Recently, and only after coming back from it, I realized I had just visited Mercosul. As some South Americans call it. Other South Americans call it Mercosur. Real Americans call it nothing at all. I suppose the lateness of these perceptions is positive: you don't want too many abstractions cramping your travel style! I have enough already as it is. They can become real lifestyle-dictators. Lazy notions that somehow turn into iron principles. Ones like airport avoidance, and photography reluctance, and radio deafness, and language ignorance. But if you keep traveling, you keep challenging them, or deciding they are still doing some good after all.

Certainly it has been a useful sort-of-a-rule of mine, on trips to South America, to avoid the airport closest to me. Rather than drive a half hour to Austin to catch a feeder flight to Houston, I drove 3 hours to Houston. Overall this is hardly slower, and there's no chance of missing a connection. As for Houston itself, it again served its purpose, which was to conduct me in one hop to Brazil. I've done this many times before, so many times that my memories have become unreliable. Reviewing some personal electronic records now, I find that I never did entertain a parking-shuttle driver by reeling off in Portuguese the names of fruits and vegetables. I only thought of doing that! It is a fine idea, but I cannot claim I've done it 'til I've done it, and this trip's shuttle driver had more passengers than just me and she was very busy. She asked only what airline I was flying, not where it was flying me to.

Another, nontrivial way to ensure an airport is unobjectionable is to have been there before, on a similar mission, and observed that while it may not call itself a hub, it can serve as one. I already knew that in So Paulo, where in 2012 I left a flight from Chile to connect to one to the U.S., I didn't need formally to enter Brazil just to go onward to another country. I followed signs, then asked an airport functionary to confirm. Yes, for international transfers, just go down those stairs. My bags and I had to get X-rayed again, but no sweat. Since United and Gol don't have a partnership or codeshare agreement, my tickets were separate, and the failure of the first airline to get me in on time for the second airline would have been no one's problem but my own. Except it wasn't at all, because these airlines work, these airports work, and weather in South America is benign. I had 110 minutes - plenty of time.

Now in Buenos Aires, I could not be so elusive. Curiously, although I did have to clear immigration, my passport was not stamped. I did not think to ask why not. Just as well: I could not recall the Spanish word for stamp, though I did know the Portuguese. I did correctly guess there was an electronic record of my entry...though I did not guess the bus company that would be taking me to Paraguay could access that record. What I did think to do was ask where to change money. What I had left over from my 2012 trip was now worth 4. I got a fresh sheaf of pelf. Then I ate at a McDonald's, took a leak, and headed out. I mean I walked, right out of the airport, several blocks to a subway station. Who walks out of airports? Now you know!

It was in the Buenos Aires subway that I decided that this would be yet another trip with little or no photography. At least this time I had an excuse: taking pictures of something that's underground, a machine so big you can see it only when you're inside it, is well beyond my talents. I'm glad that people who do have such talents can still exercise them for a living. I'm glad to leave the Subterranean, its proper portraiture I mean, to their skillful sense of composition. Me, I will simply venture the following: it's big iron. Not in the mid-20th-century, figurative sense computers but in the early-20th-century, literal sense girders. I don't think this is an artifact of an at-or-below-sea-level situation. The subways of Rio de Janeiro, Panama, and Lisbon do not look like this. They're modern. Buenos Aires' isn't. Although they got rid of the tokens! Now you need a card. Which doesn't look as good as Guatemala City's.

Something else I saw in Buenos Aires, aboveground, and could easily have photographed, was a political ad. Someone was promising a utopia. It was just a matter of details, or priorities. Cultural change had to come first. Some Argentines may have agreed. Me, I had never before come across the Spanish word for "utopia." Never having seen one, certainly nowhere in Latin America. By the way, the word in Spanish I still haven't seen it in Portuguese is utopa. Four syllables, accent on the third.

By now it will be agreed that, even sight unseen, Buenos Aires is a fascinating place. Even though it's not particularly notable architecturally. Quite a lot of buildings could be described, possibly still accurately and not in a complimentary way, as walkup apartments. But unlike the more officey skyscrapery conurbations, Buenos Aires looks greatly lived-in.

It looks great for living in, because besides being full of obviously active citizens, it is clean. Two more features that can certainly be captured in a photo, yet fail to be the message of the photo. I did consider a snapshot of a sign in a park enjoining dog owners to pick up caca. But since they obviously all did that, and since the real lesson to me was that caca is a publicly usable, printable word evidently its rhetorical force is precisely poop I saw no reason to belabor this.

