Evolving Porto Alegre

Porto Alegre like all the world´s cities is a ragbag of the great and the dire. I love living here quite like I love Lemmy from Motorhead, warts´n´all, but there´s room for improvement. Much smaller than London it offers many things we Londoners don’t have and we can learn from the way of life here as no doubt Alegrenses learn from our gross and gourdy metropolis. Obviously the first thing that should change in Brazil is the huge gulf between rich and poor which leads to crime and destitution the world over, but apart from that here is my list of things I think PoA could do with and without…

Do with:

garam masala - bring your own or see if you can find it in the public market!

Curry: If an Alegrense says they like spicy food they´re telling black lies, there isn´t one good Indian restaurant in the whole town. Not one. Where are the nosebleed vindaloos? Can I even get an authentic chicken tikka masala? Visitors, bring your own gram masala and colman´s mustard with you. See also branston pickle and cheddar cheese!

Bus timetables – Bus shelters, half-pipes of corrugated iron, line the streets but you learn more about jesus and strip joints than you do the times and destinations of the sadly characterless buses. Import those retro buses from Argentina, they´re far more exotic, and put up timetables.

where are we going?

Cycle lanes – When I first arrived here in 2011, a manifestation by cyclists for better facilities and safer roads made world headlines when a maniac plowed into it with his car. Fortunately no one was killed. Since then there still aren´t cycle paths on the road and motorists are as selfish as ever. Why not go green and replace the lane slaloming taxis with rickshaws or make them solar powered with max speeds of 20mph?

Monkeys – I don´t get why anyone would be proud that Porto Alegre doesn´t have monkeys and think us foreigners ignorant or rude for expecting them. Since when was having cute little monkeys a bad thing? The mata atlantica used to belong to them, species like the blond capuchins are all endangered now so reintroduce them, it´s not like you don´t have enough trees.

More saliva – I love sharing a chimarrão with strangers but why not share ice lollies and cutlery as well?

Others: sound time-keeping, cheaper dvds and snow at Christmas

Things PoA can do without:

Giselle Bundchen – If you blindfolded a newcomer to Brazil and took them from Salgado Filho airport to the centro historico, the shock of so many ugly people would make them think they´d entered the twilight zone by mistake. Porto Alegre has more than its fair share of beautiful women, enticing us ugly expats to your shores, but be honest, you have a plethora of different people of all shapes and sizes and too much body consciousness to sustain them. Be proud of everyone not just the size zeros and vacuous supermodels.

The Beatles and ACDC – Okay, they´re great, I get it. But while universidade sertanejo and Brazilian funk deservedly take the flak, the gaucho mobsession with these two bands is chatissimo (really boring). Putting your baby in an ACDC t-shirt makes ACDC less cool and makes you a moron.

This building – 

unfinished since 1956

Maniac Taxi Drivers: If you want to feel like a princess here, take a taxi. Within minutes of hurtling down the road you will feel like Princess Diana. The fast lane in Brazil is whatever lane your taxi happens to be in.

Others: rip-off internet shops, stripclub flyers all over the pavement (use blue tack) and the facebook page for estrangeiros/foreigners in Porto Alegre which is oddly unfriendly and snooty.

But what can we Londoners take from Porto Alegre?... I will blog about that soon!

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Practicing Portugese in Porto Alegre

´Rua Lima e Silva,´ I repeat for the third time. ´Por favor!´ The cab driver understands and we set off.  ´American?´ He asks. ´Não Búlgaro,´ I say. ´Eu sou da Bulgaria´. The cab driver turns round in astonishment, ´Sêrio?´ - we almost crash and I grab the puta merda handle. ´Sim,´I reply. ´Da Sofia´… I smile to myself, now I have a captive listener to practice my Portugese on. In the following 10 minute cab journey, I manage to articulate the enormous differences between Brazil and Bulgaria in the food, weather and geography all in my best pigeon Portugese! The cab driver is genuinely interested as I tell him my own story of how orphaned in the Great War I grew up in a forest, making a living as a chess hustler until I was given a place at the prestigious Sophia University of Espionage. All lies of course, I´ve never even been to Bulgaria and am pretty sure their currency isn´t Dumplings, but we´re not talking English, we´re talking Portugese, the language I´ve spent the last 2 years learning and until I invented my alter-ego Englebert hardly ever got a chance to use.

