I never “learned” the word barulho, but I heard it all the time and it made complete sense in context, so it integrated itself into my vocabulary. The laundry machine does barulho; so does the neighbor’s dog, cars when they need to be serviced, and people in the kitchen when they’re cooking. ”Is my bike supposed to be making that barulho?” The lyrics from a Lenine song (o barulho do mar na areia: the barulho of the sea in the sand). I pictured barulho as a sort of furry monster that makes raucous mischief, regarded with the same mix of affection and exasperation as one gives a terrible-two toddler, running around a room with sticky hands. The word always appears with fazer—to do—thus giving life to the things doing barulho, as if they had their own violition, their own ability to enact actions.

And then I saw the direct translation—burulho: noise. Of course! Yet… how dull, to restrain burulu to one word rather than a sort of hazy image of what noise is based on what it does—how, with whom, to what. (It makes mischief, and most often seen with animals and appliances).

Profe Miranda interrupts a passage I am reading out loud from my Portuguese textbook. “Que baralho!” he says. “Calma.You’re speaking like a machine gun.”

Evidentially, I need to work on voice inflection.

Bora, PORRA… caralho, que filho da puta é essa!!

Six thousand Brazilians cursing. It’s not even a “classic” game: It’s Recife’s Naútico v. Bahia’s Victoria, late on a Tuesday night, but it’s rowdy, on your feet, jumping, singing, a mass of red and white and shaking fists and arms, and I can only imagine what an “important” game looks like (World Cup 2014: please?!?!). Naútico wins, 3 x 0.
Learn Portuguese swear words: check.

Wednesday night, I watch Rio de Janieros’s Santos play Sao Pablo’s Flamengo. They’re both Division 1 teams, and it’s a different game: precise and fast and meu dues these players are good. Santos scores 3 goals in the first half, but the game ends with Flamengo in the lead, 5 to 4. Nine goals scored in a game! One kid, Neymar (he’s 19!), dribbles the ball from midfield, leaping across defenders, flying across the pitch; the goalie comes out to meet him, but Neymar darts around him and he scores, and the whole thing takes ten seconds. Caralho. This is not soccer as I’ve known it; it’s fut-ee-bol. It’s a different sport entirely, and it’s too cliché to admit: soccer in Brazil makes me love soccer.

On a run through the grounds of the Instituto Fernando Brennand. I don’t know if I’m really allowed to run here, but there are so many stretching kilometers—I have to find 15 of them today; the half-marathon is in less than two weeks—and the Institute is tucked behind the city on a huge parcel of land, flat and green and carless and quiet, and it feels like I’m discovering something hidden.

I run on a long and rutted access road that cuts through a field of thick grass between the sculpture garden and the art museum: so much space. I approach the museum, and the space closes back in: buildings and cars and a statue-adorned fountain in the middle of a circular drive. Tourists snap photos of the fountain—grey figures doubling back, hands on foreheads. I am drenched in sweat, and the museum guards stare at me as I pass: confusion or indifference. I give them a thumbs up and gesture a circle with my hand: just passing through. The uneven cobblestone of the drive makes my knees buckle, so I hop on the the grass, and loop around the fountain, around the clusters of tourists. They glance at me, and then they gawk. One teenagers turns around completely and snaps a photo of me. I realize I am an unusual sight, but really…? I attempt to glare at them. And then I feel a peck on my calf, and my heel hits something on its upward stride. I turn back. A pink peacock is sprinting after me, nipping at my heels, neck darting front and back.

I stop, stunned, and shoo it away with a “tssk.” It, too, stops, and circles me, neck darting front and back. It is perhaps two feet tall, a round, grounded bird, skinny legs for running and wings too weak to fly. A splayed hand of feathers arches over its otherwise bald head: a pink mohawk. I run again, around the fountain and down the road a few hundred feet. It’s hot on my heels, pecking at ankles. I stop again, and shoo it away in Portuguese: “saí!” It does not sair. The tourists are still staring.

There’s nothing much more that I can do except snap it away with another saí, and take off in a dead sprint the opposite direction, believing in the strength of my legs over its. Word of the day: beliscar—to peck.

A single load of laundry, one person’s weekly wares. What will emerge next from this wet lump? A cotton periwinkle skirt and a breeze.

In Tide commercials, ladies dressed in linen pin clothes to expansive lines hanging over grassy fields, smiling on a sunny afternoons. But, in the U.S., laundry detergent is bought to be dumped into electric washers, to produce piles of wet clothes that are dumped into electric dryers—clean squares of steel that live in a windowless basements. Who has time to hang laundry, to wait for it to dry? Kelly Ripa bakes pies, finds Mark Consuelo’s car keys, and plots a season of morning talk news while she does her laundry.

