grounds that I didn’t have a sufficiently clear letter of invitation from the host organization. With fear and trembling I replaced this and sent the packet in a second time, aware that we were now within the three-week window of my trip during which one is no longer supposed to submit visa applications by mail. (But what else could I do? Fly to Chicago to oversee the submission? Impossible, with my work schedule.)

In the end it all came out right, however, and I got my passport with its colorful visa image, and the stamps denoting the money I had paid; and at the border crossing there was no trouble about the matter at all, not even the usual questions.

So I guess a visa is good for something.

 

It occurs to me

…that French border police never seem to ask why you’re entering their country. Possibly that is apathy, but I prefer to think a person’s desire to enter the awesome country that is France just never needs explaining.

 

Globe Theatre, London

The architecture of theaters is a curious thing, because it often contains subtle messages about what it considers the relationship between the audience and the plays. And I don’t mean the shape of the stage and the arrangement of seats, important as those are. The message begins out in the lobby, or even on the façade. Some theaters pitch themselves as small and hip, theater for people who just like going to shows. Some (especially the ones that do musicals) pitch themselves as glittering and glamorous general-purpose entertainment, some as high cultural meccas.

The Globe Theatre seems designed as the goal of student field trips. In addition to the reproduction Shakespearean-era theater, there is a modern support building in which tickets are sold. The lobby area is tiled, floor and wall, in ugly brown-red tiles, like a school cafeteria. There is a little diorama of the theater building one is about to enter. There is a gift shop containing mildly educational souvenirs but not necessarily, say, the actual text of the plays performed. The whole set-up so valorizes the reproduction that I imagine many visitors consider the plays an accessory to the building, like the waxwork dioramas installed in stately homes.

Even the food is like food at a museum, which is not a compliment.

At the play I attended — disorientingly, a production of Euripides’ Helen in a new translation by Frank McGuinness — the standing-room Yard was full of young adolescents who plainly had been dragged along by their parents. The adolescents held instructive muttered conversations during the action. They shuffled. They snickered openly at the dramatic reunion of Helen and her husband Menelaus: not because it was badly performed, but (I suspect) because it is a rather stylized scene and because these kids were just too young to have any notion of the human experience underlying it.

I’m not against the reproduction of older styles of theater as a route to understanding the performance realities of the plays performed there, but I’m a bit against the reliquarist’s mindset that makes the reproduction Globe an object of thoughtless pilgrimage. The lasting monument of Shakespeare is not this building that sticks out foolishly on the Embankment and looks like a supersized Renaissance Faire prop. It is the living drama, which can be performed under all sorts of circumstances, provided the audience comes there to be an audience.

The same is of course true of Euripides, and fortunately the people behind the production of Helen knew this, even if some of the young people present did not. The translation was sprightly and felt accessible without being self-consciously Modern and without discarding much of the original content; the actors played with considerable heart, especially Paul McGann as Menelaus; the blend of laughter and pain, and the sense of human dignity in the face of a senselessly unfair divine order, were true to their origins; and when at the end the play dissolved into dance I felt I at last understood this curious and stylized way of finishing a story.

So it’s not a bad company, and the theater’s not a bad theater, and there is something to be said for looking back to older performance techniques. But if you go, don’t go to be a spectator or a museum-goer. Go to be a member of the audience, which is more dangerous. Go to hear what the playwrights and the actors have to say to you.

 

Riverfront bar/restaurant, London

Mojito: brown sugar, lime, rum, a shot of something greenish from a squeeze bottle, and freshly spanked mint– I saw her do it. And yet it tasted as though the glass had been washed with bug spray.

I blame the greenish stuff from the squeeze bottle. What else could it have been?

(Here.)

 

Glandèves Cathedral

By the standards of cathedrals, Glandèves cathedral is very small; but that should not surprise. It is in Entrevaux, a walled town of narrow off-true alleys, as constricted and picturesque as the contents of a snow globe.

The cathedral is dark when you go in, and it’s hard to make out too much of the big paintings or the star-painted ceiling or the columns that look oddly as though they’re swathed in red velvet. Then a man in a clerical collar passes you with a small acknowledgement and goes to the back of the church. The meditative silence for which you stepped inside is broken by workmanlike bangs, the clangor of metal on metal. The meditative dimness is, a moment later, broken also: lights come on one by one in answer to the bangs, showing up the gilded excesses in full electric-lamp glory, more than you wanted to see. The baroque was in good taste only in the age of candlelight, if then.