Typical reaction when I try to speak Portugese

You see being a native English speaker in Brazil is a blessing and a curse. One´s as surrounded by friends wanting to practice their English as a lightbulb besieged by moths. You´re held in very high esteem: you´re an ambassador, a philosopher, a wordsmith and raconteur. You´re all these things and more, while you´re speaking English. When you open your gob and mangled Portugese comes out, then you can see the smiles drop, interest snap, you´re suddenly a dolt, a burden, a malfunctioning robot. How many times I´ve had my friends beg me to ´Speak English!´?  How many times do they let me get halfway through an anecdote before detonating my grammar mistakes, leaving its ending hanging in the air? I have one friend with superlative English who translates everything I say in Portugese back to me in English. ´Me passa um copo´ ´Pass you a cup?´  Yeh, thanks mate.

Oooô lariá laiô obá obá obá

One night I was invited by some friends to watch them play Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, surprisingly, it´s as popular over here as say football. For five hours, I listened and understood almost everything they said to each other in Portugese. For five hours, I journeyed through towns of vampires, battled giant worms and watched spells being cast and mice having sex. All in Portugese. The only time the magic of the roleplay was interrupted was when one of the gamers would speak to me, and when they did they spoke in English! Come on guys, what the hell? 

Some of my friends have begun humoring me with the odd five minutes here and there, and for those brief spells my shackles are lifted and I can see the light of day, but then it´s suddenly over and it´s back into your hole you wretched troglodyte. And thus Englebert was born, the bane of shopkeepers. As myself I would shyly mumble for paracetamol only for the shopkeeper to look in a bread oven and tell me ´no more´, leaving me to shuffle off dejected. But Englebert doesn´t give up, he talks over those who would speak English at him. He wants not your pity. ´Uma maça´ ´An apple?´ ´Não eu quero uma maça, droga!´

People here seem taken aback that you´re trying to learn Portugese. In London, we´ve developed a facility for understanding peculiar pronunciations of the Queen´s.  Porto Alegrenses and Brazilians will also need this listening skill because while English is now the world language, many non-English Engleberts will descend in great waves upon this city in 2014 and 2016. Moreover, they need to be considerate of the few lonely expats who already live here and see grasping the lingo as the key to a richer life in this wonderful city.

Some tips for practicing your Portugese:

- Go to the church, synagogue, mosque or espirtualist temple and join in with prayers out loud

-Teach English to beginner students where a bit of translation is acceptable

-Find a Brazilian girlfriend or boyfriend, preferably someone who has never tried to decipher the lyrics of their favourite band

- Go to Subway or a supermarket where you can assemble your own sandwich

-Commit to memory the following volumes: dungeons and dragons – livro do jogador and livro dos monstros

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Beer in Brazil Part Deux

An English man, a Scottish man and an Irish man walk into a pub in Porto Alegre…. The joke´s on them, there are no Pubs, no real pubs, in Porto Alegre as far as I can tell after 2 years here.  Not pubs as we would understand them in any case. This is not a slur just an innocent observation as there are some inextricable differences in atmosphere, method, blah and blah. That said, there are lots of good, some great, Pubstitutes. Some of them are even called Pubs as opposed to Bars to make them easier to spot.

Say you fancy a liquid lunch, pubs in Porto Alegre don´t usually open till about 6pm so you´ll find yourself having to sit in a neon-blanched lanchonette sharing a midday drinking sesh with retirees. To get a good beer at that time of day the best place I know is Café Cantante in Bom Fim. The staff are nice and you´ll never be alone as there are other lonely people sat in close proximity to you sipping their coffee, reading the paper and wobbling about on the dainty furniture.

Kerouac- Best English night in the city

After 6pm on a Tuesday (the beginning of the drinking week for most locales) you can find a variety of botecos, bars and pseudo-pubs in the area of Cidade Baixa. All of the pubs have table service which means you rarely get up save to go to the bathroom but makes it difficult to mingle.  When you enter these establishments you are given a comanda, a slip of paper on which your orders are tallied and which you lose under pain of a billion R$ fine. The fine is only to spook you, there´s no legal way they can make you pay it. The real problem with the comanda system is when you miscalculate your own funds.

Sadly, the vibrancy of cidade baixa has been coming under attack from a neighbourhood coalition demanding curfews. This has cut off the life blood to some smaller, newer pubs who depend on live music to keep going. The new pubs that don´t have an immediate buzz around them find themselves skittering around like Bambi on ice and are soon dead. The longevity of a pub is one of the deeper differences between back home and here. If you get the chance before it slips off the edge of the world then I heartily recommend the bluesy  beatnik bar the Kerouac Rock Pub in Cidade Baixa which has live music and a kick-ass English pub quiz (see Pub Quiz POA on facebook for info).

