Yeah, interning in São Paulo for the past 10 weeks at Mackenzie Presbyterian University has helped me make progress towards my career. But I completely underestimated how much this experience would cause me to reflect on myself, grow, and develop new habits and ways of thinking — I guess you can’t really know how a big mysterious change will affect you until after the fact. While I can’t exaggerate how wonderful of an academic opportunity this has been, through my internship with Mackenzie, as well as the neuroscience lab I worked in there, I’m want to write instead about my thoughts related to Brazilian culture and lifestyle from the perspective of a “gringo” (the lighthearted nickname Brazilians give foreigners). So, here are a couple of the most important lessons I have learned through the crazy adventure of adapting to a new country for the first time in my life.
1. American Icons Abroad
When I first arrived here, one of the first thoughts that hit me was: Wow, why is fresh, unprocessed food so cheap here? Stranger yet, all the large American restaurant chains were often more expensive than freshly cooked, healthier, and fuller options at “padarias” and snack bars. One time, I ordered a big mac burger from a McDonald’s, assuming I would get my food instantly. However, I was mind-boggled when 5 minutes of waiting became 10, which became 20. “American Fast Food,” in other words, is ironically often one of the slower options in Brazil.
Tasty salgados at a padaria
So why in the heck is anyone buying this stuff? Well the answer’s in the name: In the US, people buy American Fast Food because it’s fast — in Brazil, they buy it because it’s American. And it’s not just American food brands like McDonald’s, Popeyes, Burger King, and KFC — this trend is no less subtle in American (and European) clothing brands like GAP and Zara, technology brands like Apple, and film studios like Disney. It goes farther than just companies, too. I learned from an architecture professor at Mackenzie University that much of the architecture in Brazil is heavily influenced from Europe to make it more chic: I have seen numerous mansions designed with gabled roofs, which is completely pointless since it never snows here.
More shocking is how many young people speak English in São Paulo. True, it’s not like living in the United States — you can’t get around without knowing at least some Portuguese (since almost nobody my parent’s age or older speaks a lick of English). But chances are, if I try speaking to anyone living comfortably in their teens or twenties, they will try to respond to me in English. Learning English is a skill seen by all as attractive, and to some people, expected. It is common here for parents to send their children to schools where some or all classes are taught in English, and if you take a look at the many flyers taped to street lamps around São Paulo, it isn’t hard to find an advertisement for English lessons.
I have spent tons of my time here trying hard to learn Portuguese from scratch — and I am so grateful for the never-ending compliments and encouragement I receive when talking to Brazilians in their language (very rudimentarily, by the way). Learning a new language from scratch is hard, but luckily Mackenzie offered me and Dara, my travel partner, biweekly language lessons, plus I always had an endless supply of Brazilian students to practice with during the internship. But it makes me sad when I compare my language learning experience with theirs. Most of the English-speaking Brazilians I have met are so much more fluent in English than I am in Portuguese (even now, after almost 3 months living here) and impressively, a large number of them have never even stepped foot in an English speaking country. So many Brazilians who speak to me in English become embarrassed and apologize for their grammar or pronunciation, even though I can almost always understand them perfectly. Whenever I speak Portuguese to Brazilians, though, they are simply excited to hear me speak their language at all, whether I can communicate myself or not.
Unfortunately, these double standards between speaking English and Portuguese are only growing farther apart. One of the primary ways the presence of English in Brazil spreads is through media, especially entertainment content consumed by children. Whenever I asked especially fluent English speakers here how they learned the language, most of them referenced Disney movies, American TV shows, music, or communication through video games. And whenever someone tells me they’ve been to the United States before, I am right about 70% of the time when I guess they’ve seen Disney World. Heck, I’m willing to bet that most of the friends I have met here have seen more animated American movies than I have!