The paintings are of no special distinction. You think that, on the whole, you’d like to leave again, but it isn’t quite clear whether the clerical-collar man went to all that bother to turn on the lights for you, so that you could see the paintings, gildings, Corinthian columns, moldings, roundels, etc., in their full glory, and it would be rude to leave after–

Mercifully the lights snap back off. You stand, and walk purposefully toward the back.

The man in the clerical collar bangs and bangs again and from what little you can hear of his muttering he may be using words not entirely suited to the ecclesiastical environment. He barely acknowledges your going out. He is still struggling to enlighten the place.

 

Jardin des Plantes, Paris

One of the challenges of making a train connection through Paris — as through London — is that the train you came in on is pretty much guaranteed to come to a different station than the one on which you need to leave; and this entails a somewhat hectic trip via Metro and some unpleasant tactical decisions. If you have a layover of several hours, what do you mean to do with it? Will you put your luggage in consignment in order to let yourself wander the city? If so, do you put it in at the station where you came in, or the one where you mean to go out? Either way you have to go back to one of the stations twice, which is a bother, so perhaps you should just drag the luggage with you, prop it next to your chair at cafés, and turn a cold touristic obliviousness on anyone who expresses by word or gesture that you’re being a little inconsiderate.

For those traveling through the Gare d’Austerlitz, however, I recommend this possibility: spend some time in the nearby (very nearby) Jardin des Plantes. It’s a botanical garden, with statues honoring many French scientists of note, and there are some buildings you can go into if you like; but that’s hardly necessary if you don’t want to. There are also benches and long tree-lined avenues and you can sit and breathe fresh air, a welcome thing post-couchette.

In the morning there are joggers: not only solitary joggers such as one might see in any city, but jogging teams of fit men in t-shirts that say “SAPEURS-POMPIERS”. Literally this means SAPPER PUMPER, which sounds like a club for plumbing obsessives, but is actually French for firefighter.

 

Books for the road: Stanza

My iPod has long been a traveling companion, and before that I carried a portable CD player — an expensive fragile piece of equipment that skipped on especially rattly trains and quickly drained its non-rechargeable batteries. Once upon a time I took a night train from Paris to Florence to an unending cycle of George Michael because that was the only CD I had with me. For similar reasons (and to similarly embarrassing effect) I associate Alanis Morissette with the city of Rome, and the soundtrack to Such a Long Journey with the castles along the Rhine.

But music and audio books are not always the ideal companions for a journey, or are not always enough; on loud enough transportation they can be hard to hear properly. Sometimes one wants reading material — but books are heavy and bulky to pack.

Recently I’ve been whiling away a lot of travel time with Stanza, an eBook reader for the iPod and iPhone. On my most recent trip I got through Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth; Gene Stratton Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost; Balzac’s Petty Troubles of Marriage; Turgenev’s First Love; some dozens of short stories by L. M. Montgomery; Sabatini’s short The Abduction; and (it must be admitted) a couple of romance novels Harlequin was giving away in honor of its 60th anniversary. I also tried, before I got bored with, Stephen Baxter’s Manifold: Time, most of the other Harlequin novels on offer, etc. I would have had to bring a whole separate sack for these books if I had been carrying them in physical form.

There are other advantages: with the built-in catalogs, it’s easy to add to the collection any time I’m on a wireless network, and the screen is readable even at times when a book wouldn’t be, as for instance in a dimly-lit couchette. I wouldn’t mind if I had a larger range of reading fonts available — the installed ones are fine but don’t include any of my real favorites. Then again, I can’t revise the typesetting of a physical book at will, either.

There are a couple of disadvantages as well. One is just an extension of the same old problem: the iPod/iPhone can run out of battery power. But it does so very slowly when doing something so low-processing as running Stanza, I have to say; a single charge is good for a lot of page-turns. I only ran out of reading power once or twice.

The more significant issue is the lack of visual or tactile hints about how far one is through one’s book. The little bar at the bottom of the screen gives some information about position within a given chapter, which is useful, but it doesn’t indicate how long the whole book is. And it turns out that I want to know that more often than I had ever imagined, because in the past it has always been an instant and unconscious matter to check how far I was through the book’s binding.

Still, that’s a small price to pay for the entertainment.