Leonardo Boiko’s Diary

A major disadvantage of a nomadic lifestyle is the need to carry stuff around. I try to avoid storing cruft, I don’t own furniture, I minimize my personal library donating all books that I won’t read again and I keep everything packed and ready to move. Even with all these precautions, it’s still a pain — especially if you’re as against owning cars as I am, and if the public transportation service available is that of São Paulo.

In my last change of address, I was preparing myself to carry my book handbag by drinking vodka. Vodka helps easing the pain, but you can’t risk dehydration (with the exercise and so on), so I drank some gatorade on the side. At some point I had the vodka bottle in my left hand, gatorade bottle in my right. I looked at the vodka, and looked at the gatorade. Gatorade, vodka. Vodka, gatorade.

I poured Smirnoff in the sports bottle, filling it 50/50. I tried. It was good. It was pretty good, actually. I drank vodkarade the rest of the day.

* * *

My new room is near the campus, bringing with it all the advantages (real and psychological) one has by living near the campus, but it has no kitchen. On top of that, when my night classes are over, everything nearby is closed: cafeterias, restaurants, convenience stores. Márcia said I should ask pizza, but how to find out what are the neighborhood’s pizzerias, and which of them are open after midnight? This isn’t like the first world where you can just check out Google Maps.

In that very same night I found a pizza ad on the pension’s gate. Magic.

Driven by hunger, I overcame my telephone phobia and called. They’d deliver in half an hour. Twenty minutes later I went outside to wait for them, since my room is deep behind and I wouldn’t hear the pizza guy. After some time, the chopper appeared in the quiet street. The guy had a two-liter soft drink with him, which intrigued me — since my pizza was the last of the day and the only one in the bag.

New readers might not appreciate the problem, so I’ll explain: I don’t drink soft drinks — none of them, ever. In fact I don’t drink any sweet drinks, and never got my head around this habit. Soft drinks either taste only of sugar, or have a terrible taste disguised with lots of sugar (*cof* Coca-Cola *cof*). If I want sweets, there are much better sweets to spend my money with, and if I want a drink — isn’t it illogical to drink something which will only make me even more thirsty? I’m not worried about “healthy food” or other such superstitions: I’m not into soft drinks simply because they taste bad.

Keeping this in mind, try to picture my expression when the delivery boy gave me a big bottle of Fanta Uva — Brazil’s Grape Fanta.

I mean, Fanta Uva is the sweetest and most sickening of all sweet and sickening soft drinks — it’s the über soft drink, soft drinks overcoming themselves. Even people who drink Coca-Cola regularly think Fanta Uva is too sweet. Spotting a vegan shopping bacon is easier than spotting me asking for Fanta Uva. And there he was, all smiles, handing me the bottle. I was about to complain, but the guy helpfully explained:

— Since it’s your first time with us, this one is on the house.

So, well, you know what they say about given horses. I carried my Fanta Uva to the room but I couldn’t decide what to do with it. I don’t even own a fridge; would I resign myself to drink two liters of sugared food coloring in one go?

Then Mr. Smirnoff hinted me. Alcohol! Vodka is pure alcohol, water and alcohol, tasting of nothing but alcohol. Everything gets better with alcohol… right?

I poured vodka and Fanta Uva in a glass. 50/50. I tried it. And…

…it was AWFUL :-D Seriously, it was truly horrible! It tasted like, I don’t know, dripped bile licked from the skid marks of a truck. The vodka somehow destroyed the sugar camouflage and revealed the true personality, the Mr. Uva Hyde of Dr. Fanta Jekyll. Never before I got drunk with something so bad — even Brazilian lager tastes better. Vodka with Fanta Uva: worst cocktail EVAR.