metro station liberdade

in the morning we rushed to get to liberdade, the japanese section of the city, because we were supposed to meet up with the others for a tour of universidade de são paulo (usp) being led by my "cousin". my cousin told me in japanese to meet at "liberdade no kouen" which means the park in liberdade. he said the park is right across the street from the metro station. immediately outside of the station are some vendors and i decided to ask them where the park is. i heard two elderly people speaking japanese and decided to ask them in japanese "kouen wa doko desu ka?" (where is the park?) and they just had a blank look on their face so i pressed on, "chikaku ni kouen aru deshou. doku ni arimasu ka?" (isn't there a park near here. where is it?). the lady pointed down a street and said it's that way. i heard the man she was talking to ask her in japanese if there is a park around here. i didn't hear her answer. but i lead us down that way and was getting too far away for a park to be just across from the metro station. so we starting going around, making a circle around the metro station, seeing no sign of a park. we kept trying to ask shopkeepers if they spoke english, spanish, or japanese. a big no to all three languages. so we tried in broken portuguese to ask where the park is and no one had any fucking clue. finally i stumbled upon some old japanese handing out flyers for jesus or something and they spoke japanese. so i asked them and they said that this is the park. we were standing nearby some construction. they said that it's going to be built into a park. hmm... ok, whatever. we headed towards where we had originally started walking from and that's when i saw the group gathered on the corner. i looked up and realized the street is called praç liberdade which means "liberdade park". oh my fucking god!!!

liberdade

we made some chit-chat with everyone and waited...and waited. there was no need to rush because the bus is late due to some okinawans just arriving at the airport. great... we're going to be here for awhile. might as well check out some shops. besides that, i really gotta pee. we start wandering and there's no restaurant open for me to use the restroom. i see a place that looks like a decent sized shopping place. there must be a restroom there so i go in. thankfully my instincts were right. after that we check out a shop and buy some snacks for the day. later when we tried the mochi we bought, it was too sweet and artificial tasting. nothing at all like the mochi i get in LA which tastes like mochi from japan, in my opinion. again at the shops, no one seemed to know japanese. the store we bought the snacks in had some okinawan mark in there and i wondered if the place was maybe run by okinawans. i wanted to ask the clerk this even though it's a silly thing. i asked if they knew japanese and they just kind of had a panic on their face and said no, but some other lady did. she tried to get her attention and i tried to ask her but she completely ignored me so i just walked out of there. it's not important and i'm tired of this bullshit of blank stares and not being able to communicate because i thought this was the one part of the city where i would be able to communicate.

we walked back to where everyone was gathered, only they weren't there anymore. shit, we were gone for maybe 10-15 minutes and they left without us!??!! just then my cousin ran up to us and showed us where the bus was. funny, we passed by this bus when we were trying to find "the park". we head off to the university. the bus stops on campus and i thought we were getting out to walk around but we didn't. i think it was at this point that the bus picked up some brasilian women and boy are they fucking loud. they are not okinawan so i'm wondering who the hell they are because really, i just want some quiet. the bus started back up again. they said something about lunch and attending a capoeira demonstration at 1pm. well we circled the campus forever. we must've passed by the same spots 5 or 6 times. i kept noticing the same signs and buildings. i thought that it was insane to keep circling, that we are going to miss the capoeira. eventually we park and instead of capoeira, we head to a dining hall for lunch. my cousin says we have to eat quickly for capoeira. i'm thinking, why aren't we just going to capoeira first so we don't miss it, unless the dining hall has certain hours. capoeira is just something i've thought was cool from the first time i heard about it and was one of the things i didn't think i'd get to see on this trip since we weren't going to be in the northeast of the country.

now the next part is bad but i'll be brief (or at least try): i was pissed at the lunch situation. i thought there was nothing i could eat. i wasn't sure if the beans were safe, if they were made with meat or lard. but i inspected them and in broken portuguese one of the loud ladies said there's no meat, that it's ok. i only took a little beans and rice, just in case it would make me sick. the cups for drinks were really small too. everyone else got meat and some other stuff that i can't remember. i think i got one piece of bread. i sat down, ate it, was still hungry, and thought it's safe enough because it didn't taste like meat. but then i wondered, maybe they don't get seconds here. so i asked one of the brasilian kids and he said for dinner yes but probably not for lunch. and that's when i freaked out. because i'm thinking, shit, if they had said something before we got the food, then i wouldn't have grabbed so little. it seemed like a buffet and that's what i do at buffets--i just grab a little to see if it's ok and then i go back for more. so here i am thinking we're going to totally miss capoeira and there's nothing to eat and god knows if i'll get another chance to eat because i was told that we're spending the entire day with these people. i had sightseeing plans but i cancelled it for this tour of the campus which hasn't even happened. after biting off a couple heads, then everyone thought i was some crazy bitch. a couple people had heard the rumors that i didn't eat at all and this other shit and i had to explain that i made a complaint that got blown out of proportion. i complained with what i had already said, that we've been wasting our time so far spending 3 hours doing nothing when i could have seen so much of the city. plus i don't even get to eat. all that planning of things to do and vegetarian restaurants and i'm sitting around like an idiot not doing any of it. i don't think the others got it because i think they came to brasil with no plans other than to attend the okinawan events. whereas my list of things to do was huge and every hour wasted feels like a day wasted. every crappy meal eaten is a vegetarian restaurant opportunity missed. (no, i just can't be brief. can't do it.)