What I have come to notice is how much of an impact virtual global connectivity has had on spreading American culture. For one, the generational difference in knowledge of English language and culture is astounding. For instance, I met a friend here in São Paulo who is completely fluent in English, and her 13-year-old younger brother is fluent too. He told me he learned English primarily through American Hip Hop music and Minecraft YouTube videos. Just earlier today, I visited their house with Dara to pick up a couple things we left there, and we had a conversation (in English) with the two siblings in front of their mom. While we talked, their mother kept staring at her son then back at us, and finally, after about 10 minutes she exclaimed: “Entendem o que ele tá dizendo?!” (“You can understand what he’s saying?!”). She was so surprised because she had no idea her son was able to communicate seamlessly with native English speakers like me and Dara — we were the first two Americans he had ever spoken to face-to-face, in fact. After all, our friend and her brother were the only people in the entire family who knew any English, so how could she know his fluency?
It’s not just our friend’s family — we have met dozens of other Brazilians around our age who learned English independently from their families, through a desire to consume American media. Consumption of media is both problematic and vindicating for Brazillians. For instance, Mackenzie University took us to a Guaraní indigenous people reserve in a forest located in a neighborhood in the northwest region of São Paulo called Jaraguá. There, a Guaraní representative expressed to us their concerns due to a growing rebellion against the Guaraní way by the youngest generation, who had found access to the internet. Walking around the area, it was clear many of the kids were disconnected from the world their parents were in, some wearing branded clothing and others listening to music with headphones. Many of these children, we learned, felt ennui at learning the Guaraní language, too, further threatening such a deep-rooted culture.
On the other side of things, big entertainment media has given Brazilians the means to, as they put it, “reverse-colonize” Portugal. See, Brazilian Portuguese and culture is incredibly different from the Portuguese spoken in Portugal due to the large influence of various diasporas, indigenous populations, and immigration. In fact, the Portuguese in either country may as well be classified as an entirely different language! Before social media became so popular, Brazilian culture was not able to spread back to Portugal very easily due to the distance and a lack of Brazilian immigrants. In the past 5 years, though, immigration from Brazil to Portugal has sharply increased and Brazilians are already the most populous foreign group there. Through the means of social media and immigration, many Brazilians tease, Portugal is slowly transforming into a land where Brazilian slang, memes, and popular culture are felt throughout.
But at the same time that the Guaraní and Portugal culture is being influenced by popular Brazilian culture, Brazilian culture is becoming influenced more by English-speaking entertainment media. I always knew that this was happening in foreign countries, but it’s a different story to see American influence firsthand. It’s weird to go to a bar and hear Katy Perry or Coldplay on the speakers and see all the most expensive drinks listed in English to make them sound fancier, all the while surrounded by people speaking Portuguese, with a shareable bucket of salty Brazilian pastels on their table. After all, the food is fresher here, the music is addictive, and I would even say the language is more interesting than English — there are certain words that are untranslatable to English like “saudade” which describes the feeling of missing someone dearly or “cafuné” which means affectionately running one’s fingers through another’s hair. I guess what I’m trying to say is, the Brazilian style is wonderful, and it seems crazy to me for a place with such great traditions and an awesome way of life to idolize the US when it comes to mainstream culture.
Pastel and Caldo de Cana (sugar cane juice) at a Traditional Feira
2. How to Live
If you have ever visited Brazil, you’ll likely agree with me when I say that it feels like Brazilians have a certain zest for life. Most of my friends here, as well as random people I meet at events, bars, and stores are really good social navigators, in touch with their emotions, and seem to live life fuller than most Americans I know. The whole concept of anxiety here is either deflated or it’s expressed in different ways which cause people to be less closed-off from each other than in the US. There’s a bigger emphasis on separation of life and work, and my friend once told me Brazilians are used to “trabalhando bastante a boca” (loosely translated: “working a lot by mouth”) meaning they talk a lot at work.
One time I went to a bar with my friend who studies law and she introduced me to some friends she made the week prior who were video game developers (sidenote: a law degree here is awarded as an undergraduate degree, and you can start practicing law just 5 years after graduating high school. The same goes for medicine which takes 6 years!). It was kind of a funny experience because it seemed like the entire game studio was there: there were voice actors, script writers, graphic designers, coders, and bug testers. At this point, I had only been in Brazil for around 3 weeks, and my Portuguese was terrible. But the crazy thing is, even though I was surrounded by all these people I had just met who were speaking a different language with each other, I didn’t feel out of place. My friend and the game studio people were excited to talk to me, and they even invited me to a party at their house just 30 minutes after I introduced myself!