There is to be no multi-tasking while hanging clothes on a clothesline. What is beautiful for me is a curse for most of the world’s women: days spent stringing a family’s laundry on a line. Here, with only Portuguese class pressing on my time, I love this routine, its methodical pace. It smells sparkly. It depends on the weather. Sun breaking through clouds and a breeze. It’s quiet, and, unlike so many other things, it is piece by piece by piece. A wad of wet fabric spreads into human forms.  It is panties revealed, socks unpaired, skirts billowing up to expose presumed legs.

I am un-learning how to multi-task. I feel comfortable in Recife now, comfortable enough to rush, to be irritable or distracted. Yet there is something that is still slightly off-kilter—just different enough, foreign still—to throw me off balance, to disrupt what seem to be mindless tasks. I make coffee—boil water, stir in grounds, pour through filter—while cutting a banana into a bowl of yogurt, and something is dropped, spilled, burned. I unlock the door to leave while toeing for my Havianas, and the door doesn’t open or the flip-flops are on the wrong feet. I let my mind wander forward or backward, even just a step, while someone is talking to me, and I lose control of the conversation.

And, then, I speak, and this, too,  teaches me to slow down, to focus on one thing at a time. What happened? has three quick syllables. O que aconteceu? has seven. Seven syllables, and if any are multi-tasked, smashed together, or forgotten in the rush to finish the word, the word itself is lost. This is the hardest part: moving forward, word by word by word. When I want to say all sorts of thoughts, all at the same time, but first have to fit them into my mouth, fit my mouth around them, conjugate and articulate. What will emerge from this wet lump. Piece by piece by piece.

“If you’re going to be pickpocketed or mugged in Brazil, Salvador is likely to be the place.” –ye ol’ Lonely Planet

Salvador da Bahia is stunning, dipped in more beach than it knows what to do with. Crowded on the southern tip of a peninsula, like water pooling in the corner of a plastic baggie, the city brims, pushes against the ocean, threatens to topple over into the Bahía de Todos os Santos. 

I arrive at the airport Friday afternoon—for my first and only solo venture outside of Recife—and hop aboard a bus that swings around the praia-lined perimeter of the peninsula to land in Pelorinho. The city’s historic center is now a World Heritage Site, colorful and cobblestoned, adorned with unexpected plazas and music—always music—wafting from somewhere. (It is also, you can’t take two steps without being told, where a famous Michael Jackson video was filmed.)

Arriving at the golden glow of 5 p.m., turning new corners as sunset emerged, clomping past bright buildings, row after row of color; it is wonderful. I meet folks at the hostel bar, over vegetarian curry and cerjeza, and we venture out to find a cachaca bar near the main plaza. Six of us—two tall northern European gents, and three blond girls from Denmark—not fifty meters from the hostel. A dude sprints at me—I don’t see him until both his hands are around my neck, grabbing my necklace, breaking the gold chain. It’s too fast to really understand what he’s doing, so I resist before I realize that, really, I shouldn’t, but my resistance is momentary and futile, as he’s already got what he wants and he’s already sprinting away, and I don’t even see his face. I’m left shocked and scared and with only a short scratch where my necklace once was (and relief that I was not wearing earrings). It is a twenty-dollar necklace bought on sale when I was in college, and I’m not hurt, but it’s such a violation of my space, and, now, I feel like I’m being watched, scoped out, surveyed for anything shinny and bright that might be on my being; now, I’m uncomfortable and suspicious and I can’t get into the rhythm of the city.

I re-boot the system and move to a different hostel in Barra, a beach suburb on the southern point of the peninsula. I ask a lady on the street for directions to the beach, and she is confused. “Any which way,” she says. If you’re headed downhill, you’re headed to the beach.

I have been told I have to try acarajé, which is sold on every street corner by women adorned in elaborate African headdresses and wide white skirts. I reluctantly shell out five reais for what looks like a fried ball of bread, but what is, I soon discover, magic: deep-fried black-eyed pea fritters, filled with cashew paste, tomato salad, and shrimp fried in palm oil. I alternate my meals between mountainous acai bowls and the magic bean fritters.

Salvador is the only location in continental Brazil where you can watch the sun set over the ocean, and so I watch, at the Barra lighthouse along with a gaggle of guitar-toting Brazilians. We watch the sun strut over the water, and applaud at 5:21 p.m. when she disappears with a shimmy.

I’m still not totally happy wandering alone in the city, so I climb aboard a ferry and head to the Ihla de Itaparica, and discover paradise. At the dock, while negotiating the price of a taxi to paradise, I make friends with a fellow visiting Salvador from Belo Horizonte, and thus spend the day happily wandering with him. The island is quiet… lapping waves and wide streets and shady palms… I think that’s cacao, he says, point to a tree, and sure enough, chocolate fruits hang heavy. A whole day of Portuguese is a wonder, and it’s nice to have a Brazilian around to sort things out, like when the last ferry leaves, and whether there’s time before then to have a sunset beer on the beach.

