3 bottles of water (1.5 liters each)
1 bottle of Coca Cola (1.5 liters)
3 steaks
6 bananas
2 containers of pasta sauce
2 bushels of lettuce
1 bushel of cilantro
Total cost: US $10.64
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Friday, September 19, 2014
The Next Big Thing
Dear Entrepreneurs, Future Entrepreneurs or Anyone Else Who Wants to Make a Billion Dollars,
Brazil and its grocery stores are loaded with fruits you and I have never seen before. It's a crazy thing to behold. Among them is the açaí (pronounced "ah-sah-ee"). Açaí is being called a "superfood" by folks who talk about such things because of its strong antioxidants.
Best part of all? When you freeze açaí, it becomes a purple dessert that rivals ice cream. Think frozen yogurt but better tasting and better for you. Sprinkle on some granola or slice a banana on top and you've got yourself a ticket to paradise.
I'm sure it's only a matter of time before açaí sweeps the US. It's got everything going for it:
1. It tastes good.
2. It's good for you.
3. You can throw the adjective "Brazilian" in front of it, which American marketers love to do.
It's an annoying white girl food trend waiting to happen.
Have fun with all that cash,
John-Mark Davidson
Brazil and its grocery stores are loaded with fruits you and I have never seen before. It's a crazy thing to behold. Among them is the açaí (pronounced "ah-sah-ee"). Açaí is being called a "superfood" by folks who talk about such things because of its strong antioxidants.
Best part of all? When you freeze açaí, it becomes a purple dessert that rivals ice cream. Think frozen yogurt but better tasting and better for you. Sprinkle on some granola or slice a banana on top and you've got yourself a ticket to paradise.
I'm sure it's only a matter of time before açaí sweeps the US. It's got everything going for it:
1. It tastes good.
2. It's good for you.
3. You can throw the adjective "Brazilian" in front of it, which American marketers love to do.
It's an annoying white girl food trend waiting to happen.
Have fun with all that cash,
John-Mark Davidson
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
All In
Back to normal life after a solid month of hysterics. The water on this side of the wedding is warm, sparkling and exciting. It's the first time I've felt like if there was a red button in front of me that would automatically transport our lives back to the US, I would in no way be tempted to hit it.
It's not to say that Brazil is truly home. It's hard to imagine home being a place where I can only communicate with 1 in 20 people. That's not the point.
Rather, it's where I want to be. For how long? I can't say for sure. Whenever someone asked me that a few months ago, I would always say, "A year. Maybe a year and a half." Now, I'm not sure. I think it would take a major incident to bring me back. Or maybe after 18 months I really will hate the place.
It's getting harder and harder to imagine what my life would be like had I not moved here. When I think of America, it's like I can't even focus. I see now the true value of removing yourself from the life you once knew. Is there a more alluring word than reset?
Next week is seven months.
It's not to say that Brazil is truly home. It's hard to imagine home being a place where I can only communicate with 1 in 20 people. That's not the point.
Rather, it's where I want to be. For how long? I can't say for sure. Whenever someone asked me that a few months ago, I would always say, "A year. Maybe a year and a half." Now, I'm not sure. I think it would take a major incident to bring me back. Or maybe after 18 months I really will hate the place.
It's getting harder and harder to imagine what my life would be like had I not moved here. When I think of America, it's like I can't even focus. I see now the true value of removing yourself from the life you once knew. Is there a more alluring word than reset?
Next week is seven months.
Saturday, September 13, 2014
Street Fight
I recently witnessed my first violent incident since living here. It was two days before my wedding. I picked up my friends Corey McGee and Caroline Johnson from the airport. We were in a cab on the way to my place.
Traffic slowed in front of us. There were three girls, maybe 15 years old each, in the road--the highway--fighting. They were in the right hand lane.
It was a two-on-one situation. The girl that was on her own fell to the pavement. Before she could stand, one of the attackers stepped up and gave her what I can only coldly describe as a field goal kick to the side of the head. Our car slowly drifted beside them.
It was brutal. The girl spun and collapsed. Her hair clip skipped across the asphalt to the curb. The third girl quickly added a kick to the square of her back.
All of this happened in four seconds. We were past them by now. Car horns blared all around us. As we drove away, I saw the attacked girl get up and run into the arms of a motorcyclist who had stopped. She was crying hysterically and yelling to him for her life.
It's the worst thing I've seen. I've been here for almost seven months. Corey and Caroline had been on the ground for about an hour.
Before this moment, our cab driver hadn't said anything to us. He just listened to us yammering away, catching up. I assumed that he, like most drivers here, didn't speak English.
