Caipirinhas and I don't see eye to eye

For the uninitiated, the caipirinha is a cachaca-based alcoholic drink (cachaca being an extremely strong Brazilian version of rum).  It is the most popular distilled alcoholic drink in Brazil.  The drink is traditionally made by crushing up pieces of lime and sugar in a glass, then mixing in ice and filling the rest of the glass with the previously mentioned cachaca.  It can also be made with vodka and pretty much any fruit the barman can manage to pulverize into the glass.  The strawberry one is particularly good - especially since it completely masks the taste of the alcohol.


Caipirinha is an extremely potent drink.  If you haven't been to Brazil, you may think that you've already tried it at some snazzy West End bar and it wasn't really that bad.  Trust me, that wasn't a caipirinha.  In England, there are specific measures for shots of liquor that pubs and bars have to stick to.  In Brazil, there are no such measures.  Here, they don't serve caipirinhas in piffly little whiskey glasses, they serve them in what looks like a half-pint glass (sometimes bigger).


Anyways.  I went out to a very cheesy gay bar on Monday night.  As I surveyed the 18/19-year-old clientelle and listened to the godawful American pop music pumping out of the sound system, I thought to myself: "I'm going to need a lot more alcohol in my bloodstream to enjoy this".  So, I decided to order a caipirinha.  Apparently I ordered one with vodka (or so I'm informed).  I drank it sort of quicklyish and started enjoying myself a bit more.  I then began slurring, the room started spinning, I went out for a cigarette and felt nauseous, and finally I went downstairs and fell asleep at a table.  My girlfriend had to physically accost me for my swipe card at the end of the evening(/morning?) to pay the bill.  I do remember watching a bit of the drag show.  She did a stage dive.


It seems that every time I have a caipirinha (or two) I end up falling asleep.  That happened on Friday when I had two of them....and back in March when I had three.


Basically, I need to steer clear.  I'm supposed to be going to The Week on Saturday night and falling asleep on the dancefloor is never a good look.

My mediocre birthday and some Brazilian sentimentality

Yesterday was my birthday.  I turned 27.  It was a pretty 'meh' birthday as far as birthdays go.  I hadn't had the best week so I didn't really feel like celebrating.  I'm not going to go into it, I don't want this blog to be too much of a downer.  I'm well past my emo days, thank fuck.

Anyway, yesterday morning I dragged my arse out of bed at 8.30am on a Saturday, showered and got dressed because I promised my mother (why the hell did I do that?) that I would attend synagogue at 10am.  So, not only was my birthday going to be mediocre, I wouldn't even get a lie-in.

I got to the synagogue and got a very polite third degree treatment from the two security guards dressed entirely in black: black suits, black shirts, black ties.  Oswald Mosley would have been proud.  The second one asked me in perfect english for my passport, of which I carry a photocopy with me everywhere because I'm not idiotic enough to carry around an original.  People want to see your passport for the stupidest reasons in this country - like in order to get into a synagogue, for instance.  He went behind the big metal electronic sliding door for 5-10 minutes doing god knows what before he decided to let me in.

I had skipped breakfast and my morning coffee, so as I took my place next to my mother in the third row from the front all I could think was "I hope the time passes quickly so I can stuff my face at kiddush".

Then something unexpected happened.  There were two simchas (celebrations) happening at the synagogue: a barmitzvah and the naming of a baby girl.

First, the family of the baby came up to the bimah (large table at the front of the synagogue) and they announced her hebrew name and her portuguese name, Catarina, to the congregation.  The Rabbi asked the father to explain the reason for her being named Catarina.  The father stepped forward to microphone, said something unintelligible to my ears (everyone was speaking in portuguese) for about 10 seconds then his voice broke and he started crying.  His wife and two teenage daughters that were standing behind him also started crying.  He was speaking in fits and starts and mentioned something about his "avó" (grandmother).  I looked around the room and could see other people crying.  I looked at my mother and she was crying.  I realised I was crying too.