People are so eager to reach out and mix in São Paulo, both emotionally and physically. From the way you greet people (women with a hug and a kiss on the cheek and men with a handshake and semi-embrace), to the way many Brazilians will share their gossip with you less than an hour after meeting them, to the normality of public french kissing — at first it kind of felt to me like the skin on everyone’s skin was replaced by plexiglass, their whole beings open on display. But it is hard not to appreciate how open and expressive people are, and how much less present the embarrassment is to express some part of your true self always. Why have I not been faster to open myself up to people when I first meet them, and so averse to expressing myself more, I wonder? It feels so much better to treat everyone like your friend until they’re not than the other way around.
Eating a Mortadela Sandwich
Brazil knows how to throw parties. First they’ve got “festa juninas,” country-themed, family-oriented parties thrown by elementary/high schools with loaded hot dogs and pastel (fried dough with filling) where students perform their rehearsed dances for everyone. There are also samba street parties where performers play musical instruments like the Cavaquinho and Pandeiro to a fast 3-step beat and people drink as they “sambar” (the verb form of samba which means to dance samba style). Then there are the clubs and college parties. Since the drinking age is only 18 here, college students don’t have to resort to drinking behind closed doors, and parties often have open bars. It’s popular to mix energy drinks with shots, and the Brazilian funk music doesn’t usually stop until 5am or around sunrise.
Going to these parties and social events has been a great way to meet new people here — especially since most people are excited to meet gringos. Every day, I feel more as if the most important part of this experience is the people I’ve met along the way. It helps that I’m in a faraway place where nobody knows who I am, but I have a feeling being here has made me more comfortable approaching people, too.
Just a side note — it has been super difficult to learn Portuguese from the beginning in such a short stay, but it has been super worth it. This isn’t only because learning a new language makes your brain healthier or gives you a reason to feel smart, it’s because you can’t really know someone until you speak their first language with them. There’s so much personality that’s locked behind the door of the extra cognition and unfamiliarity it takes for someone to speak in a language they don’t often use to crack jokes or talk to friends. Plus, Portuguese contains so many expressions and “palavrãos” (curse words) that don’t make sense in English that you’re just missing out on a higher level of communication if you only speak to Brazilians in English. This isn’t to say that I’m completely fluent, or even nearly fluent in Portuguese (that would be ridiculously impressive). But it makes me so happy when I’m in on the jokes my Brazilian friends create, can learn about the life of a random man sitting next to me on the bus, or have a laugh with a peppy teenager trying to sell me fake Gucci in an outdoor “feira.”
3. Understanding My Place in Brazil
Remember how I said earlier that I bought a Big Mac? Guess how much it cost. If you guessed R$26,90 or $4.76 USD, you would be correct. But wait — earlier I mentioned that American food is a more expensive option in Brazil, but a Big Mac in Chicago, my hometown, is $5.35 USD, a whole 59 cents more expensive! So, it would seem, McDonald’s in Brazil is actually cheaper than in the United States.
The answer is actually much more complicated. For an American traveling to Brazil, exchanging United States dollars for Brazilian reais, sure, the American pays slightly less for the burger. But this is only due to the fact that the exchange rate between USD and Reais heavily favors the dollar. Exchange rates between two countries are under the influence of various market, economic, and political forces, which makes it almost impossible for travelers to understand the true value of a foreign country’s currency in the context of its workers salaries and cost of living. To get a better view of how hard people have to work to buy things in other countries, try looking for estimates of the purchasing power parity between the two nations. For instance, the exchange rate between the US dollar and the Brazilian real is around 5.65 reais per US dollar at the time I’m writing this. The purchasing power parity, though, estimates that in Brazil, one can buy around the same amount of goods for 2.44 reais as United States citizens can buy domestically for 1 dollar. This means that us Americans paying for things with USD underestimate how costly everything in Brazil feels for the people who live there by over two times! In conclusion: yes, a McDonald’s Big Mac is effectively more expensive for the people living here in Brazil than for Americans living in the United States (and smaller too, by the way).
