Contextualising things is never fun, especially as a writer who is most often suited to fictional writing, where you can avoid contextual information by forcing your characters to have a flash back or a dream or something equally as creative. So I'm going to be brief here, for your sake, but mostly for my own.
I landed in Brazil on the 1st January 2015 with £1,200 in my Barclays Bank account, my guitar, a back full of clothes, and a small hand-luggage bag with my laptop, phone and iPod safely wrapped inside. I had no expectations on what my time here would be like, due to the advice of my friend Tom who was also standing beside me in the blazing sun as we walked out the airport into the 30 degree sloppy heat of Rio di Janeiro. Having expectations is never wise, whether they be good or bad. If you expect the worst and get the worst then yes, you're better prepared, but you can be assured that however you imagined the worst turning out, it happened in a completely different manner.
After a stressful arrival in Heathrow where I had to buy two tickets to Argentina for March so that we were allowed to enter Brazil on a tourist visa, we had finally made it after a connection in Rome, to our final destination of Brazil. We were happy, tired, sad, hungry and poor, in a foreign country, with foreign people, who spoke a language we didn't know, to go and stay with people we'd never heard of, and pay with a currency which made no sense.
I remember noticing a few things that went against my original perception of Brazil. Stereotypically Brazil is hot, tropical, full of amazing beaches which are full of amazing women, home of the coconut and country of an overwhelming amount of 'wonders-of-the-world'-deserving architecture. None of this was obvious as we walked out of the main airport in Rio, Galeau, where all you could see was a load of tall, gray, concrete structures that looked like the inside of a multi-storey, and a road full of taxis with weathered Brazilian men trying to grab you and take you away to God-knows-where. We made it, in one piece surprisingly, after a ridiculous taxi drive to the Monastery of St Benedict in north Rio. Yet again, nothing as expected, tall, white, dark inside, gold adorned Church-style Monastery was completely against the norm of my expectations.
A huge, gargantuan amount has happened here in Brazil. Far far too much for me to write in one sitting unless I decided I wanted to dedicate the younger years of my life to composing a new Bible. However I wish to write anecdotes, and my comments on the stuff that has happened here, with as much (or as little, depending on the story) detail as possible.
The most important thing to realise is that Brazil has not, by any means, been a big ole' load of jolly fun, rather a stream of different roads all leading downhill at times. Of course, often the worst moments in our lives are the best experiences, but it certainly never feels like it at the time.
Yet, contextually, I am here, and have been here for three months. I am alive, and well, three-thousand mosquito bites, a fall off a skateboard, and about twenty colds later. I have money (very little), I have friends (at the beginning about thirty, now I can count them on one hand) I have two books (one read, one half read) I have my laptop, my phone and my iPod. These things are what have meant the most to me over the last three months. Sadly I cannot take all these things home with me. Apart for the mosquitoes. Those buggers can stay in Brazil.
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