When we parked in front of my building, he helped us with our bags from the trunk. His face had been serious and embarrassed ever since the fight. In what little English he knew, he slowly said, "I'm sorry...What you saw...That's not Brazil."
When we parked in front of my building, he helped us with our bags from the trunk. His face had been serious and embarrassed ever since the fight. In what little English he knew, he slowly said, "I'm sorry...What you saw...That's not Brazil."
Monday, September 8, 2014
Honeymoon
For someone who has a lot of useless knowledge about geography, I had never heard of Fernando de Noronha. Located a few hundred miles off the northeast coast of Brazil, just under the equator, it's a tiny island, seven square miles in size, that's revered by biologists for its delicate ecosystem and treasured by the few tourists that set foot on it.
Noronha is pricey to get to from Brazil. From other countries it's breathtakingly expensive. Flights are only offered from two coastal cities and tickets are easily twice as much as what a 70 minute flight should be.
Once you land, the first order of business is to pay taxes. Because Noronha is such a guarded environmental jewel, humans to have to pay R $40 (US $18) per day as a penalty for being human. There's also the card you have to buy to access some of the select beaches. And, of course, you're on an island, so everything from a bottle of water to a room will run you two or three times what it would on the mainland.
The island will pick you up and shake you by the heels, but it's well worth it. Dani recommended Noronha for our honeymoon and after one Google search, I was hooked. If we were ever going to go, this would be the time. I'm mighty glad we did.
To get to Noronha, you have to fly through the cities of Natal or Recife. Since we had never been to either, we decided to stop and stay a couple of nights (the price issue of Noronha may have also played a role in this decision). We chose Recife because a friend of ours works at a great hotel there.
Recife has to be one of the sadder stories in Brazil today. A gorgeous beachfront city, it's impossible to look up at its high rise hotels lining the water and not think of Miami. Look down from those towers into the surf and Recife takes on an eerie quality. No one is in the water. No one on the beach either. For miles, Recife's platinum sand is an urban ghost town.
It is South Beach meets Detroit.
The problem is that in the early 90s a large seaport was built a few miles down the coast. When shipping traffic picked up, thousands of sharks that called the area home were disrupted. They migrated to the shallow waters edging Recife.
Shark attack numbers spiked. Surfing was outlawed shortly after. Signs were planted in the sand warning the dangers of swimming. Word spread.
Problems, as you can guess, multiplied from there. When Dani and I stepped out on the beach around sunset to go for a walk and take a picture with the Shark Attack sign, we had to put the camera away because a drug deal was happening behind it. Drug dealing and usage is common on the beach precisely because it's so empty. After a short walk at dusk, Dani and I decided it better we return to the room.
Noronha is pricey to get to from Brazil. From other countries it's breathtakingly expensive. Flights are only offered from two coastal cities and tickets are easily twice as much as what a 70 minute flight should be.
Once you land, the first order of business is to pay taxes. Because Noronha is such a guarded environmental jewel, humans to have to pay R $40 (US $18) per day as a penalty for being human. There's also the card you have to buy to access some of the select beaches. And, of course, you're on an island, so everything from a bottle of water to a room will run you two or three times what it would on the mainland.
The island will pick you up and shake you by the heels, but it's well worth it. Dani recommended Noronha for our honeymoon and after one Google search, I was hooked. If we were ever going to go, this would be the time. I'm mighty glad we did.
To get to Noronha, you have to fly through the cities of Natal or Recife. Since we had never been to either, we decided to stop and stay a couple of nights (the price issue of Noronha may have also played a role in this decision). We chose Recife because a friend of ours works at a great hotel there.
Recife has to be one of the sadder stories in Brazil today. A gorgeous beachfront city, it's impossible to look up at its high rise hotels lining the water and not think of Miami. Look down from those towers into the surf and Recife takes on an eerie quality. No one is in the water. No one on the beach either. For miles, Recife's platinum sand is an urban ghost town.
It is South Beach meets Detroit.
The problem is that in the early 90s a large seaport was built a few miles down the coast. When shipping traffic picked up, thousands of sharks that called the area home were disrupted. They migrated to the shallow waters edging Recife.
Shark attack numbers spiked. Surfing was outlawed shortly after. Signs were planted in the sand warning the dangers of swimming. Word spread.
In our two days of sunny, warm weather, we saw exactly no swimmers in Recife.
Problems, as you can guess, multiplied from there. When Dani and I stepped out on the beach around sunset to go for a walk and take a picture with the Shark Attack sign, we had to put the camera away because a drug deal was happening behind it. Drug dealing and usage is common on the beach precisely because it's so empty. After a short walk at dusk, Dani and I decided it better we return to the room.
