Day 3 or The Attack of the Quebra Molas

Notes on Sunday, June 21, 2009

At 9:00 I met Mike and Melie outside their pousada two doors down from mine. Mike deserves an award for wedging my beastly suitcase in the back seat of their little clunker. The drive was pretty uneventful, with the exception of the quebra molas. Mola, in Portugese, is tooth (like molar). The verb Quebra is "to break." So quebra molas are "teeth breakers." I am referring of course, to speed bumps, which are EVERYWHERE in Brazil. I think there must be a law or something that there must be one quebra mola for every Brazilian. And these fuckers are huge. They make for an exciting and occasionally painful ride. Most of the time the speed bumps are painted with ominous yellow stripes, or there is a helpful street sign just before you encounter one. But many times there is no warning at all, and you hit the bastard at 35 miles an hour, and then everyone in the car hears the nasty "clonk" on the underside of the car and a chorus of "ooohhhhhhhh" rings out in unison as faces cringe.

It took us about three hours to reach Ouro Preto. A trip made more interesting because Melie gets motion sick. And when you combine the incessant slowing down and speeding up to survive the quebra molas, the cliff hugging curves of the mountain roads, and the constant up and down over hills and through valleys, Melie was feeling a little puky from time to time. It was kinda funny to hear her, in her Quebec accent, saying, "Oh, Mike, I don like thees. No, I don like thees." But still, you have to admire the sheer good sportingness of a woman who gets motion sick but is still willing to travel the world by plane, boat, car, motorcycle, train, whatever. She's pretty kick ass.

Ouro Preto is a mountain town with insanely steep cobble stone streets and narrow jack knife turns where only baby cars can go. We came into town from a valley road, so we had to climb in the little clunker all the way to our pousada at the top of the town. We had some serious doubts as to whether or not the little car could do it, but in the end, it prevailed bravely and we made it to our ancient pousada, The Chico Rei, in time for Mike and Melie to get the very last open room in the city. There was a film festival going on this week that none of us knew about, and the town was utterly booked up. I already had a reservation there, but it was M&M's turn to be smiled on by the travel gods today. And I am glad. It means I have my friends for another day.

And what a pousada it is! This place was built in 1770, and is one of the oldest in the city. The whole place is stuffed with antiques, including an enormous original painted corner cabinet in the dining room with the most beautiful decorative iron key whole, antique tables and chairs, wide, warped wood floor planks the color of rich dark coffee, weathered old oil paintings and ginormous floor to ceiling windows with worn stone window seats. It oozes comfy charm from floor to ceiling. It's the kind of place you want to spend a weekend with a lover. But since I'm short one lover at the moment I'll just have to pretend.

My room was was a complete gem. On the second story and at the front of the house, this room was one of the fancy rooms. The angular vaulted ceiling was made entirely of carved wood, painted white, and the view from my balcony of the Igreja Nossa Senorha do Carmo right across the street was positively enchanting. Out my other window (an enormous window that I had to hang my entire torso out in order to open and close the giant crusty old painted shutters) overlooked the red tile roofs of the western side of town. I was in pousada heaven, and the best part was that this place was only $45 a night. You can barely stay in a skanky Motel 6 for that back home. When our exhuberant host gave me the key to my room, I about fainted. This mother was huge! It was a clunky, crusty old worn metal key the length and thickness of a large pocket knife, with a worn wooden handle that Mike called an elephant club. I salivated the first time I put my 240 year old key in the 240 year old lock of my 240 year old door to my 240 year old room. (It doesn't take much to make me happy).

Once settled and refreshed, we headed out for a bite of lunch. I am a tad embarrassed to say we ate pizza, but damn, it was really, really good pizza. They don't do tomato sauce on pizza down here so far as I can tell, which means that pizza is basically a dough and cheese bomb with various toppings: pepperoni, yummy whole green olives (I have finally been fully converted to a green olive eater down here - still won't touch the black though), and onions. But since they don't do pizza sauce, they do ketchup instead. Uhh, like gag me with a chainsaw. I didn't partake of this particular travesty of condiment misuse, but we still had a lovely lunch basking in the sun on the terrace of a 250 year old restaurant and dranking our agua minerale com gas. Which reminds me, bottled water here is agua minerale, and you can get it carbonated or not. But the first time a waiter asked me if I wanted agua minerale com gas (with gas), I was like, "huh?" In the US, gas is what you put in your car, or what you have after you eat too much chili, it doesn't come in water. But then I realized that "com gas" meant sparkling water, and I was like, "Sure, I'll have gas."