capoeira class at usp

after that, we went to the capoeira class. we got there late, probably when the class normally ends, but they gave us the demonstration/lesson anyway. yeah, it turns out it was a lesson. i was told demonstration but it was a lesson. i wasn't prepared to do this. i was prepared to take pictures, to document. so that's what i did. i didn't participate, just stood there taking pictures. it seemed like plenty of light for my eyes but not for the camera. it was as difficult to film as a concert, if not more so. with a concert, at least at some parts of the show you have strong lights on the performers. not so in a gym. i took many pictures in hopes that something came out decent but a lot of it is blurry. after all, people are moving fast in less than ideal light conditions and i didn't want to flash them or waste battery power on flash. when the class was over and everyone was doing the latin american goodbye of kiss on the cheek, i decided to get into south american mode and kissed everyone on the cheek who came up to me, which was a lot of people. even the sweaty people. even the hairy face people. once the goodbyes were done, i realized twiddle thumbs was talking to some of the regular students of the class about the instruments, specifically the berimbau. she got an on-hands demonstration of it, which was pretty cool. now that i've seen it up close, it seems much harder than i thought.

açai frozen treat

after the class, as we were walking back, we passed by a restroom and since those behind us were slow, i decided to make my own pit stop because obviously a restroom break was not in the itinerary. others followed by lead. nearby we stopped to have a frozen treat. this and the lunch (and the bus) were complementary of the kenjinkai so i am grateful for that. everyone was getting açai but i wanted to try a different brasilian fruit, i can't remember which one now. it turned out that the one i wanted had dairy in it but the açai did not so i ended up getting that. it came with bananas and a package of granola to put on top. we in a foreign country, do as the locals so i put it on even though it seemed weird. the frozen treat was alright, didn't taste like anything in particular but it was too much and i didn't finish it.

when we left campus, rush hour had begun. it took us awhile to get where we needed to be. it was getting too late to visit the japanese immigration museum so they decided to cancel that. instead, we went directly to the hall for tonight's program. we got there early but we were the first to speak. the so-called youth had their time first when the hall was relatively empty. i say so-called because i feel i'm too old to be in the youth category. at least in japanese terms because they usually cut you off from things labeled youth once you hit 30. the youths who gave speeches were supposed to be limited to 3 minutes but some went over. i didn't think it was a big deal. my cousin told me before i left on my trip that there would be this speech thing, that he put me on the list to speak, and that i should just talk about myself and the local kenjinkai. i figured i'd make stuff up on the spot. but once in brasil, it felt more like a big deal because people brought clothes to dress up in, they were practicing what they were going to say, and they had stuff prepared to project on a screen. so i brought some of my work clothes that i packed just in case i needed nice clothes for any of the events. once there though, i said fuck it because you could tell dressing up was not necessary. so i had been lugging around my clothes that day for nothing. everyone gave their speech in their native language, which for most people was english. i decided to do mine in japanese. afterall, that's the language that links us together, the language of our blood. (i doubt many there could speak the okinawan dialect and besides, i don't know it either.)

reception for foreign visitors

later on the hall got very packed because later is when the festival commemorating 100 years of immigration officially started. it was amazing to see it so full of okinawans and from various countries. there were large groups of people from okinawa, peru, hawaii, and then the rest of america was scattered. some LA people were in a LA group, some had joined the hawaii group, and others were like me who did this on their own so you can't count them as part of any group.

as the evening went on, there was a large spread catered by a sushi place which is great if you can eat that stuff but i can't. i loaded up as best i could on cucumber rolls, of which there weren't too many. so overall today i didn't get to eat real food. after some of the speeches was an impromptu gathering of youth beyond those that rode on the bus thanks to a kenjinkai member from LA who insisted on gathering the youth together. we got shuffled around a lot because at first we were sitting on stage (bad idea, they need the stage for speeches after all!), then outside (bad idea, it was dark and then it started to rain), then upstairs. i was hoping to interview some young people for my podcast but it was just so damn loud in the hall that i couldn't do it.

by this time there were stage performers which included okinawan music, arabian dancers, capoeira, and closed with a samba show. at the end, the samba dancers went into the crowd and did a long samba line of people. it was really funny to see all these older okinawan people dancing along and being next to the samba dancers because they were so tall and scantily clad while the okinawans were so short and conservatively dressed. it was a long night and when we got back to the hostel, we just wanted to relax. we have a tv in the room but we haven't been able to figure out how to use it. it just won't turn on. earlier we asked a worker to check it out but he never came to the room. tonight we asked another worker who managed to fix the tv remote so now we can watch tv and see what kind of shows air in brasil.