One of many Shark Attack warnings. Our second attempt at a photo.
The next day, less than 90 minutes away, Dani and I stepped off our plane onto the pavement of Noronha's airstrip. We might as well have been on a different planet. The compact island's beauty is strange and immediate. Chunks of igneous rock formations jutted into the sky around us. One of the island's 10,000 photo ops presented itself before we even stepped inside the airport.
Welcome to Fernando de Noronha. There were so few staff at the airport, I'm pretty sure I could have run onto the runway if I wanted.
It's the strangest place I've ever been. Because the government is so conscious of preserving Noronha, the island limits the number of tourists that can be on it at any one time (I think up to 400). The place has only two or three paved roads. Very few cars. The preferred method of transportation is dune buggy.
Dani on the back of a dune buggy taxi. When this guy hit the throttle on the main road, nothing about it felt safe. We loved it.
No McDonald's. No Starbucks. No luxury resorts or five-star restaurants. No stoplights. No crowds. No traffic. Dirt and gravel roads. Roosters wandering around front yards. Water tanks on roofs.
Fernando de Noronha has positioned itself to continuously appear as if it was discovered in the last two years. Everywhere is quiet. There's no waiting for a restaurant table or an ice cream cone. There's a constant feeling of having the place to yourself. It's hard to tell if Noronhans thrive on tourism or despise it.
The beaches, of which there are ten or so, are all peaceful. Most of the time, Dani and I found ourselves to be the only ones in sight for hundreds of yards in either direction. Cliffs cradled us from behind. Pure, undisturbed sand padded our feet. Towering crags of rock studded the water in front of us.
It's easy to feel like you've got the place to yourself.
Noronha showed itself from the get go to be the place that every middle age woman is imagining when she says she likes long walks on the beach. It's where James Bond takes his girl before her untimely death midway through the film. It will always be the image I think of when I hear the word honeymoon. It was built by God for honeymoons. Dani and I are forever ruined.
Sancho Beach. Trip Advisor's choice as Best Beach in the World.
On our first day, we headed out for Sancho Beach, which was just voted by Trip Advisor as the Best Beach in the World (for my money, I wouldn't put it in the top three on the island, but anyway...).
Like all places worth going, Sancho is not easy to get to. We took a cab down a bumpy dirt road, followed by a ten minute walk through the woods. We then found ourselves at the edge of a cliff that we had to descend down into via two dicey looking ladders and some unkempt stone staircases.
We almost turned away in fear, but this is Fernando de Noronha. Where else are you gonna go?
Sancho Beach will make you work for it.
A few minutes later, after a lot of "Take your time, sweetie"-s, our feet touched down into sand. We were on the Best Beach in the World. There were maybe 20 of us there.
The emerald waters of Sancho.
Sancho Beach and the rest of Noronha boasts world-class diving. While we didn't gear up, we did get a good feel for the wildlife.
Standing in calm, waist-deep water, schools of tropical fish swirled around us. One medium-sized blue and yellow striped fish paid particular attention to us. Dani and I tiptoed closer to him hoping we wouldn't scare him away. Instead, he moved closer to us. The fish circled around us a few times, staring at our legs blankly. When we sloshed away towards the shore, he followed, as if to say, "What? You're leaving already?"
Same thing with a big booby-looking bird I saw land in the middle of a group of tourists and eat a tiny fish right out of someone's hand. Once he realized they were only taking pictures and not supplying anymore treats, he waddled across the sand up to us. I stood there looking down at him as he stared right back at me. He was maybe eight inches away. Both of us just passing the afternoon.
Many of the island's rocks are covered in crabs. This is terrifying at first, but after a little while you realize that, unlike the fish or birds, they want nothing to do with humans. Their sole purpose is to pinch tiny fish from the waves that wash over them. We saw a few strike it big.
Jackpot.
There were also the countless lizards we encountered combing the rocks, the dolphins popping their heads up out on the horizon, and then there was this curious little cliff dweller.
Island squirrel.
There are basically no hotels on the island. Most lodging is in the form of "pousadas," which is their version of a bed and breakfast.
This was the worst part of the trip. All Dani and I wanted out of our room was a place to get some sleep. That was nearly an impossibility for three reasons:
1. Our air conditioner only worked for a few minutes at a time before emitting this high-pitched frequency sound like an alien trying to escape from inside it. Noronha was 85 degrees every day and 77 degrees every night. The humidity was like a blanket. I'm used to living with no A/C, but this was a new ballgame. We sweated and shivered each night.
