Porto Alegre :: Brazil
And here I thought the Anti-Globalisation movement was deader than Kurt Cobain?
Places: Chuy, Chui & Porto Alegre.
Coolest thing I did: Stood in the middle of a road straddling both countries. And was nearly run over. Sorry, it's been a bit short on cool stuff the last couple of days.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Portuguese is basically Spanish but with everything pronounced wrong and written in wacky non-Latin characters. I just speak Spanish and most people seem to understand me. I just have no idea what they're saying back.
All the horror stories I'd been told about trying to go it alone across the border from Uruguay to Brazil (instead of getting a bus from Montevideo) actually set me in very good stead to make it easy. I managed to get both bus drivers to stop at immigration for me and get my passport stamped so the crossing was fairly painless. That should be a no-brainer, except for the fact Chuy/Chui is a town that spans both sides of the border and for some reason only beknownst to themselves both countries decided to put immigration like 3km out of town on their respective sides. I'd read about people getting all the way to Brazil before having to get a taxi back 6km into Uruguay, get stamped out, then get a taxi 6km back to get stamped into Brazil - by which time of course their bus was long gone. Nothing like forward planning, eh?
Due to my paranoia about this border crossing I found myself in Chuy with about 2 hours to spare and not much to do in them. This gave me time to contemplate many Brazilians and Uruguayans shopping their little hearts out duty free on the other side of town. It seems like the Brazilians mostly want electronics and booze and the Uruguayans mostly want Havaianas and other clothing, however I couldn't be sure as both groups seemed to be speaking a halted mix of both Spanish and Portuguese to try and get any business done. Like most border towns I had time to try and take a picture in the middle of the main drag so I could be in two countries at once, but had to abandon that idea when people made it clear they wouldn't be breaking for me.
I was glad I did get up early, because my options for the bus were 12.30 or 12.30 the next day. I'd have probably lost my mind by now if I'd had to spend another 24 hours in Chuy.
So the 6 hour bus ride took 9 hours (welcome to Brazil!) through a rapidly darkening landscape of farmland, dotted with either cows or plants I suspected were ma-te. It seems like ma-te drinking continues well into Brazil, with the locals of Porto Alegre spending Sunday wandering the markets in the park with a Thermos and gourd under one arm. From what I've gathered people drink so much of it because it makes you alert, relaxed, cures both impotence & cancer, gives you night vision and makes you impervious to bullets. These are some of the less wacky claims I've heard.
So Porto Alegre wasn't exactly what I was expecting, but I guess I'm not sure what I was expecting because I only picked it as it's about half way between Uruguay and Florianopolis. I showed up late on Saturday night to a pumping street of bars and pubs but due to having had about 3 hours sleep on my last night in Punta del Diablo I kind of needed sleep. I admit I also wasn't able to mentally bridge the gap between low-crime, Spanish speaking Uruguay and high-crime, Portuguese speaking Brazil so I piked out and went to bed. Turns out that was a bad move as Sunday night is pretty quiet. Due to the wiles of the bus gods I've also had to spend a Monday here too, as I'm waiting for a night bus that goes at midnight.
Porto Alegre is a proper working port, and is considered the town that Mercosur rebuilt. Mercosur is an attempt to create a free-trade zone to rival the European Union and despite only really consisting of the southern South American countries it does engender a lot of trade. Which means on the way in you see heaps of container ships and the cities waterfront is pretty much full of cranes and can't be walked on. Instead, taking photos of really old buildings is the order of the day. I hadn't done that for a while so I indulged. What I found more interesting though, is the leftie vibe in town, because it turns out since 2001 there's been a thing called the World Social Forum held here, which I never heard of and made me chuckle a bit when I did.
I'm of the tail end of Generation X, and I remember the 90s fondly. I recall that I wasn't supposed to believe in anything, but somehow also to believe that corporations were evil and stealing our future. I remember being happy when the anti-globalisation movement was born out of street fights at the WTO summits in Rome and Seattle (booo...Starbucks...booo...) but not entirely sure why I was. I guess it's because corporations punched kittens and killed Kurt Cobain, or so I'd been led to believe. By the turn of the century, when I moved to London they seemed unstoppable, I remember days after first arriving the May Day protests with their memorable image of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square with a Mohawk glued to it.
Well I remember seeing it all on TV.
Well we all grow up, or at least I thought we all grew up, until I got here. There's people who work for NGOs having meetings to discuss alternatives to neoliberalism (whatever the hell that is) and how they will give the people a voice, despite most of them being fairly white and rich. You want to help the poor? Give them your friggin' Macbook.
I'm going to not state the obvious fact I've drifted a little bit right since those heady days of the last 90s, but I will say that I'm surprised that after a decade of talking about alternatives to market capitalism these guys are still about as divided as ever on what any of those alternatives should be. It seems like they know what's bad in the world, but not what's good. My favourite bit of anti-globalisation graffiti ever I saw in Prague in 2003. Someone had written "Let's destroy capitalism and replace it with something nicer". Under which, someone had written "with what?". I suspect there's still no reply.
I have to admit that while I'm staying in a safer part of town I'm still fairly on edge about the prospect of violent crime here. Everyone I've met on their way from Brazil has a second hand story of muggings and I'm weary of the fact I see very large numbers of poor people living under PAs many bridges and overpasses (it's on a hill so they kind of make sense, but it's a maze walking around or trying to follow where the taxi is going). I've been told that describing Brazil as having a crime problem is kind of like describing Ireland as having a drinking problem - even if it's a bit racist it's tinged with a whole metric heap of truth. There's a huge mix of inequality living side by side, and to be honest the only real example of seeing the same thing before is in the US, another highly unequal society. When we smash capitalism and replace it with hugs, I'm sure this will all be sorted out.
So I'm waiting for a midnight bus to whisk me away from here to the beach. More tales of sunstroke and peeling skin to follow.