The process of getting to know Brazil I could divide for few parts:
- Falling in love with everything and everybody.
When I arrived in Brazil for the first time, I swear I felt a bit like in Europe. Maybe it’s because I was in Foz do Iguacu, pretty touristic place. But I know that I loved food, people and the nature, everything I saw.
- Learning about all the differences, habits, politics and economic issues.
And that started during my last days in Brazil in September 2017, when I started to see the reality, how it really is here. And I wanted to understand everything, learn everything, because at some point I wanted to move in here in June 2017 (and even tho it eventually happened, just a bit later, I was changing my mind many times and I didn’t come here with that intention. It just happened). But everything I was told started to seem so complicated, so different from my culture… that I just had to accept it. (Not everybody has to do that. But there were many important people from Brazil at that time in my life so I wanted to know more about their culture).
- Accepting and learning again how to…live.
When I decided to accept all the culture differences, even without understanding them, I had to learn how to adapt into that new world. When you travel to the places with such a different culture, wanna spend more time with local people, you are kind of a child again. You have to learn everything since the beginning. You don’t know how to greet people, how to eat, what to eat, how to cook those unknown veggies and fruits, how to cross the street, how to drink, how to sit at the restaurants, how to talk to the people. And it all might seem easy when you’re in Copacabana or Ipanema in Rio, but not when you are at some „dark-sides” of north-eastern cities or you’re trying to hitchhike.
It’s actually such an amazing process, and even more fascinating when you also have to learn the language of the place. You know when a child looks at his mother’s and he listens to her, how she greets the neighbours, she has to teach him how to eat, how to cook… Parents show us how to cross a street… When we travel, we have to pass through the same things, again from the beginning. The only difference is that our parents are our friends, strangers met on the street or on the bus. We have to open to the world, open our minds, don’t feel embarassed, because in the beginning we will seem to be fools, just as kids sometimes do. But it’s just part of this amazing process, of getting to know everything, learning life since the beginning, learning how to love life since the beginning. We become another people, and we can be whoever we are, do whatever we want, try the things we never did before.
And it was in that 3rd part when I just got used to my new life so much, and I loved it so much, that I cannot even imagine coming back to my „old” life right now. After experiencing all of that we are never the same people again.