Most of us probably already knew this.

Something that I'd guess none of us knew and because it is so thoroughly indigenous, photos of it would be incomprehensible is the Buenos Aires theater scene. I don't know if Avenida Corrientes just west of the Obelisk is Argentina's Great White Way, but it certainly marshaled enough megawatts. The huge screens publicizing plays, or movies, were as exciting as they were, at least to me, mystifying. So many actors I'd never heard of and never would elsewhere hear of. Speaking of professional photography and art, I recalled something I'd read in a book about late-1990s Argentina, and which I myself had seen in many, uh, Global South kind of places: movie posters that were locally painted, in the apparent absence of studio-provided publicity stills. And also the apparent absence of art teachers. The images were always accidentally lurid, the stars' eyes always wrong. But these fully electronic emanations, and printed matter too, were totally modern and technically flawless.

More generally on the subject of entertainment, but on an image that wasn't lurid at all even though I fully expected it to be, I found it convenient to inspect the statue of Carlos Gardel. I noticed from the subway map that there was a stop named after him. I might never have thought to go look, but in some book about Pern, Argentina, or both, the author mentioned in a footnote that when he first saw the statue, it had a lit cigarette between its fingers. Well, it didn't when I saw it, so I didn't take a picture of it. Still, any Subterranean ride, followed by some aboveground wandering, is time well spent!

Did I take any pictures at all of Buenos Aires? I guess I didn't though in one case I wished I had done so on my first visit decades earlier. I have a memory of phone lines strung all over, seemingly from every building to every other building, even across a dozen or more lanes of traffic. An off-the-grid system that became itself a grid? An overhead welter that didn't quite block out the sun but sure gave it a try? Be that as it was, I can say that the great avenue named Carlos Pellegrini has no such festoonings now. I wonder how quickly cell-telephonics rendered them pointless. Was there a single Great Reeling-In of the wires, or did they get yanked incrementally?

___

Here's something I still haven't stopped thinking about: what did "Walkman" ever mean? I would continue to think about this even if I didn't own one. Or two. Both radios. Neither plays cassettes. In any timeline of human achievement, viewed at any scale, the Era Of Pocket-Sized Audio Devices With Battery-Powered Motors is the slimmest of bands, dividing no significant pair of any other epochs.

I used to take a radio on overseas trips. Every one. When my landlady suggested I tune in to the Metropolitan Opera's worldwide Saturday-afternoon broadcast on a Brazil trip, I did exactly that, finding the exactly one Brazilian station that carried it. In point of fact, I'd listened to even more opera in Turkey. Then, for no particular reason certainly not one of weight or of luggage crushability I stopped. Then, this time, I resumed...with a fresh idea. I would be traveling overnight across sparsely populated regions. Never a great bus-ride snoozer, I would likely be awake. So, why not tune in to whatever was on the airwaves?

At precisely midnight on the Buenos Aires-Asuncin run, in what would have been the Argentine province of Entre Rios, I fished up my little apparatus and put on the headset. On both AM and FM, there was a lot of racket meaningful only to electrical engineers. But I did find, very briefly, a broadcast. And on it, just as briefly, one ad. From a Uruguayan funeral parlor. In the town of Artigas, it was felt that each human being should be sent onward with affection.

This was a good message to hear in such isolation. Not the one I expected, of course, and it jarred me that the verb used, despedido, I always thought meant "dismissed." Of course it has a broader definition in Spanish. Well, it better! Anyway, the transmission quickly faded, I heard no more from anywhere, and saw little. The area was flat, and on its horizon there were few lights. The moon rose, but its glow did nothing. Nevertheless, I was satisfied. I thought that both the sound and the circumstances justified bringing the Walkman on the ride.

But if there were no such justification, just seeing the confluence of the Paran and Paraguay rivers, at Corrientes, would have been. For many months I've been listening, at home, via the Internet, to a radio station that is (or says it is) here. Only because it's available and mainly talk. During the day. At 3 AM, I wasn't sure. Well, I wasn't sure where exactly on the dial it was. I'd never accessed it on any radio that had a dial.

Anyway, on into Paraguay itself. Although Asuncin appears to be right on the Argentine border, across from a small settlement called Clorinda, there is no bridge right into downtown. The bus made a wide loop west and north of it, then found passage across the river. The first thing I saw, and I'm pretty sure this was on the Paraguayan side of the line, was a golf course. My first anywhere in Latin America?

