Please help me make sense of this
Trip Start
May 21, 2007
1
13
44
Trip End
Mar 30, 2008
Dourados,
Brazil
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Showers: Now I'm led to believe that this is a continent-wide phenomenon, but can someone please explain to me why the average Brazilian hotel/hostel seems to feel it appropriate to mix water and electricity in such a ham-fisted fashion? Serial mini-electrocutions await us for the next 4 months as we run the gauntlet of the crappiest collection of electric showers I have ever seen, obviously wired in the dark by lobster-clawed misguided handymen.
Suicide shower
It's not as if the water even leaves them at a temperature approaching hot - it's just charged when it hits your body, which maybe is supposed to give your skin the impression of warmth.
Naive as I am, I started thinking that a guy importing Triton showers could really make a killing (without killing anyone else if you catch my drift) until I saw a new shower head for sale in a supermarket for 12 scabby euro! Now, who pays 12 euro for a bloody home appliance that makes all the difference between a good start to the day and a dead one?
OK. Poor people. I see where you're going with that.
Poor People: Developing country? Check. Some heavy doses of poverty? Check. But I'm beginning to notice that strangely enough, Brazil seems to have some of the least-poor people I'm ever likely to meet.
Spending time in a developing nation does give you a different sense of what wealth really is. I mean, if no-one else in your town (or state) seems to have much money, then the fact that your car is a 1963 Ford pickup doesn't really matter. Nor does it matter that your clothes are all that fancy, that your TV isn't a 42" plasma jobbie or that your house doesn't have a hot-tub. I reckon that far fewer Brazilians than you'd think actually consider themselves 'poor' in the way I had originally thought.
And it's nice. No-one targets you as a gringo that they can make a fast buck out of (having said that, that I'm increasingly unshaven probably helps keep them at a respectful distance). Everyone seems happy and quick to smile - and to help out wherever they can. And of course, being surrounded by people with this attitude, you yourself start to appreciate the little things a little bit more.
On that note, please see entry on 'showers' above.
And on the same 'poor developing country' note, I can't help but think of the roads in Brazil. Oh, the roads. They would make a Dublin M50 commuter weep with the open, uncongested, sheer multi-laned beauty of it all. WTF were we doing in Ireland while the rest of the planet was building motorways? Brazil may have developed a reputation for fine footballers, but the motorway maestros are another story. Maybe Ayrton Senna had something to do with it.
Ayrton Senna enjoying the Brazilian road system.
Recycling: This ones daft, but I sort of expected that developing countries would be inherently wasteful of raw materials, and would be unconcerned with recycling. Being eco-friendly was, I thought, a luxury that many countries couldn't afford.
On yet another note, I score a prejudicial own goal.
Because so many people live closer to the breadline than in developed states, there are many more people for whom recycling is a financially rewarding way of life. Up and down the beaches in Rio trudged ordinary guys and gals picking up litter, not because they are paid to do it but because they can make a few bucks out of recycling cans and bottles. All through the country towns we've passed through, 'rag and bone' men sort through other peoples garbage to pick out anything of any meagre value.
The mantra of waste not want not seems alive and well. The eco-friendly Brazilian shames some of our 'disposable consumer' Westernised ideals.
So long as you can overlook the destruction of the rain forests yadda yadda yadda. They'll grow back. There's like, SO many of them. Trees I mean.
