Yes, It's Nice Weather, But Now I Must Escape

For those of you thinking that my absence from my regularly-scheduled weekly posts was due to traveling to some exotic locale where parrots deliver you coconuts to drink from (parrots, due to their greater strength and larger size than both African and European swallows, are likely quite adept at gripping coconuts by the husk. But I think they're non-migratory...), you'd be wrong. I didn't write because there wasn't much to write. Although now I figure that some blogger.com server in a warehouse in CA is getting worried about my disappearance, so I'll talk a little.

When I last left off, I was working in the equivalent of the provost's office, creating a new set of rules for how content is published to Mackenzie's website. Yeah, it's not very exciting. But on the bright side, when you're important enough to be on the 8th floor of the admin building, plates of fruit and cups of coffee get brought to your desk where you sit growing fatter because you can't burn the 30 calories to get the stuff yourself. But I don't mind - the fruits were good.

The next week (as in, last week) I was in the international office, translating stuff from Portuguese to English, among other tasks. Imagine - you struggle to speak the language and have only tried to do so for one month, yet now you are reading a 10 page report in Portuguese and are trusted to write a summary about it in Portuguese for some staff journal. I only hope they don't include my name and address with my work; the last thing I want is someone associating 5th grade grammar mistakes with a college student. In my defense, reading and writing is infinitely easier than listening and speaking, so I don't think I made a fool of myself.

This past week I began work at The University of Pittsburgh's office in the American Chamber of Commerce building (AMCHAM). I had imagined AMCHAM as a large, grandiose structure; a picture on the Pitt São Paulo webpage showed a giant entry room with chandeliers and such. Now I realize that was the picture of the inside of a Hilton. Hmph. AMCHAM is, in fact, a somewhat underwhelming building, at least when one initially imagines a chamber of commerce from the world's most powerful nation that is located in one of the world's largest cities. Just two stories with offices and conference rooms, though, is nothing special. And no one brings me coffee! I have to walk across the room to get it - the injustice!

Here, my work isn't very thrilling. Again. Right now, I look at spreadsheets of alumni, update spreadsheets of alumni, look at spreadsheets of companies, update spreadsheets of companies, and email alumni to remind them to update their information so I can update spreadsheets. So...yeah. I wish it were Excel 2007 and that the computer weren't so old. I also wish there was a window, so I could look at the happy faces of pedestrians as they enjoy sunshine and their corneas aren't scorched by rows of names, numbers, and addresses.

And every time I go to the bathroom there, I hope that it's empty. Not for any weird reasons. But this one time, I was washing my hands, and one of the janitors came in. He looked like a nice guy, mid-to-late 40s, with a beaming smile. That smile meant that he wanted to talk. Oh no. He started on about how nice today's weather was. I got about 10 of the 40 words, something about beautiful sunshine and whatnot. Okay. I smiled and nodded, added a quite sim or two, and hoped he would go about his work. No. Paragraph two. This time, I understood absolutely nothing. But after he finished, he smiled and laughed again, so I smiled and offered him a slight chuckle, hoping that would appease whatever desire he had for human contact at that moment. No. Paragraph three. Yep, may as well have been spoken in Urdu. Now I was really concocting my exit strategy. As he talked, I walked over to the paper towels and grabbed a couple. In an effort to disguise my inability to respond coherently to anything he said, I pretended I was extremely concentrated on drying my hands. You know, when someone talks to you and you want them to go away, you always start fiddling with something like if you don't the world will end. Let me say that my hands were super dry. I smiled politely at him, didn't make eye contact (I didn't want to know if he expected my response), and left the bathroom. Close call. That guys foreign-o-meter was just about to go off.

On the bright side of all this, today begins another four day weekend. I could get used to having some random holiday every couple of Thursdays, which provides a great reason not to work on Friday. Sadly, I cannot accompany my Samsung-ee friends on their travels to the beautiful northeast of Brazil, Maceió, because a round trip plane ticket would require me to drop a little over $500...which is more than my round trip from the USA cost. I am a college student, and I haven't yet received my first paycheck, so therefore I do not feel like losing two-thirds of my current bank account balance. Which is sad, because the photos look scrumptious. Also, my happiness was slightly dampened yesterday when I realized that the soles of my faithful brown casual shoes are full of cracks. Cheap rubber. Or maybe they have a self-destruct clause when crossing the Equator, to prevent patent infringement or something.

What else?

People love their dogs here, wow. Last weekend I went to a park nearby, and that place was chocked full of 'em. It was ridiculous. When walking on sidewalks near houses, one spends more time watching their feet than looking up.

Also, this week I started using a new bus route, obviously, since I'm working at a different location. It's a full-size bus...but manual. Manual! Who in their right mind would think it's a good idea to drive a manual bus? Maybe it was drawn up as a scheme for population control. It seems like it'd be exceedingly easy to die when the driver throws it around between gears, especially on a cobblestone street. Goodness. And apparently bus stops here can also be marked by a wooden pole painted two colors, nothing more. I did not know this.

Throughout this past week or two, I remembered various other random insights that I wanted to write here: sights and sounds, cultural observations, the road to El Dorado; but now I can't think of any of that. Oh well.