There may also have been my first shipwreck in Latin America. Nothing really so dramatic, just a beached boat, with at least one crane mounted on or over its deck, presumably over a hold with presumably nothing now in it. An insurance company would know. Meanwhile, there was active freighting visible. Barge traffic. Whatever it was, it could nearly have been the first of its kind for me in Latin America. I must've seen some on the Amazon, but I just don't remember. Anyway, the Paraguay River is clearly a commercial highway.

Which would make Asuncin a port as well as a capital. Somehow it was failing to resonate with Rio, Montevideo, or Buenos Aires. Never mind Manaus. I had no mental images of this place, though I had read a lot about it. Operation Condor had been uncovered here...but if I ever looked up where all the embarrassing records had been cached, I forgot. I think about the same time I was learning about that, I was also observing that this city had a mass-transit system like San Salvador's...maybe I'd ride a bus to go see a police station? Probably not. What other ideas had I ever got? Some years ago I got interested in the details of the exiled Nicaraguan Somoza's assassination in Paraguay. I read a book or two, and then Wikipedia, then forgot about it. But had I reread at least the last before my recent trip, I'd've recognized I was in the area! Not that I'd've seen anything significant. Things would've been tidied up. And I doubt there's a historical marker, although what a scene it must have been. Somoza's car took the rocket hit so hard, he had to be ID'd from his feet - your joke *here*. Yet among his effects there emerged his American Express card - your joke *here*. The killers had rented a safe house by claiming they were representatives of Julio Iglesias - your joke *here*. I was in any case pleased to find, 43 years later, a couple of really good-looking shopping malls. Third-Worlders do these things so nicely.

And my hotel was right next to the Porsche dealership! (I presume Asuncin has just one, but I could be wrong.)

So, what did I do in Asuncin? Besides observe minimal written Guaran - businesses might have a word or three decorating their logos - and neglect to take photos of my hotel's patio, which had tables with perfectly clean glass ashtrays on them. I could not remember the last time I'd ever even seen ashtrays. In any state of shininess. Could've been in Slovenia in 2019: there, I stayed in another hotel in the same chain, and all Europe smokes.

Oh, I know: I bought a newspaper. Those are hard to find. I guess my last was in Aguascalientes, Mexico in May. Hidroclido, a local tabloid. EXTRA is a Paraguayan tabloid, and doesn't that sound redundant? If you were a printing press at the dead center of South America, what else would you output? I am not complaining. I'm just thrilled that newspapers still exist. And I'm agreeably puzzled by their exact level of survival. What's it mean when there are only a few copies of any one paper available any given day? Why doesn't the number drop to, and stay at, zero?

In the issue I found in the Asuncin bus station, there was a story about the upcoming Paraguay-Peru soccer game, with focus on the home team's goalie, a guy born Brazilian but naturalized Paraguayan. This put me in mind of another Brazilian athlete I once read of, in another newspaper, in Manaus: a guy who lived in that city but decided that his training for iron-man triathlons could be better pursued in Paraguay. I still don't know why heck, you can run on the beaches along the Amazon, and of course swim in it. True, there were hardly a hundred miles of paved road around Manaus, so the bicycling part may have been tougher. But there were lots of other places in Brazil to do all these things.

Maybe Paraguay was simply a cheaper place to live at the time! But there can be sentimental reasons instead or in addition. The goalie probably moved, and took citizenship, because he had roots, however shallow, in the other country. His mother was born there, and his family lived right on the border. Which, like most borders in the Western Hemisphere (motto: "This ain't the Eastern Hemisphere"), is routinely wandered across. As with most countries in the Western Hemisphere, just doing that hardly amounts to an invasion: you're still a million miles from the nerve centers of both countries.

Well, if you decide to become Paraguayan, or just dip your big toe in the water, there is plenty of precedent. Apparently the country is used to folks poking around and possibly hanging around. And, as I say, it has newspapers, barely, still! Other stories in EXTRA: the money-throwing vito, which was in a church and so bothered a bishop he called it a pagan festival in a chapel and then either said a prayer or hurled an imprecation in Guaran; and the Prez giving three choices of photo to be hung on government office walls. The options being one of him alone, one with his lovely wife, and neither of the above. Such offices, said the article, are not required to display any such portraits. I thought it was droll of the reporter to suggest that who ordered what would definitely be noticed by the chief executive and/or his wife, who herself might have political aspirations.

