Tamar and Phil Are Married

It was with a measure of surprise that I surveyed the scene in my room in Hostel Manaus, not more than a few hours ago.  Two observations stood out.  My stuff was gone and someone sleeping in my bed.   "What can this mean?" I wondered.  "Do I have a room?"  "Do I have stuff?"  I grew vaguely nervous and left the room.  The hostel staff person was not in the common area, but three guests were, including my Russian roommate of some time who was recently back from, rather than going on an organized tour of the jungle, having simply gone to a native village and asked to stay for week.  He is an avid Skyper and seems a decent sort.

"Did you see where they moved your stuff?" he asked.  While I clearly knew the answer to this question, I struggled to articulate it.  Before I could, all three people were pointing at room 12, the single room I had been in before.  This was odd because I had spent the afternoon moving out of this very room.  You see all of the reservations are laid out in this impossibly formatted Excel spreadsheet that lets the manager see about half of the rooms on any given day at a time, running on an impossibly slow computer.  A question like "What room am I in?" generally takes about ten minutes to get an answer to.  In any event, at that moment the manager came down the stairs and apologetically told me that someone else had argued their way into my berth and that to settle the situation he had moved my belongings and that I would now be sharing room 12 (a double) with someone who has yet to arrive as of midnight.

I am again in possession of all of my belongings -- short of a green bag with a few essential items that hopefully will make its way to the front desk at Hotel Tropical Manaus, where the wedding took place.  Said wedding was between my classmate from UCSD, Tamar Benzaken, and her boyfriend of some years, Phil Koosed.  Both families are quite large, and thus the wedding was quite large -- to the tune of about five hundred friends and relations.

The wedding was lovely and done in traditional Jewish style.  One of Tamar's aunts adopted me for the early part of the evening and talked me through much of the symbolism and the procedure.  The service included English, Portuguese, Hebrew, Aramaic, and a Jewish Spanish dialect.  Tamar looked stunning in her wedding dress and both bride and groom were exceedingly happy throughout the course of the evening.

I say "evening" but by the time I was taxiing my way back across town to my more modest digs, the sun was shining in the eastern sky.  This was the finale of three nights of festivities to celebrate the wedding, and in that time Tamar's family made me feel very, very welcome.  I look forward to my next opportunity to visit the city!

Today, the Sunday after Christmas, is the first day I have seen the sleepy side of Manaus.  It has experienced an enormous boom in population and, as with much of Brazil, money is becoming more plentiful.  This leads to extraordinary traffic with cars crawling for miles and miles.  The air fills with diesel smoke from the buses that snake through the center.  But today, hardly a car moved through the downtown.  The wide streets today were pleasant avenues that one could leisurely amble across, rather than playing the usual game of Frogger.  Looking down the empty streets to the Rio Negro in the distance, the city at last felt peaceful and pleasant.  Tomorrow, no doubt, it will be life as usual.

Tomorrow I return the suit I managed to rent.  I will try to track down my small bag, and I may try to finally get that elusive yellow fever shot.  Then on Tuesday, I finally make my way into the jungle.  There I will have not internet, little electricity, and for a few days will not even think about getting work done.  I celebrate the new year's arrive in the jungle lodge, then return to Manaus on the 1st.  The next day I depart once again for Bogota.

Short Update from Manaus

While I could go on at some length, here are just a few small updates.

The most surprising thing about Brazil is that Coke Zero is popular here.

I am staying in a dorm room in a hostel.  My room has an air conditioner.  It's one of those air conditioners where the cooling comes from a long rectangular box attached to some fan elsewhere -- most likely on the roof.  This situation poses several challenges.  The first is that whoever installed the air conditioner did not account for draining its condensation.  Thus each night over a gallon of water drips from it and falls about seven feet into several buckets lining the floor.  This is not a noiseless process.  Secondly, one's roommates have varying concepts of how to manage a room with an air conditioner.  To some, it is appropriate to only mostly close the eight foot tall door to the room or, when coming into the room at 6am to rifle through their possessions, leave it open entirely.  If it were not 85 degrees and so humid you expect at any moment to see fish floating by, this might be a viable strategy.

But this petty complaint is hardly representative of my time here.  I have made industrious use of the hammock on the roof deck, and have almost cleared out my Yahoo inbox (down to 24 unread messages!)  Today's adventure will be trying to rent a suit in Portuguese.  Can it be done with the words "Please" "Thank you" "Sorry" "Yes" "No" and the numbers between one in ten?  We'll find out!

In the Middle of the Amazon

I’m in the middle of the Amazon!  Well, along with two million other people in the capital of the region: Manaus.  Not only this, but I arrived on time and with all of my luggage.  Just to recap – I’ve now flown Boston to Atlanta to Fort Lauderdale to Atlanta to Bogota to Sao Paolo to Manaus.  I have been very busy these last few days so I have some catching up to do with the writing, so I’ll try to do that over the next couple of entries.

Tamar, my Manaus-ian friend from graduate school, is getting married here on the 26^th of December, which was all the reason I needed to take my first trip to Brazil.  Tamar is the kind of person who, in the midst of wedding planning meetings, would shoot off and pick you up at the airport.  This an analogy with considerable factual grounding.  She and her sister Nina brought me to their house, a lovely place in the northern suburbs, where I met her mother as well and had a tasty lunch.  She arranged a ride for me to my hotel which was interesting in that the driver spoke no English and I just about no Portuguese.  It was a little tricky to find, but ultimately we ended up in a situation where I was convinced it was half a block up the road and he was not, but I had no way of saying, "I'm pretty sure it's half a block that way."  Fortunately the word for "wait" is just about the same in Spanish, so I ran up the road, verified the hostel location, and all was right in world.

The hostel is pretty typical.  Somewhat musty but spacious rooms, thinly separated by my fan is loud enough to compensate for that.  My clock tells me it is 87.5 degrees in my room.  That feels about right, but with the fan going I don't mind.  The guy working the front desk is buried in the computer, largely disinterested in the goings on.  Several people are lounging in the heat watching Brazilian TV or reading books on assorted couches in a lobby area.  There is a nice open area on the roof where one could sit and look at parts of the city.  Tomorrow I'll be stocking up on a bit of food to do some of my own cooking in the kitchen here.

Last night I switched three time zones in a five hour flight to Sao Paolo where I had to wait four hours to fly three-ish hours back (and two time zones) to Manaus (think flying New York to Chicago via San Francisco) so overall I did not get a lot of sleep.  I'm going to try to make up for that now.

Not Where I Meant to Be

Hello. This blog will track my year-long plan to travel in South America doing volunteer work and figuring out what I want to be when I grow up. For now, just a short entry.

I should be on a plane to Bogotá, Colombia, but I missed my flight. I blame Ft Lauderdale - Hollywood International Airport. I feel downright tricked. You see, I had plenty of time to make my connection, but foolishly idled away my time watching a departures board for a gate assignment that never came. Basically Delta listed the flight without any gate information, while the real information could only be found in another terminal, listed by Avianca (the operator of the Delta flight). When I finally showed up, sweating and distressed, in what I'll call the "Avianca Terminal" (this despite any Avianca signage or personnel) the flight was still marked "On Time" although it had clearly "Departed."

So I sure was bummed to miss the plane, but the folks are Delta were very nice and got me all set up with a hotel and a flight for tomorrow. Apparently, this happens often. It does not seem like a hard problem to solve, but there you go.

I'm rather tired so I'm going to check out the Airport Hilton and maybe save any potential exploration of Ft Lauderdale until tomorrow morning (my flight out is tomorrow afternoon).