Bier Keller - where mugs defy gravity

Some other places I recommend:  First, the Bier Keller is a mysterious tavern hidden somewhere in Porto Alegre. It´s beautifully decorated and has a giant walk-in fridge stocked full of beers from around the world. Entry is by invitation only and it´s a little pricey but the atmosphere is wonderful. Second, the Malt Store in Petropolis is a shop offering a vast array of beers. It has a few tables for degustaçao, meaning you can drink yourself merry until about 10pm. Third, Imperial on the corner of Rua Santana, is a great, great boteco with ninja-fast service, top food and a real buzz. Last and my favourite pseudo-pub is Lagom. A brew-pub in Bom Fim where you can be served draught beers in pints and listen to Maiden!

Some places to avoid: It´d be unfair to name names. Certain irish bars near Redenção with their no havaiana policy (isn´t this Brazil?); an eponymously owned pub on Avenida Mariland where they´ll try to convince you that their sound system isn´t malfunctioning and that Robert Plant raps as fast as Apache Indian while simultaneously telling you that Baden on the menu means Baden Crystal and not Baden Golden which is 5r$ more please; a Bukowski joint which would be amazing if it had about 10 more floors to fit all the sardines in. 

I haven´t been to all of the so-called pubs here, whole streets and neighbourhoods are missing from my experience, and I imagine there´s many more wonderful surprises in store, perhaps even a real pub with London Pride on tap and KP nuts and Sunday roast. 

Sharing my experiences of beer in Brazil, how it´s served and where to find it! (Read part 1)

Now, if you're looking for bars with latin music in, try here.

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Beer in Brazil

My first close encounters with beer in Brazil were ordering pints of Brahma, Nove Schin and Kaiser and being given a Choppy instead. I couldn´t understand why I kept being given girly half-pints, half-full with espuma (head).  The beer was cold, so cold I burped ice cubes, and undeniably refreshing but basically tasteless and in lilliputian measures. What was going on?

Soon though I was to discover bottled beers and the strange and shady  world of casco-recycling.  Authentic churrasco is one of the wonders of the world, but unlike the Taj Mahal it goes better with a cold beer.  Big brown bottles of the stuff: Original, Bohemia, Serramalte, their labels slipping off from condensation. When you buy these beers from the shops, you´ll notice that each beer has two prices. That´s because if you bring your empty bottles back to the shop you just pay for what´s inside the casco! Not every bottle is recyclable though and if you build a collection of empties hoping to cash them in, be careful the grateful shopkeep keeps a proper tab. The charitable thing to do is to leave your empties on the street. Here selective littering is a form of charity, as hard laboring poor folk collect cardboard, cans and cascos for recycling.

One of the hardest things to deal with in our different drinking cultures is the Brazilian musketeer approach: All for one and one for all. A 600ml bottle of Original, roughly a pint, becomes property of the collective and is shared equally into pesky little half-pint glasses. The beer evaporates faster than agua com gas, it´s close cousin. Normally if I know my pint is about to be gang-banged,  I try to drink just a little bit faster than everybody else and be sure that I serve the drink, giving plenty of head  to Brazilians who see a lot of espuma as a mark of quality. Here there is no thumb-rule, draught beers from the Shamrock Irish bar to the boteco chopp dispensers are served as if it was bubble bath.

In London, we have a great range of craft ales, we even donate to CAMRA, a society to protect this endangered species. We care more about ales than we do pandas, by and large. If I was to survive Porto Alegre, I knew I would have to find something a little more palatable than thirst-quenching Original. Fortunately, Brazil is at the beginning of what I feel is a beer revolution. The economy is fermenting, people´s salaries are rising and with the world cup brewing, new pubs, breweries and shops are being opened. Yeast is so in right now, that even my wife has dropped out of uni to become a beer sommelier!

Generally, there is a huge mark-up on imported ales. Alas-alack-a-day, you can buy a Bishop´s Finger here but it costs an arm and a leg. Instead, rather than drink expensive imports you can find brilliant national beers.  Seasons, Coruja, Eisenbahn, Way, Helles, Colorado, Rasen, Bamburg and Backer all make good beers. Beers you´d gladly risk walking a mile at night to find.

The well-stocked ´Malt Store´ Cervejas Artesenais - Petropolis

Sharing my experiences of beer in Brazil, how it´s served and where to find it! (Read part 2)

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