Which brings me to something I only occasionally think about nowadays: why I even like, or ever liked, newspapers. I'm still not sure. I suppose I've not quite forgotten the pleasure they have brought me. And not just in tropical countries Turkey's were good. It could be their physicality. I like having them at the table. They are right-there companions. Pompous at times, but I still like their chattiness. And their collectiveness: they represent a cooperative enterprise. One with workers who must harmonize, as well as a boss those people have to please, fox, or a little of both. People somewhere who unite to produce, I mean push across a loading dock, and on a rigid schedule, a thing. There's a sociability to all this, one I may be mostly imagining or postulating, but one that online content fails to project at all.

___

As I left the country, I found Ciudad del Este a lot more substantial than it had appeared on my first visit, in 1996. By "substantial" I do not mean "attractive," not in any esthetic sense. I just mean the bazaars were in actual buildings, not under black plastic tarps.

Now I was on another long-haul bus, this time Asuncin-Florianpolis, and I would prove to be the only passenger who both got on at the very beginning and got off at the very end. In between, which was mostly in the Brazilian state of Paran, a little more was in the air. But not much more. Radiowise, I mean. South America, even the technically populated parts, is still close to empty. Again precisely at midnight, I spun the thumbwheel. There were, this time, choices. But odd ones, if you're used to daytime Brazilian radio. Maybe it has changed over the decades, but it struck me here and now that the fare favored belters. Guys who sing hard. The genre or practice or maybe I should say self-perceived artistic imperative is not unknown in Brazil, although this material was more ponderous than, say, Raimundo Fagner's ever was. Well, whatever encourages or sustains it, I was receiving it in my bus seat. I was also receiving other emanations: what could have been accordions, or soprano saxes, or synthesizers. I wasn't sure. What a fate it must be for an electrical engineer, to struggle to create new musical machinery, only to have it sound like...accordions, or soprano saxes.

Anyway, another ten minutes in the middle of the night well-spent!

In Florianpolis itself, but during the day, I did what I had always done when I lived there for six months in 1988: listen to the radio. I'd loved it then. I'd sung along with every jingle!

Som Atlntida
Que vem do meu rdio
[Something something, I forget what]
Explode no ar
E faz me cantar

Which it sure did! Or I'd just mouthed the lines:

[serious girl voice]: Fawr Weenz Soorf Shoppe: ultrapassando limites...
[even more serious guy voice]: ...e preconceitos!

Not surprisingly or even distressingly, the content had changed over the decades. But not totally. While I do think just from online sampling that Brazilian stations play less English-language stuff than they used to, and not just because they could hardly play more, foreign material hasn't quite disappeared. And what do you know, in 2023 there was the very same song from an Australian group I'd heard so long ago. And it had the same effect on me. In South America, I still can't hear music from Australia without thinking: that place isn't south of here, it's west of here. It is, here, neither "down" nor "under."

___

It may be a distinctly Latin American practice, the naming of places after dates. Or so I had finally guessed, on this trip, after seeing Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires. Dates that are day-month only. I'm not sure where Avenida de Mayo, also in Buenos Aires, fits in. I think for that one, we really do need to know the year. I can aver that a number alone does not fit in; or at least Treinta y Tres, in eastern Uruguay, refers not to any day of any month, obviously, but to a group of patriots. And though it is well afield, the name of the far-eastern Turkish settlement called Aralk refers not to December but to space: when it's not the month, the word literally means betweenness, and the place sure has got that, if you're wondering what separates Mt. Ararat from central Asia.

So slow or so spotty on the uptake have I been on this phenomenon, someone later had to remind me of Rio de Janeiro. Which was indeed discovered, by the Portuguese, on January 1, of some year.

A date fairly frequently alluded to in Brazil is the fifteenth of November. Most notable, at least to me, are the squares or parks in various cities. The date, the proclamation of the Republic, is unambiguously in 1889. But were the plazas named or renamed at that precise time? Almost. Florianpolis's plaza wasn't even created until 1891, but as far as I can tell, the instant it was, it was Praa XV. Makes sense, as the name of the city itself had been changed from an allusion to Mary the mother of Jesus to a general who helped kick out the Emperor. I cannot tell when Rio de Janeiro's Praa XV got that name but it had had many others over the centuries. Perhaps most timely, most nearly on-the-dot, was Porto Alegre's, which had been in existence for decades but got its revolutionary and still current name on December 11, 1889.

