Four Quests in Uruguaiana

Those who live in foreign countries know the peculiar problem of not knowing where to buy a certain kind of item. You don't know the local stores, you don't know the brand names, and what seemed like a simple task at the beginning of a day (say, buying a sponge) ends up taking a week of detective work and a National-Geographic-scale expedition into the city's back-alley economy. A peculiarity of developing nations seems to be an extreme abundance of very tiny shops that each only sell 1 kind of item, or what I call a Sponge Economy - named after an eventful day in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, when my friend Rikki and I set out innocently one morning, looking for a sponge. It turned out supermarkets in Plovdiv did not sell sponges. Nor did any other kind of store we could think of. After many hours of exploration we at last found a district lined with tiny shops that each only sold one thing. Electrical connectors.. or biscuits...or, sponges! At last we'd found the sponge store!!!! It was infinitesimal shop that sold all sponges, and only sponges, apparently supplying the entire city of Plovdiv with all of its sponge needs. Many of my memories of Lima, Peru, are of similar exciting adventures like the The Day We Needed A Button, or the Day We At Last Found The Correct Electrical Adaptor. Recently in Salvador I experienced a Quest For A Small Kitchen Table (that quest lasted three full days!)

Sometimes you feel like King Arthur heading out after the Holy Grail... but you soon make so many funny mistakes that you realize you're in the Monty Python version of the story. ("Go away or I shall taunt you a second time!") These are often my favorite memories of travelling - wandering the little street markets, the back alleys, inspecting all the little shops, getting completely lost, getting found, getting lost, and then... finally... magically finding the item you've been searching for.

Anyway, today in Rio I set out with 4 quests: (1) Buy a computer headset, i.e. earphones & microphone, so that I can use Skype on my computer (this is part of a longer two-week Quest to attempt to re-gain access to my university email account, a process so complicated it is not worth explaining here) (2) Buy some more Brazilian movies to practice my Portuguese, (3) Look for a toaster, (4) - I knew this would be the hardest - look for a cheap roll-up foam mattress. So I spent the afternoon of Rio wandering through my favorite section of the city, the endless warren of shops in the back alleys of the Uruguaiana neighborhood. A lot of these streets are closed to traffic, and are lined overhead with festive colorful banners. The effect is of wandering endlessly through a colorful world full of strange little shops.

I was walking past the VERY FIRST STALL when I realized it was a stall specializing in ... headphones! Including computer headphones with microphones! Can you believe it! Bought one. Quest 1, completed.

I started wandering... past... an entire store selling only tiny, intricate, lovely baskets of wicker; a store completely full of chickens; another of live canaries; a store full of huge bins of all kinds of nuts and dried beans of all types (also including two food items representing the Brazilian's Portuguese heritage: a vast bin of European chestnuts and huge stacks of dried Atlantic cod. Both of which Brazilians love, and both of which are not remotely native to Brazil.) Another store completely full of silly hats. Another with millions of teeny-tiny cupcake wrappers in all possible colors. Shop after shop after shop with pretty little tops and dresses, sandals, watches, brooms, furniture...

Ooo! I'd been looking at the shops so intently that I had realized the middle of the street was a solid row of guys selling pirated dvd's! The pirated-dvd sellers have large racks lined with blurry xerox pictures of the films that they have available. The dvd guys are extremely attentive, leaping at you as soon as you pause infinitesimally in your strolling, especially if you glance for a millisecond at a dvd. "Can I help you? Anything in particular you're looking for? Children's movies? Action? Don't look at that rack, that's, that's all for guys. Perhaps you'd like a new movie? Avatar? 2012?" They had a pirated version of Avatar available literally the day after it came out in the theaters - unbelievable.

I asked the first fellow for "filmes nacionais" - national films, meaning, Brazilian films. This always sort of takes them by surprise, since most movies sold are American movies. But they're always pleased at the inverse concept of an American who's interested in Brazilian movies. He'd only got two, but he pulled them out to show me, then went sprinting off (literally sprinting) down the block, calling out "Wait! Wait right here!" Five minutes later he came running back with a freshly-burned pirated copy of "Tropa de Elite" (Elite Troop), the famous recent Brazilian movie about the military police in the favelas of Rio. (my friend Olivia was assistant director on this movie!). I've seen the American version but don't own my own copy, and I'd like to have it, so - I buy Tropa de Elite. I also picked up a documentary on favelas, and "Lula," the fictionalized account of the childhood of the man who is now president of Brazil. 3 movies for 20 reais! (about 13 bucks.) Fechado! (It's a deal!)