After almoco (lunch) we split up for a while, and I went off to explore the town. I was of two minds about the precipitously steep streets here. On one hand I knew I was getting stellar exercise, but I began to not want to go on any downhill streets to find this architectural gem or that, because I knew I'd have to come back up. But I forced myself, and the resulting intimacy with the town was well worth the huffing and puffing. The first church I hit, Igreja Sao Francicso de Assis, is one of the most important master works of our hero sculptor Aleijadinho. His real name was Antonio Francisco Lisboa, but the nickname Aleijadinho means "little cripple." See, dude came down with leprosy or syphilis (they don't know which) and he lost his fingers and toes (total bummer). But instead of crying in his cachaca, dude strapped hammers and chisels to his stumps, and kept right on chiseling and carving the gorgeous soapstone of the region into moving and elegant works of Barroco Mineiro art. He sculpted soapstone, carved wood and left behind a huge body of work, including the graceful, cascading church front I was looking at. I paid a small fee to step inside and continued my verboten habit of taking pictures in churches that you are not allowed to take pictures in. I had to be sly about it. They kind of have a picture nazi hanging out in all the churches, so you have to have your camera ready to go for when the camera gestapo steps out of the nave. Back in Tiradentes I heard that the reason they don't let anyone take pictures inside the churches is because they keep getting robbed, and they don't want anyone to use photos of the interior to advertise the churches goods to potential thieves. I kind of thought they just wanted you to buy their post cards, which all sucked monkey fuzz, and so I clandestinely took my own photos in all these lovely igrejas.

I hit a few more lonely, humbler churches, and made an effort to cross town to the last one I wanted to visit that day: Igreja Nossa Senhora do Pilar, apparently the second most ornate church in all of Brazil,* although I am not exactly sure how you quantify such a thing. This place boasts over 400kg of gold and silver decorative work in its interior, and judging by the stunning glow of the nave, that's a lot. In front of the church I had the questionable fortune of meeting Lucia, a kind of geeky, gangly dude from the south of Brazil who spoke English in a wheezy, nasaly high pitched voice that kind of makes you want to stick your head in a toilet so you won't have to hear it. He decided to latch on to me to practice his English. I wasn't entirely keen on his company, but he offered to pay for a private tour of the church for us and then translate the Portugese to English for me. So I was game.

In the end I think Lucia successfully translated about .05% of what the guide told him. He said things like, "The church is gold because there is so much gold," and "The workers were working and there were a lot of workers." But I did find out that the theivery of churces is for real. The guide pointed out all the stuff that had gone missing, so I guess my illicit photos of church interiors might fetch a decent price on the black market. There is no honor among us thieves is there.

After the tour I was ready to shake Lucia. I walked down this street and that, he kept following like he had no where else to be. Finally I stepped into a chocolate shop hoping he might move on, but he came with me. So I decided to order some drinking chocolate for myself, and he did the same and sat with me. BTW, the hot chocolate down here is something to experience. It is dark and thick, halfway between a drink and a pudding. It gets a chocolatey skin on top and goes down thick and creamy, like a lava flow of bitter sweet warmth. But we sat in the little restaurant with wide open windows overlooking the mountains in the background (it's the kind of place you sit with a lover and I am short one lover and long on one Lucia - ugh), and chatted about where Lucia was from (Porto Alegre) and how long he was in Ouro Preto. Then I decided that this completely unromantic interlude needed to end, and I lied about going back to my pousada for a nap.

I did end up back at my pousada eventually, and I met Mike and Melie, and they invited me to go with them to a couple of the film festival movies that evening. They were all free, and even though I knew they would be in Portuguese, I figured I'd better attempt to stretch myself a little if I wanted to appear even remotely sophisitcated. We trekked to the old theater in the center of town, which of course has been converted to a charming movie theater, and I can't say I was disappointed with the selection. It was a collection of 5 short documentary films from the 1970's about social ills in Sao Paulo. One featured homeless migrant workers, another a water polution problem that remained unfixed by a local beaurocracy, another was about the deaths and injuries of always expendable low wage miners, another about people actually living on one of Sao Paulo's landfills. Pretty fascinating stuff. The second movie, which was playing outside on a huge screen erected in the Praca Tiradentes (the town square), was a horrible cheesy drama about a lowly but talented race car driver who worked for a Chevrolet dealership in Sao Paulo and was in love with his boss's hottie Brazilian girlfriend and his hottie souped up race car. It was dumb. It was cold out. We left early to go get dinner.

Dinner was not easy. I had a recommendation from my guide book for good local food joint, but I lead us on an expedition across the entire new world in search of it because the official names of the streets don't match the names the locals use and I got lost, and in the end it was closed for dinner. And the second place I picked was closed altogether. So after an hour of playing New World Explorers we found a place on the Praca that was open, and the food was good, but expensive. I got a little tipsy of one very very strong caipharina. It is a little impossible to stumble home drunk in these towns. Well, given the size of the cobble stones (which are really like cobble boulders), you will stumble, but you won't make it home. Luckily I had Mike and Melie. As we were headed home to our cozy abode, Melie said, "Wee need to find you a nize Brazilian traveler. Eef we find one on de way home, should we encourage you or stop you?"

"Encourage me Melie, definitely encourage me." But we have to do better than Lucia.


* More good stuff from Lonely Planet.