This bridge year has made me appreciate the value of self-reflection and spending time alone. My high school was called a “pressure cooker” and no one had the time to slow down and think about anything. I had no direction and felt lost when I graduated from high school. Going to college without taking some time off seems unimaginable to me now because I would have no idea of what I truly want to get out from a college experience. During my time in Brazil, I have read 17 books on my kindle. I am gradually getting into the habit of reading, which wouldn’t have happened without taking a bridge year. I am not only surviving, I am thriving here. I’ve learned to be comfortable by myself. Every book I’ve read, from Americanah to 1984, has taught me something I wouldn’t have gotten out of if I wasn’t alone. Even though I am still not sure what I want to study, I can say confidently that I have more direction in life than ever before. Having alone time has enabled me to think back to my high school life. If you asked me a year ago what my favorite book was, I wouldn’t have had an answer because I was ambivalent about everything. But now, having reflected so much on every detail of my life, I’ve realized how I’ve always enjoyed explaining calculus concepts to friends; whenever I start my homework, I would start with mathematics because I tend to leave my least favorite things last. Before embarking on this journey, I regarded this year as merely something different, but I was wrong about it. It’s more than something different, it is life-changing.
Is it possible to miss you even though I have three months more? The inherent kindness of strangers—their naturally open, welcoming, and talkative nature. The terrazas—why would anyone eat inside when the weather in Madrid is almost always beautiful, sunny, and breezy? The winter sunsets (and sunsets in general). The abnormally long hours of sunlight. The late nature of everything from sleep, work, and school to meals—I feel like I get more out of my day. The free museums—El Prado and Reina Sofia. The social nature of food and meals—people take their sweet time and chat.
The abono card—unlimited access to all of Madrid and Toledo for just 20 euros a month (as long as you’re young and broke)! The informative dancing diagrams on the metro marking every door. The recording of the woman on the metro telling me to watch my step on the way out…what a doll. The Cercanias trains. The abundance of things to do. Madrid tap water!! I’ve never known such quality. The fruterías. The Cien Montaditos and Cervecerías. The music and the way people dance. The fact that loitering in restaurants or cafes is completely acceptable (caveat: El Tigre doesn’t count). The Spanish lisp—I’ve grown to love it and use it(; The primero/segundo plato deals for just 10 euros. The casual beauty in every Spanish city or pueblo. The sunset strolls in El Retiro. The immunity I’ve seemed to develop for gorgeous cathedrals (slightly concerning, but a good problem to have). The ill-fated trips to El Rastro on Sunday mornings to spend all of my money. The one extremely happy, short, little fifty-year-old guy who’s sometimes playing the guitar in the Alonso Martinez metro stop and bounces/does a slight head-bang to the music while continuously grinning. The kebabs—a budget dinner for a standard 3.50 euros throughout the whole city! Patatas. Bravas. TORTILLA. Cocido and padron peppers. Garbanzos and lentejas. The prevalence of chocolate. Pisto—a newly discovered delicacy thanks to my majestic centaur OG travel bud RB. My host sisters’ “restaurant” Foxx—I can dine in for less than ten centimos. Warren and his one-of-a-kind humor and abundance of highly quotable lines. Enrique our sarcastic Spanish teacher. Feeling like a celebrity when I walk past some of the tables at lunch and the kids in my class scream my name just to say hi. The kids in my classes telling me small little details about their lives that they find exciting in the moment. The new student-teachers that I’m constantly meeting. The way people say my name. The besos. The complete Spanish immersion—no matter how much I try to soak it in now, I know I won’t realize how great it is until I leave. Thank you for all that has been and has yet to come.
“This experience has been incredible. I have learned so many things about Spanish culture, food, history etc. from talking to my fellow teachers at the school or the kids who are always eager to talk to a tall, blonde Americano. Everyone has been very welcoming to me and always helps me with my Spanish language skills. I’ve seen much greater improvement in the English level of the classes that I spend time in than those that I go to less often, which is a sign of the difference I have made so far. I’ve also noticed in myself a deep desire to keep learning. I see kids every day who do not take advantage of their opportunities in class, and I cannot help but think that I have done the same for much of my time in school.