Overall, such folks who were excited at all were in a bit of a hurry to get this name in place, and cement it. Lest the hesitant or the grouchy gather steam and start to question it? The more I read about the end of the Empire, the more I think this transition was unpopular, and by no means necessary or inevitable. Or an improvement. The Republic that came next has proven merely okay. In any case, Praa XV in Florianpolis still looked great. And though this was unrelated, my old apartment building, about a block away, still did too. The elementary school across the street seemed however to have been closed. I'd enjoyed hearing it at midday, and looking down at the boys playing soccer, the girls being social.

On this visit, my first since 2007, I did not stay in the city itself, but in So Jos, the next town west, on the mainland. I had never done this before. I was doing it now only because it has become my practice to reserve hotels in advance of my arrival and the hotel chain I'd stick to throughout this trip was, in Florianpolis itself, full, though there was space here. I wondered about So Jos. All I ever knew about it was (1) it didn't look good and (2) it used to have a state- or nation-leading schoolteacher-absentee rate of 73%. Did that mean that if you randomly visited four schoolrooms, three would have a substitute teacher or no teacher? If the statistic doesn't mean that, can it possibly mean anything better? Well, whatever the condition of its primary education now, the town's appearance had hardly improved, on any point of my three-mile walk back into the capital the next morning. At least my hotel itself was favorably situated: fact #3 about So Jos is that it was still home to Florianpolis's original shopping mall, Itaguau. I know I glimpsed it in 1988, maybe bicycled by it. Shopping malls weren't notable to me then. But they are now. I was happy, now, to patronize this one's tony c-store!

I did not do much else hereabouts. I was pleased to find the original 1926 bridge reopened both to foot and motor traffic. And even with the cloudiness - I could hardly remember any part of Brazil ever lacking sunshine - I enjoyed the view along Avenida Beira-Mar Norte. I might have seen much more, but I found the city's mass transit now baffling. Some of the buses could be ridden only with a special card, which was not for sale at any of the half-dozen windows I inquired at, though everyone at each one directed me to the next one. (Did they do this in a loop, the last functionary sending me to the first one? Maybe.) I never did get out to the beaches. On the other hand, the bus I needed to save myself a three-mile walk back to my hotel had taken a technological step backward: where formerly a bus-company employee manned the turnstile inside each vehicle and took your cash and made change, now the driver himself did that.

It didn't matter. I was happy. Each day I lunched pleasantly on the open-air terrace of the bus station's second-floor restaurant. Doesn't sound very nice but it was. After my last such meal, I bought postcards - which nowadays are about as scarce as newspapers - and boarded a bus for Curitiba. Where the highlight was telling the hotel clerk this was my twentieth visit to Brazil. I was so pleased that I knew how to say "twentieth" in Portuguese. I was also pleased that he knew it too: he himself was Venezuelan. For very different reasons, we were finding Brazil a land of opportunity.

The morning after that, I boarded another bus, for So Paulo. Arrived at last in the big city, and this time I do mean in it, I was mildly surprised when the gal at the bus-station information window barked at me. I'd missed the name of the bus company that ran the shuttle out to Guarulhos, and Brazilians, who have no idea at all how noisy their country is, if asked to repeat themselves, usually just do so at the original volume. Oh, Brown Bird right. Although the vehicle itself actually displays, in English, Airport Bus Service. Whatever its livery, it got me there with ease. And at last, I tried Casa do Po de Queijo. Yes, Brazilian cuisine is, if not literally Bread Of Cheese, about as ambitious. With my bread, and its cheese, I had a beer. As on earlier passages through this airport, I'd looked in on bars, most of which had had big-screen TVs tuned to sports. Guarulhos is tidy and modern but it just hasn't been the same since that playoff game where the Saints didn't get a pass-interference call. This time, there wasn't even soccer on the tube.

Back in Houston: the Global Entry kiosk worked not just perfectly, it may have worked instantly I think it approved me just photographing me, with no need to scan my passport. Them 'puters is smart! And though I have always craved passport stamps - they being the very opposite of abstract, and I do know how to say this in English - I don't need one from my own country. I completely approve of this technology, here.

© 2023 J.A.Hutter

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