After living a while in Brasilia, a paradox becomes evident: this a place of foreigners, but at the same time the largest village I have ever lived in.
Brasilia is ihabited by foreigners. Only in 2009 the Brasilia-born (Brasilienses) outnumbered for the first time the `foreigners`(Candangos). Due to the fact of building a city from scratch, the planners and builders forgot the detail that they didn´t need just stone, sand and cement, but people, to build it and inhabit it. There are no records of any plan about how to populate Brasilia.
Actually, one of the striking factors of the planning odissey is that the planners thought this place as a campus, with temporary assignments of housing, the way Harvard plans the dorms, mixing and matching Ministers and Janitors.
No one thought in living permanently here. But almost without thinking, the public officers discovered that was hard to move back and decided to stay. And the laborers that came for a while to do shovel services decided that here was better than the deserts of the Notheast. And, lone by one, they stayed and brought their relatives and in-laws.
But the point in this post is that, in spite of all these foreigners and the tens of thousands internationally recruited officers in several hundreds of multinational corporations, Brasilia still has the human feeling of a countryside village. It´s hard to hear any non-Portuguese speaking in the malls, and all the store attendants are shocked in awe every time we try to use other languages. They call their supervisors with terror in their eyes, saying: É uma estrangeira! (It´s a foreigner!).
It´s not even provincialism (which may mean a strong, even disdaineous stance against anything from the outside world). It´s more like the instinctive shock in front of the unknown. That reflects also a certain lack of worldliness that goes way beyond the language. It´s hard to get a waiter that knows about the food ihe is serving (I suspect that even the cook is just following instructions). It´s hard to get a haircut, it´s impossible to get bilingual service, even in the hotels, it´s impossible to go to a hospital with English-speaking attendants. Even the smaller -and much less cosmopolitan in numbers- cities of the Northeast, such as Recife and Natal have more natural acceptance of the fact of an external world.
Just one tracer of this isolation is the paradox of BSB, the Brasilia´s Juscelino Kubistcheck "International" Airport. It is the second busiest airport in Brazil, after São Paulo International and preceding Rio International. But only has one direct international flight to Lisbon, a direct flight to Buenos Aires was cancelled, and a flight from Atlanta comes non-stop a few days a week and returns via Manaos. So, strictly speaking has just ONE international daily flight out of hundreds of domestic flights a day.
Brasilia is ihabited by foreigners. Only in 2009 the Brasilia-born (Brasilienses) outnumbered for the first time the `foreigners`(Candangos). Due to the fact of building a city from scratch, the planners and builders forgot the detail that they didn´t need just stone, sand and cement, but people, to build it and inhabit it. There are no records of any plan about how to populate Brasilia.
Actually, one of the striking factors of the planning odissey is that the planners thought this place as a campus, with temporary assignments of housing, the way Harvard plans the dorms, mixing and matching Ministers and Janitors.
No one thought in living permanently here. But almost without thinking, the public officers discovered that was hard to move back and decided to stay. And the laborers that came for a while to do shovel services decided that here was better than the deserts of the Notheast. And, lone by one, they stayed and brought their relatives and in-laws.
But the point in this post is that, in spite of all these foreigners and the tens of thousands internationally recruited officers in several hundreds of multinational corporations, Brasilia still has the human feeling of a countryside village. It´s hard to hear any non-Portuguese speaking in the malls, and all the store attendants are shocked in awe every time we try to use other languages. They call their supervisors with terror in their eyes, saying: É uma estrangeira! (It´s a foreigner!).
It´s not even provincialism (which may mean a strong, even disdaineous stance against anything from the outside world). It´s more like the instinctive shock in front of the unknown. That reflects also a certain lack of worldliness that goes way beyond the language. It´s hard to get a waiter that knows about the food ihe is serving (I suspect that even the cook is just following instructions). It´s hard to get a haircut, it´s impossible to get bilingual service, even in the hotels, it´s impossible to go to a hospital with English-speaking attendants. Even the smaller -and much less cosmopolitan in numbers- cities of the Northeast, such as Recife and Natal have more natural acceptance of the fact of an external world.
Just one tracer of this isolation is the paradox of BSB, the Brasilia´s Juscelino Kubistcheck "International" Airport. It is the second busiest airport in Brazil, after São Paulo International and preceding Rio International. But only has one direct international flight to Lisbon, a direct flight to Buenos Aires was cancelled, and a flight from Atlanta comes non-stop a few days a week and returns via Manaos. So, strictly speaking has just ONE international daily flight out of hundreds of domestic flights a day.
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