After that was over, the Barmitzvah boy came to the bimah and his father joined him.  His father read a brief speech, held his shit together, gave his son a long and emotional hug, then went back to his seat.  Next was the Barmitzvah boy's little brother - he couldn't have been more than 9 years old.  He was already sobbing before he got to the Bimah.  I couldn't really understand what he said either (something about whenever he has a question or a problem, his brother is always there for him), but I was bawling my eyes out along with everyone else regardless.  By the time the mother came up to the Bimah, I was all cried out, she talked for a long time and my mind wandered.  But it was all very emotional and everyone was in tears.

This is the polar opposite of what goes on at a British synagogue.  Yes, the whole family will be there but they'll be bitching behind each others backs, looking around the room at who dressed well and who looks a mess, making sarcastic jokes during the speeches, hiding their boredom ineffectively, and generally clock-watching.  Every eye in the house will be dry.  Jewish family rituals are generally seen as a chore.  There will be the odd member of the family saying "isn't it a lovely simcha?" but everyone finds them annoying anyway, so their opinion is generally disregarded.  OK, it's not always that bad but there's a lot of that going on.

After the service, there were two kiddushim going on in two separate halls.  The entire congregation was invited to both.  The baby one was nice but more like a normal kiddush.  The Barmitzvah one was a real party.  There was a lot of very good & very expensive food on a beautiful long buffet table, with real cutlery and plates, a flower display, another table for dessert, chocolates and sweets, 15 round tables exquisitely laid out, catering staff with headsets roaming around handing out champagne and soft drinks, clearing empty plates, there were 2 DJs, a sound system, and a dancing area.  Usually in England this kind of thing would be reserved for family and friends; it would be by invite only.  But no, this was a party for the entire congregation.  People of all ages joined in with the usual dancing you get at any Barmitzvah or Jewish wedding.  It was lovely. 

A gang of eastern european octogenarians took me round to both parties and kept plying me with straight vodka shots (they don't have standard shot measures here, FYI - it's whatever size you want it to be) until I had to leave at 2pm, on slightly unsteady feet.

I'm definitely starting to feel at home here.

Nightlife #1

This is probably the first of quite a few posts on my experience of nightlife here.  I like going out.  In London I was more specifically interested in EDM (electronic dance music) and gay clubs (which mostly play either pop or house music - my preference being the latter).  However, I am interested in most genres of music.  London just has a particularly good dance scene.

On Saturday night I went out for a birthday get-together thingy for our host Fernando's boyfriend.  We went to a place in Jardim Paulista called 'DJ Club Bar'.  As a native English speaker from England, I found the name of the bar highly misleading.  The words 'DJ' and 'Club' usually denote some form of danceable music of which there was none.  Well, not what I was expecting anyway.

The ground floor (there were three floors in total) consisted of a few seats and some retro arcade games: Virtua Street Fighter, another game like VSF, and two proper old-fashioned pinball machines.  Fernando is a massive gamer, so we played video games while we were waiting for the club room downstairs to open up.  Upstairs was a slightly quieter bar, but nothing particularly interesting.

We went downstairs into the club room about 1am when it opened.  The music was British and American indie/rock.  Most of the songs were instantly recognisable to me and I spent the whole night singing the lyrics to practically every track played.  I heard: Metallica, Guns 'N' Roses, The Cure, The Smiths, Morrissey, Talking Heads, Simple Minds, Kings Of Leon, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Florence + The Machine, amongst many others.  After a very strong caipirinha, I got over the initial weirdness of dancing to late-80's indie and got 'on down' as Fernando kept saying.  The dance floor was rammed.  The atmosphere was great.  Everyone knew the lyrics to all the songs despite the fact that most of them had great difficulty in stringing together a sentence in English.

I ended up getting pretty drunk (bebedo - I'm not going to forget that word quickly) after forcing myself to finish a second caipirinha and I had to escape to the ground floor pinball room to get some air before I passed out.  The whole group came to find me about 5 minutes later which I felt very guilty about.  After it was clear I was having issues standing up straight, we went home, played Just Dance 3 on the wii for about half an hour before I retreated to my bed about 5am to pass out.  Everyone else carried on without me in the living room.

Maybe next time I'll stick to one caipirinha and a beer (gnat's piss), if I feel like having a second drink.