![[Brazil_Reflections_Part_7.mp3]] ## The First Morning I woke up on my first morning in Brazil on Laio’s couch. I remember the sound first: footsteps on the sidewalk outside, motorcycles, cars—the constant, busy hum of São Paulo, life moving close enough to be heard. Soon after, Laio joined me, and we did something that would quietly repeat itself almost every day of the trip: we had breakfast together. Breakfast is not a meal I regularly eat in my adult life. If I’m eating in the morning at all, it’s usually something optimized and private—a protein shake, quickly, before I move on to whatever the day is. In Brazil, breakfast felt less like fuel and more like a gentle beginning. Most mornings, it was simple and consistent: pão francês with butter, cheese, and some kind of deli meat, with fruit on the side—often papaya. As far as I could tell, it was also a very typical Brazilian breakfast. What I didn’t realize at first was that this wasn’t special. Later in the trip, it became obvious. No one ever asked, “Do you want breakfast?” Breakfast just happened. People naturally drifted into the kitchen. Someone would start preparing something. Dishes appeared. Food was made not just for oneself, but for others—quietly assumed, not negotiated. There was no decision to make about what came after waking up. It was already decided. That realization was strangely comforting. Ritualistic. Not because breakfast itself mattered so much, but because it removed choice. It was a shared default. And it reminded me how much culture lives in things that are so normal to the people inside them that they never think to explain them. After breakfast, Laio told me we needed to rent a car. Mariana’s car wouldn’t be big enough for the three of us and our luggage. She drove a hatchback—perfectly capable of fitting four people, but with essentially no trunk. That made sense once I started noticing the scale of everything around us. The lanes were narrower. The parking spots were tighter. The cars themselves felt like compact versions of American cars—except there _was_ no full-size version. What we’d call “compact” back home was simply normal here. The car we rented was technically a crossover—already considered a compact SUV by American standards—but in Brazil it felt large. Bigger than most of what we saw on the road. It was a small but constant reminder that even your sense of “normal size” is cultural. We packed up, headed out, and once we were on the road—a place we’d spend a surprising amount of time during this trip—I did something I would keep doing in Brazil: I didn’t ask where we were going. I asked how long we’d be in the car. ## The In-Between There’s a kind of thinking I fall into without noticing. It treats time as either “the thing” or “the waiting for the thing.” Events are meaningful; everything in between is overhead. I can feel it in airports. In long drives. In lines. In transitional spaces—where my attention abandons the present and tries to leap ahead to where it thinks the value is. But so much of life is in-between. And the in-between isn’t empty—it’s just less structured, which makes it easy to miss. Or, if you’re willing, easy to fill. Meaning isn’t always discovered. Often, it’s created. About thirty minutes into the drive, the conversation went quiet. Mariana said she wanted to sing for us, and I loved that idea, so I encouraged her. She played a few songs and sang along—some in Portuguese, some in English. What struck me was how good her English pronunciation was, even though she’s still learning the language and doesn’t fully understand the lyrics. She had learned the songs phonetically. The best English I heard from her all trip was when she was singing. Then she put on one song in particular that stopped me: “Veludo Marrom,” by Liniker. The song felt cinematic. The pacing was patient. The dynamics were huge. It trusted the listener enough not to rush. It genuinely blew my mind. Part of what made it so good was the music itself. And part of it was the setting. This wasn’t a concert or a planned experience. It was a car ride—something most people treat like a hallway. And we turned it into something else. Watching Mariana sing—share something she practices and takes seriously—felt like being invited into a kind of intimacy that wasn’t romantic. Just human. Just real. Sometimes I imagine myself far in the future, looking back on my life, frustrated not by mistakes but by moments I let slip by. Times I treated the present as disposable because I wasn’t “there” yet. This is the cliché for a reason: it’s not about the destination. On this trip, Laio made that impossible to forget. I didn’t even know where we were going. So I couldn’t fixate on arrival. I could only be where I was. ## Welcome to Sorocaba Eventually we left the freeway, and Laio told me we were in Sorocaba. Soon we’d be arriving at Mariana’s parents’ house. Mariana was born in a small town in Minas Gerais called Serranos, where she spent her early years. Later, her family moved to Sorocaba. Her parents’ house was on the outskirts of town, in a neighborhood where houses still sat wall-to-wall, like in São Paulo. We brought in our luggage. I met her parents. Then Mariana took me upstairs and set me up in what used to be her childhood room. That detail mattered to me—not as a novelty, but as a signal. I wasn’t just visiting a new place. I was stepping into a family system that existed long before me, with its own rhythms and defaults. And now I was inside it. Not long after we arrived, Mariana’s mom prepared a big lunch—rice, beans, meats. Home food. Some of it familiar, some of it not. One dish stood out: feijão tropeiro—beans mixed with farinha de mandioca, eggs, and bits of meat. It was unfamiliar, and it was excellent. So was the drink Laio made: a caipirinha—made with cachaça, a Brazilian sugarcane spirit similar to rum, mixed with lime, sugar, and ice. That moment became a pattern. Try this. Eat that. Taste this. And almost everything they handed me was good. There’s something powerful about that when you’re far from home—not because you’re being impressed, but because you’re being reminded that there’s an entire world of “normal” outside your own culture. ## Cultures Are Gold Mines Everyone needs to eat. Every culture solves that problem. And over time, each one develops foods that become so common they stop being remarkable. That’s what makes them such a gift to outsiders. To them, it’s Tuesday. To you, it’s discovery. In the U.S., we have our equivalents—things so familiar they’re nearly invisible. Biscuits and gravy. Comfort food you don’t even think to explain. Being in Brazil felt like walking into a bookstore where every shelf was full of books I’d never seen—not because they were rare, but because I’d never wandered into that section before. The next day, Laio introduced me to coxinha—a small, teardrop-shaped fried snack made from soft dough, usually filled with shredded chicken. I’d looked up Brazilian foods beforehand and mentioned wanting to try it. The moment I bit into it, I knew—it was excellent. I couldn’t contain myself. It was immediately obvious that this was something I was going to love. I still miss them. Later in the trip, I had sonho for the first time—a soft, lightly sweet pastry, usually filled with custard or doce de leite. I was with someone who hasn’t appeared in this story yet, and she handed it to me without any buildup. I tried it unsuspectingly and was completely blown away. I couldn’t really describe what I was feeling to her. She didn’t speak English, and that didn’t matter. What mattered was my reaction. My face, my voice, the way I kept talking about it did the work for me. Even without sharing a language, the people around me understood exactly what was happening. They knew it was good—but it was so familiar to them that they’d forgotten what it felt like to experience it for the first time. Watching me, they remembered. What stayed with me wasn’t only the food itself, but the way my excitement mirrored their familiarity. I was discovering something for the first time. They were watching me rediscover what had long since faded into the background of their everyday lives. It’s a kind of experience that’s easier to miss than we realize. Laio and I had talked about this before: how people seek comfort food when they travel. The joke was Americans going to France and complaining the food isn’t good because they can’t find a decent hamburger. In seeking comfort, people end up finding a cheap imitation of home. If you’re going to be somewhere else, don’t pretend you’re still at home. Seek the comfort food of the people who live there. Let yourself be disoriented long enough to discover something real. Novelty doesn’t end. We just stop looking. Continue to the next post: [[8. My First Night of Forró]]