It was shaping up to be One of Those Days.

The neighbor’s dog begins barking earlier than usual—7:00 a.m., instead of 7:30 or 8:00. (I have never actually seen this dog, which is locked in a yard behind my apartment building, but based on its bark—shrill and ceaseless, a beating metronome—it’s one of those tiny, yappy things.)

Portuguese tutor Adriana calls to say that we were not going to have our 9 o’clock class at the Fenearte, as planned, because, as it turns out, the Feira doesn’t open until 2 o’clock. Lunchtime reveals that the magical acai na tigela shop is closed, for who knows how long, as the university is officially on winter break. It is pouring rain, which I can handle, but it is also gusting wind, which my umbrella cannot handle. It rattles and then gives up and crumples in despair, and I arrive to Portuguese class similarly crumpled and wet. Profe Miranda is distracted and I am stranded, waiting for him to finish a phone call or assign homework to students who are learning English.

It’s still pouring, but I am feeling stubborn, so I take the onibus directly from class to the Feira Nacional de Artesanato; the biggest artisan fair in Latin America is in the convention center this week only. I get on the correct bus (small accomplishment) but the bus is full and the windows are closed and covered in fog, and I somehow miss my stop, which I realize only when I end up in downtown Olinda (larger failure). I get off and pay another three reais to take the same bus in the opposite direction. After two lovely and dry hours wandering among beautiful art and bright things to purchase, it is time to go home. I ask a man directing cars where the closest onibus stop is, and he points me down a muddy road. It doesn’t seem right, but he nods again, and there is a sign there that says, Exit, so I’ll see where it goes. It’s soon clear that the Exit sign is meant for cars, not pedestrians. I arrive to the exit, and ask the fellow there where the onibus stop is. It’s there, he says, gesturing across a dark and busy street. But, it’s very dangerous, he says, looking me up and down. Very dangerous. Better to wait here.

“Wait here” is not a realistic solution—I cannot see which buses are passing, and cars are rolling past, knocking me with cold splashes, and I am standing ankle deep in mud and grass. Waiting at the bus stop is also not a realistic solution. It is dark, scarcely populated, and this man has now said perigoso twelve times.

But then, one of the cars leaving the fair stops, a window rolls down, and a young dude sticks his head out. “Where are you going?”

“Recife?” I ask.

“Right,” he says. “Where?”

“Cidade Universitaria.”

The woman in the passenger seat says something to the effect of “Girlfriend, get in the car. It’s dangerous here.”

And so, I am saved by this lovely young pair. We sit in rush-hour traffic and they ask me lots of questions and I chatter in Portuguese, and I ask them lots of questions—the fellow lived in Aspen for six months and fazia esnowboarding—and an hour and a half later, when they drop me off at Praca Derby to catch my onibus home, I’ve made myself two new friends. I arrive home, and it is bright and dry, and Josie has made couscous and scrambled eggs and Viola has made pineapple cake, and I take a shower and everyone watches a movie, and actually, it is a fine day after all.

I’m out for pizza with Josie, Viola, and another gal. We would like to order another round of caipirinhas. Our waitress, however, would prefer to stare at the wall and count the number of toothpicks in the toothpick jar. Arms are flailing and Josie cries, “oi, moça!” and still she continues to count toothpicks. A funny quip occurs to me, and in my excitement to share my witty observation, my words roll out in seventeen simultaneous syllables, none of which, based on the expressions I receive in return, are coherent Portuguese.

PFFFFF.

Word of the day: nor—knot. Minha lengua está dando nor. My tongue is giving knots.

I keep forgetting that, even though I can conjugate verbs and write mini-essays about what I did last weekend or what I would do if I had a million dollars, even though I can understand songs and swear words and entire movies in Portuguese, I still, for the most part, speak like a toddler. And toddlers do not, for the most part, make sarcastic comments about indifferent waitresses.

On the other hand, I read the newspaper every day this week, which feels like an accomplishment. Though, actually, by ‘every day,’ I mean that I read a newspaper every day, though not necessarily that particular day’s newspaper, as it takes me three days to read one day’s worth of news. I read Friday’s newspaper all through the weekend, and then Monday’s until Wednesday, and I’m working my way through Thursday now. I consider it like any other endeavor: you have to train to get better. I’m hoping that by the end of my stay, I will be able to read the newspaper, cover-to-cover, within a single day’s news cycle.

Speaking of training, I have successfully completed my registration for the II Maratona Internacional Maurício de Nassau—the Marathon of Recife. On July 31, three days before I return to the U. S. of A., I will run 21 sweltering kilometers through downtown Recife, over rivers and between skyscrapers and along the beach. It is a hefty proposition, training for this thing, given that I’m not a member of a gym and that outside it’s generally either 90 degrees or raining, but I’m up for the challenge. 21 kilometers has a finish line, and I don’t have to say a word to cross it.