Price of a Big Mac in Reais
Why am I telling you this? Because it’s easy to find yourself in an embarrassing situation if you don’t know how expensive things are perceived domestically in another country. This happened to me a lot at first, before I learned from Brazilians about their typical salaries. For instance, one time I was looking for a shirt to buy as a souvenir, and stumbled upon this nice navy blue and yellow shirt that read BRAZIL across the front. When I asked how much it was, the cashier told me: “140 Reais.” Now this was a really nice shirt, and the quality was great, so I was thrilled. After all, that’s just under $25 USD, which would be a great deal back in the states. “Wow, that’s a good deal!” I said to the Brazilians I was with, who looked back at me confusedly and with their mouths open. “No, really, that’s not cheap, but it’s probably the best deal you’re gonna get,” one of them responded amusedly. I still bought it, but I made sure to keep my thoughts to myself when it came to prices after that day.
I said I wouldn’t talk about academics here, but I can’t help it with how impactful the work we’ve done with Mackenzie University has been on my personal growth as well as my understanding of how the pieces of this country fit together. Over many weeks, Mackenzie professors and students facilitated in-depth discussions with Dara and I about the reality of environmental sustainability and water management in Brazil. We were taken to places all around São Paulo to see firsthand both the problems and successes we learned about in the classroom. By the end, we had created a business idea related to sustainability in the context of Brazil using what we had learned.
The reason I’m bringing this up here is because it helped me solidify my self-image in Brazil. Before coming, I had lots of concerns about the ethical implications of me visiting the country on a stipend: Will me being there cause more harm than good? Is it messed up for me to live on US dollars? Should I go into this experience with the intention to fix something or just to immerse and inform myself?
The more I allowed myself to lean on Mackenzie’s resources, learn, and observe, the more I realized how crazy the notion really is that a twenty year old gringo who has never stepped foot in Brazil may travel here and magically make some wide-reaching change that does any more good than harm all by themselves. It became perfectly clear to me just how necessary it would be to immerse myself into life here as well as learn as much as possible about the country’s domestic affairs, politics, bureaucracy, economy, cultural values, subcultures, history, and everything in between, in order to even start to speculate any change would affect all these different groups of people here. And as I’m not here to sightsee and be a tourist, I’m here to learn and immerse myself with all the time I have.
I did say that I came up with a business idea related to sustainability in São Paulo, and it might sound like this project directly contradicts what I just said. But there’s one huge difference and silver lining to the existentialist feeling that you may not be able to make a change that works in the context of a different country: help from the people who live here. I see it this way: I’m not able to intuitively understand how a change will impact people in Brazil. But, I grew up in such a different environment from the people here who can intuitively understand (or have the requisite knowledge to make a good guess), that I’m good at generating ideas that may not cross many resident’s minds. Unsurprisingly, I usually realize these ideas suck after I run them by Brazilians, but sometimes bits and pieces of them spark new ideas which then sparks productive conversation.
And I think that’s why I’m here: To facilitate conversations between people with such different lives who otherwise never would have met. To realize how useful it is to joke around with, party, relate to, love, or solve problems with people who live such different lives — to explore new foods, clothing, or memes with new people and see yourself in their shoes. People are only ever going to become more connected over the internet as time moves forward, and it’s worth it to get used to listening and learning from all different types of people. I mean — you should see how many Brazilians follow my LinkedIn and Instagram now! (heh). I bet in 20 years, I’ll still remember the man next to me on a 90 minute bus ride who taught me outdated slang and introduced me to his son on the phone. I’ll remember the family of four I met waiting in a line to leave Pão de Açúcar and their 10-year-old kid who told me about how he had played all the Super Mario games. I’ll remember the Austrian ex-bodyguard who served Belgian politicians and formula one drivers. And of course I’ll remember my travel partners — Dara, Erica, and Shay — and all my awesome Brazilian friends I met through Mackenzie and our friend (and Loewenstern Fellow) Juliana who lives in Brazil. It’s been quite an adventure, and I’d do it again a million times.
Me, Dara, and Brazilian Friends from Mackenzie 🙂