With no computer, is where I am. Thus the lack of blog updates (and of pictures of my daughter — stop asking for her pictures, you stalkers! She’s still barely born…).
I’m trying to solve this problem without spending too much. It’s a bit troublesome to bother with computers when you don’t even have a house, but there’s always some way.
For some three days now I’ve been playing guitar with my rock band after midnight, when I arrive at home from work.
I should have taken vacations before coming to the Worst Place Ever.
When doing the São Paulo–Curitiba route, one has two options: Itapemirim and Cometa. They both cost around R$50, and they both take around seven hours. The customer service is much better at Itapemirim, as is their attention to detail. Cometa earns extra kitsch points because its bus model is named “Halley”.
If you want to go from São Paulo to Wenceslau Braz, there’s only one option: Princesa do Norte. It costs around R$50, takes around eight hours and is much worse than Itapemirim or Cometa.
Wenceslau Braz is closer to São Paulo than Curitiba.
Travels through Princesa manage to be consistently worse in everything, even in those factors not controlled by Princesa itself. The road quality, for example, or the quality of rest areas. The food on the path SAO–CWB is fancy, diversified, and expensive; as for SAO–WBZ, it’s dirty, bad-tasting, and expensive. When I was there two days ago people from the bus wanted X-saladas, but the restaurant had neither salad nor ham. I can’t explain to foreigners how weird is that. A X-salada (pronounced “shees salada”, from English “cheese salad”) is the most ubiquitous sandwich in Brazil. You can find X-saladas everywhere, in the most awful of places, in Rio de Janeiro favelas, in the bad-smelling urban labyrinths of Manaus, in country towns so small you can see the whole place from a hill—but not in that road restaurant.
A few crippled X-saladas later and they ran out of bread. Cult fun for the whole family.
The convenience-store section of the restaurant — in Brazil rest areas are usually bundled in a single establishment — had a bunch of stuff I haven’t seem in a long time, from golden chocolate coins to soft drinks named “taubaína” instead of the standard form “tubaína” (linguistic musing: the vocalic sequence “au” is said to be one of the hardest to pronounce; maybe “taubaína” is an older version of “tubaína”, just like in the standard Portuguese evolution “aurum” > “ouro” > [oro] ?).
But what really made me happy was to find Hamlet the Uruguayan. Hamlet is a brand of chocolate with nuts (peanuts?), in royal blue packaging, which I used to eat a lot at school. It’s not exceedingly sweet like Brazilian chocolate, but it’s still far from good; tastes like margarine with pieces of nothing. I used to love it though, and thanks to the power of nostalgia I loved to eat it again. Funny to think of; who’d guess that I’d be drooling all over a lowly piece of Hamlet in this very Easter when, miraculously, lots of nice properly bitter chocolates popped around?
(Not that I didn’t eat a few dozen of them, of course.)
The only real bad experience was coming back from Wenceslau prematurely, to avoid losing a job day on Monday. After parting from my girl and my daughter to face eight hours of Princesa do Norte under the sun, without eating and unable to read a book, I’m really tired.
Today my blog URL changes to what I hope will be the definitive address for years to come. From now on, it’s also bilingual (using the excellent Gengo plugin for Wordpress) and presented in a theme of my own design. Also, I’ll improve the content separation for my site; this particular blog will contain only matters of personal life and idle thoughts. Whether it will turn out as my own Tsurezuregusa or simply my livejournal, only time will tell =)
All content in this weblog is public domain.
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