Being in this service-learning program has been a very enlightening and beneficial experience to me and if you are curious, I strongly encourage you to take a closer look at the program to see if it interests you. With all of the stress that built up for me in high school, I would be so incredibly overwhelmed if I were at Tufts right now. And being away from school for a year has only increased my desire to go back to Tufts and continue with my education. The program staff and my 1+4 peers have been so supportive of me.”
I went last weekend to visit my host family in Curitiba, the city that I stayed in for two weeks when I first got to Brazil for In-Country Orientation. My family in Curitiba is a couple with no kids, and they are both doctors, (financially comfortable and extremely well-educated), and spoke English. I was very much in my comfort zone, living with the same language, socioeconomic status, and habits I was used to. I remember worrying when I was there that my experience wasn’t “Brazilian” enough or simply different enough from the life I had just come from in the US. Visiting them for the weekend was a nice little vacation back into my American life of speaking English and having a clothes dryer. Seeing my family and Curitiba again after four months also allowed me to compare the Sophia of September who had just arrived in Brazil, homesick and terrified, to the more confident, Portuguese-speaking Sophia of January.
My host families in Curitiba and Florianopolis (my “permanent” homestay where I’m living from September to April) are very different; they are of different education levels, socioeconomic status, and general outlooks on Brazil and the world. Visiting my family in Curitiba made me notice those differences even more clearly, and also made me realize how happy I was to be living with my family in Florianopolis. I loved Curitiba, but have said over and over that Floripa is a better place for me to spend my bridge year. When I got home from Curitiba on Sunday afternoon, I walked to my grandmother’s house with my mom and sister for our almost-regular weekend visit, something I had done in Curitiba too; both when I was there for two weeks in September and on my most recent visit, I had spent a lot of time with my host mom’s family, having frequent meals and spending weekends with them. I realized that in both my Brazilian families, their families were their closest friends who they spent the most time with, even when they were adults, which was a custom different from my family at home. We see my grandparents on both sides once or twice a year, and cousins more often, but still nowhere near once a week.
I wonder whether this is a Brazilian thing or just a coincidence, because I know in my family in New York I only see my grandparents/aunts/uncles on holidays, and most of my American friends are like this too. Talking to my fellow bridge year participants I realize that Brazilians are generally closer to their extended families, possibly because they as a culture are less geographically spread out and move far away from their hometowns for university and later life less often, or possibly just because the institution of family is considered to be more important in the national culture. The importance and value placed on family is one of the things that has helped make me comfortable here, and certainly something I want to carry back with me when I go home. And by that I mean the US, although at this point, my house and family here have begun to feel so natural that when I was in Curitiba I found myself missing “home”, Floripa.
Being back on the Tufts campus now, I can know that taking a bridge year through Tufts 1+4 was one of the best decisions I’ve made so far! I am certainly doing a better job at being authentically “me,” I’ve gained a better understanding of who I am, what this world is, and how I want to impact it! I feel more comfortable in knowing where some of my passions lie and how I can use them to fuel the rest of my life. I know that I want to let my curiosity take me around the world, letting my newfound experiences guide me! Besides that, my bridge year has given me the chance too to share my amazing stories with friends, gain a new fluency in Portuguese (one that I am furthering here at Tufts!), and take advantage of all the resources Tufts has to offer!
Steven is now a first-year student at Tufts, where he plans on studying biochemistry and community health.
February was crazy! It started of finished “Training Seminar 2”, the second of three program retreats. This time I was hanging out with all of my friends in the state of São Paolo. On the second weekend of February I went to Blumenau, the city with the largest Oktoberfest in the world after Munich. The next weekend saw me in Rio de Janeiro. Then I was barely able to return home before heading out again to Iguacu Falls (worth the google image search if you don’t know what it is). I finally returned to Florianopolis, for probably the last time, the day before Carnaval. If I thought the rest of the month was crazy, I had another thing coming to me.
Carnaval is crazy. It is split, as far as I can tell, into more or less two major parts. There are the ‘blocos,’ a.k.a. giant street parties, and the parade of samba schools. The blocos were unlike anything I have seen before. Imagine a bus or a subway on a really crowded day. At rush hour. And they are doing repair work so only half the cars are running. Imagine that, but everyone is drunk, shirts are in the minority, costumes (Not that modest of costumes, obviously. Think more cat ears.) are common, and there are two loudspeakers duking it out for top dawg at each end of the subway car. Some people are dancing. That’s the blocos. They are just as hot as that, too. The only differences are the blocos are outside and keep on going for blocks. That’s the blocos.