I wandered a long way, took one too many turns and got promptly lost. Eventually I came out into the costume-accessories street, where people buy all the raw materials to make those crazy passista outfits and other Carnaval costumes. Rio's Carnaval supports a huge year-long economy of rhinestone, bead and feather vendors, not to mention the costume designers and float builders who are actually putting all the stuff together. Do the math - there are 12 escolas just in Grupo Especial, each with about 4000 paraders, each wearing an elaborately gorgeous costume - that's 48,000 costumes just for Grupo Especial! And there are 5 other groups of escolas, each with 10-12 escolas, each with thousands of paraders. The other escolas have fewer than 4000 paraders apiece, sure, but I'll bet it all adds up to at least 200,000 costumes total. All used on 1 weekend and all immediately discarded afterwards. So... it's a serious economic force. There are whole factories that specialize in mass-producing the wire frames for the enormous headdresses and backpieces, making the shoes, stamping out the plastic molds of crowns, wings, breastplates, props, and the other structural elements. There's a huge shop that just sells colored feathers - acres and acres of feathers of all styles, lengths and colors. Several more stores sell glittery spools of rhinestones and beads of every possible color and size, vast racks of thousands of different kinds of rhinestones and baubles. A dozen stores in a row that all sell bolts of glittering metallic fabrics. And enough feather-boa stores to supply a feather boa to every man, woman and child in the city.

Astonishingly, most of these costumes are discarded right after the parades - literally, at a huge pile of abandoned costumes that materializes at the end of the Sambodromo runway after the first few parades. A tip to anybody looking for a beautiful costumes: There are a few standardized glittery-bikini outfits that you can buy at a few shops (Casa Turuna), but if you want a really amazing and truly unique outfit, do what the Finns do: Get a garbage bag, stand at the end of the Sambodromo runway and scavenge through that amazing pile of costume pieces for all the raw materials your little heart desires! (The Finn's annual Helsinki Carnaval is famous for its astonishing costumes, and I was just recently told by a new Finnish friend that that is how they do it: A small army of Finnish sambistas comes every year and scavenges the costume discard pile, ships the best finds home, and then builds new outfits from scratch with the pieces. I'm hoping to join them this year.)

I could have spent forever in the costume stores. It's sort of overwhelming, actually - I think you need to already have a costume idea in mind to shop at those stores effectively. Otherwise you end up, or at least I end up, just sitting in a huge pile of rainbow-colored pheasant feathers and ostrich plumes, waving the feathers around with a vacant expression on your face and thinking "I bet I could make some kind of cool outfit with two dozen of these feathers... no, with THOSE feathers... no, wait, THOSE FEATHERS OVER THERE are EVEN BETTER FEATHERS..."

Got to get my wits back together. Quit it with the feathers - my bands hardly ever wear costumes anyway. (wahh.) Focus. Got to focus. Toaster and roll-up mattress. Get out of the feather store. FOCUS ON THE QUEST.

I wondered what the word for "toaster" might be. I knew that a "mangueira" is a tree that grows mangos (mangas), and a "laranjeira" is a tree that grows laranjas (oranges), and I knew that a piece of toast was a "torrada". So on the theory that a toaster sort of grows toast, I thought that a toaster might be a "torradeira". Wouldn't you know it, next thing I found was a cluster of appliance stores. I went in and - there was a sign for Torradeiras! Toasters! I'd found them! 35 reais for a nice little toaster. Ding, third quest completed.

Onward with the quest. Roll-up mattress, the hardest element of my quest, the Holy Grail. Would I succeed? Not immediately because I next got sidetracked by a street of bakeries! Oh dear. Actually I'd been passing bakeries all along - Brazilians have a terrific sweet tooth, and about every third store is a bakery - but suddenly they started all calling my name, if you know what I mean. Then came the happy and dangerous discovery that I live walking distance from a place with the most delicious teas-and-pastries, the "Casa Cave". I was helplessly sucked in for a cafe-com-leite, a delicious little fruit salad and a gigantic, incredibly good French pastry. Later I wandered into an interesting street that alternated bakeries with tiny gyms - I guess the idea was, you could have a pastry, go next door to a gym and work out till you'd burned it off, go on to the next bakery and have another pastry, move to the next gym and burn that one off, etc. Luckily since I'd just been to the Casa Cave I managed get past four bakeries in a row (Paradise Of Honey, Cookie Point, Chocolate Show, and House of Goodness) without disaster. Whew, close call.

It was 6pm. All the stores were closing. I'd been walking for hours, had done a big convoluted loop and was almost back where I'd started. It was starting to rain, big fat raindrops, people whipping out their umbrellas. Several dozen umbrella salesmen magically appeared out of nowhere. (where had they been hiding? Did the dvd guys suddenly toss away the dvds and pull out a hidden stash of umbrellas?) There was one last store that hadn't quite closed yet - I glanced inside and it was: A foam store. Okay, whatever.

WAIT WAIT WAIT, a FOAM store, as in, foam mattresses! I went in and found a huge shelf at the back full of... ROLL-UP FOAM MATTRESSES AND YOGA MATS! They even had vast rolls of yoga mat material that you can buy by the yard. Wow.

I didn't buy one yet - just wanted to price them out - but it sure felt good to just find them! I tottered home with my various purchases through a cooling rain. Anything you want, you can find in Uruguaina. And it's so fun there - the bustling, the thousands of people streaming all around, the chattering, the attentive salespeople... you get such a sense of how hard people are working, how entrepreneurial everybody is. There's a reason Brazil's economy is one of the few in the world that is booming right now, and it's all on display here at the Uruguaiana market.