Dateline Brazil

BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL Our third full day in Brazil and a pattern emerges. Since we are four hours ahead of Seattle, we have our mornings to be flaneurs wandering the streets looking at trees, studying the buildings, stopping for coffee and second breakfasts as we please.  We awake at 6:30AM and have breakfast, catchup on the news, meditate and then, weather permitting, take a leisurely walk around the neighborhood.  Every morning is like a weekend morning, but then, after a quick lunch, C&G Enterprises International opens for business. Each day, before work, we have six hours to wander and wonder. The effort now is to not allow those hours to slip away, but do something meaningful: study Portuguese, read, exercise, write, draw and think. So much to do and so little time.  Be well, gb

BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL    And then the day you anticipated arrives and time, forever flowing at the same pace, does what it does. Friday comes and we catch a plane, and then another, and then another. We arrive at our final airport exhausted but alert to these familiar and yet dreamlike surroundings. We hop into a cab and drive through streets festooned with blank stares. We eventually, happily drag our bags up a flight of stairs and get situated. We take a shower and grab some bills to go buy a chicken to eat. We go to sleep with our bellies uncomfortably full. During the night I stumble down a strange hallway several times to a different bathroom to do the same thing. I wake up in a new place.  A city is a huge creature and you can only touch very small parts of it. And now, with COVID making the rounds, it's difficult to get to know the city. We aren't locked in our apartment, but venturing out is not the freewheeling adventure it normally is in a new city surrounded by unfa

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA     Laurence Remila: Can one live without working?     Raoul Vaneigem: We can only live without working.  I think that sums it up nicely. I am fully aware that work is required, but is it possible we work too much, that we spend our days working to accumulate things that come to represent our lives? How many hours of our lives are invested in that new couch or that dinner at the new restaurant everyone is talking about? If asked, would we have wanted to give up 40 hours of our prime days to pay for the best of something when the suitable would have been enough? Add it all together and these things represent years of our lives that are gone forever. We still have that thing, but would we rather have spent the time doing something of our own choosing? Then the question goes to another level, are the mass of men capable of doing anything other than working and consuming? Are we capable of pursuing an original thought or is simple mimicry and watching others creat

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA As our day of departure nears, we start to think more about the circumstances under which we are going to Brazil. There is a worldwide pandemic underway which isn't the best time to be traveling. Of course this isn't a normal trip. We aren't going to be vacationing in Brazil; we will be working and our movements there will be limited to walks around town and, maybe, a few drives to some of the local sights. And, of course, we plan to go to Sao Paulo to see our daughter. These are not normal times.  I think we will bring our suitcases up this week and start packing a few things. Be free. gb  

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, USA Three weeks from the start of our trip to Brazil and two days after the Biden, Trump debate. Somehow it feels sad to be here. COVID has definitely added to this feeling of American loneliness and isolation. I know it's not the case everywhere, and some of this feeling is my own disposition, but America feels more lonely than other countries where I have spent time. And Seattle feels more lonely than other places I have been in the United States. That makes Seattle the loneliest place in the world. Driving around this city, a supposedly rich city, leaves me wondering where is all the money going? It's certainly not towards maintaining the city's infrastructure. Yes, we are building some sort of a train system, but that will take us from one crap place to another. We can get from the airport to downtown to Capitol Hill to Northgate. Basically from one Subway sandwich shop or T-Mobile store to another one. We can get from one level of depressing to an