The parade of the samba school is a whole different breed of crazy. These happen in a stadium probably longer than a football field but only as wide as a four lane road. Once the parade begins around 10:30pm there is an endless parade of elaborately dressed dancers. When I say endless, I mean they literally keep coming for the hour and 10 minutes that is allotted to each samba school. They are all decked out in the most ornate, fantastic and creative costumes I have yet seen, and the costumes change every five rows or so. In addition to the over the top costumes, they push giant floats taller than the stadium on either side down the center, with dancers strategically stationed on top. The seemingly endless line of bedazzled dancers on bedazzled dancers dazzles the eye in an awe-inspiring spectacle that doesn’t end until four in the morning.
For many, this is the height of the year. Samba schools spend months practicing for the parade and making costumes, let alone the dollars of private and public money lavished on the festivities. In fact, one Uber driver in Rio de Janeiro went as far as to say that Carnaval was part of what it meant to be to be Carioca (Carioca is what you call someone from Rio). Internationally, and for many domestically, Carnaval is seen as THE symbol of Brazilian culture.
And yet, and here it gets really crazy, in my experience most Brazilians do not actually like Carnaval. Most of my coworkers had plans to leave the city or hide away in their houses over Carnaval to escape the celebrations. My host family only likes it for the days off of work. My host cousins came to visit and stayed for all of Carnaval. They came to the city with the largest Carnaval in the south of Brazil. They are young adults, the target age of the blocos. And yet they, too, stayed at home and chilled with my host fam, only ever attending the ‘children’s carnival’ that my host mom volunteered at. Even the Cariocas, in the city with the biggest Carnaval in the world, whose identity is apparently tied to the festival itself, by and large do not like it. Of the numerous Uber drivers I spoke to in Rio, when asked if they were excited for Carnaval, only two replied in the affirmative.
This attitude towards Carnaval comes from a few different sources, I believe. First of all, half of it what it amounts to is a giant club party in the middle of the street. If that scene isn’t for you, there goes most of Carnaval. And even if it was your scene, I know many people who used to like Carnaval when they were twenty-somethings but no longer enjoy it. While immensely popular with a certain age group, trying to dance in a disgustingly hot, densely crowded space to the sound of loud popular music while surrounded by a bunch of drunk people doing the same does have limited appeal. And for those not actively involved in these street parties, they get horrible traffic, closed off areas, and a bunch of rowdy people. Obviously not the most desirable thing. Others look at the social aspect, deploring the animal conduct and flagrant waste of money on elaborate costumes or throwing street parties while Brazil faces serious economic problems. I find it perfectly understandable that if faced with this kind of craziness every year since birth people would be thankful for the long weekend but would rather go to the beach or visit family than get involved in it all.
None of this is to say that Carnaval is bad, or anything close to it. But I do find it interesting that the aspect that most defines and represents Brazil is only enjoyed by a small percentage of the population. Many times I have heard something along the lines of “Samba is Carnaval, and Carnaval is Brazil.” But just as there only small amounts of samba in Carnaval, there is only a small population of Brazil interested in Carnaval. Far from being the most authentically Brazilian experience so far, I spent all of Carnaval activities with my American friends, because they were the only people I knew who would go with me. The same people who told me I simply had to go to Carnaval while I was here in Brazil also often opted to stay at home themselves.
I think that demonstrates something very true about Carnaval. Even though only two Uber drivers in Rio were looking forward to Carnaval, I think all would agree that it is part of being Carioca, and that they were all Carioca. Even the people who don’t partake recognize that Carnaval is Brazil. Carnaval is so much a part of the cultural and social identity of Brazil that even those opposed to it still identify with it as a Brazilian. I think it is similar to how closely New York City and the Statue of Liberty are linked, even though there are probably thousands and thousands of New Yorkers who have never been.
After a crazy month of traveling I came back to some crazy parties and insane parades, spectacles I will never forget. But here Carnaval is so pervasive that even those opposed to it identify, at little, with the celebration, and that is the craziest thing of all.