2. Roosters. There were like a dozen of them surrounding our pousada. Every morning, two of them would go off, back and forth, every ten seconds from 4:00 am to 7:00 am.
3. And this one is almost too funny to be true. Like, if this was a writer's room for a sitcom episode about a bad place to stay and someone pitched this, I would say the audience won't believe it...Somewhere else in our pousada, someone in another room was learning to play the trumpet.
Horrible. Just horrible. Two or three notes at a time that sounded as clear and lovely as a pubescent boy belting out an aria. One particular morning, little Miles Davis broke that bad boy out at 8:30, just after the roosters finished their shift. Unreal.
It didn't help that Dani's skin broke out in a rash just after arriving. As it crawled up her chest and neck towards her face, we decided to go to the local hospital. She got an IV of cortisol and a pill to take. It cleared right up.
Funny enough, Dani's hospital visit was the only free thing on the trip.
Every morning I was miserable. I trudged down our dirt street after breakfast, sleepy-eyed, heavy headed, Dani beside me trying to cheer me up. I was always ready to come home.
Then a few minutes later, our feet hit sand and I looked around at another spectacular beach setting, this one somehow even more beautiful than the day before. And part of me didn't ever want to leave.
I put my arm around Dani and we walked out across the sand to whatever spot we wanted. Barely anyone else in sight. All of nature's truest wonders on private display for us. The three of us there, alone.
Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Play the Part
I'm finding as I get older that a tremendous amount of life's successes and failures teeter on one's ability to appear comfortable under pressure. Playing the part of the person with all the answers, despite all the questions and doubts circulating in his head. Acting like you've been in a room before when it's only your first time.
Some time ago, after watching two or three ripe years go by that only yielded a sliver of the success I wanted to have with the opposite sex, I forced myself to play the part. Be the guy that goes up to the group of four girls on the other side of the room, smile and introduce myself. Try to string a joke together. Restrain myself from embracing any initial interest they showed me.
Things started to turn around, but it never got easy for me. Every time was a steep hill I made myself climb. Standing there, crossing off opening lines in my head before finally just gritting my teeth and stepping forward. Like a stunt driver, staring at a brick wall that he's been hired to drive straight into, life is about ignoring the old familiar voice in your head that exists to warn you: "This will hurt."
It turns out that at the top of one of those hills one Saturday afternoon I found a group of friends, all of them new in town, out celebrating a holiday with some drinks. One of them with a head of hair I couldn't take my hands out of and a shoulder I couldn't keep my arm off of.
At the top of another hill a few weeks later, a conversation about whether she would stay in my country for a second year or go home to hers. Another about her future. Then my future. Then our future. Another when I told her I wanted to follow her wherever she goes.
And the latest of them all, a yearlong climb up the marital aisle. An aisle covered in flower petals and to do lists, swooshing around from the wind tunnel of cash simultaneously sucking out of our bank accounts. The grandest stage show in life.
I was out of Brazil for most of the month leading up to the wedding. My job called on me for back-to-back work trips to Virginia. I was thrilled. After six months away from the States, I don't think I've ever been more excited to go somewhere. It was a euphoria at first, made of Five Guys burgers and nights with old friends. But as the tenth, eleventh and twelfth days ticked by, the mounting responsibilities awaiting me south of the equator had me desperate to escape the Land of the Free.
Even broader than that was the realization, for the first time since moving, that this wasn't my world anymore. After six months in São Paulo, I had finally relocated there.
I played the part in Reagan Airport, smiling, leaning over the the US Airways customer service counter, using every language tactic I had learned from this book and that to coax a woman named Sarah into upgrading me to first class all the way to Brazil (for the second time in a month). When I told her I was going for my wedding, she smiled and her printer spit out a new white ticket with my name on it.
I flipped through a few movies, pushed away the remains of my half-decent steak and reclined my seat all the way flat into a bed. The sun disappeared outside the window. I pulled down my complimentary eye mask and went to sleep--the chaos quietly waiting for me beyond the curve of the Earth.
Dani handled the lion's share of our wedding planning as brides often do. My main job on a countless numbers of days was to walk to the local ATM and withdraw the daily max of R$1,000 (US $450) to pay for this and that. I hadn't really been stressed at any point in the process and didn't expect I would be. That changed as Tuesday crept into Wednesday and then Thursday, and there appeared to be no treatment to stabilize or shrink our swelling, last minute to do lists.
We were blessed to have a handful of friends and family come down from the States to enjoy the festivities with us. I played various parts as host, tour guide, cultural consultant and occasional translator. I did my best to assure them I had more answers than questions about this place I found just as strange and different as they did.
Biggest and most important of all my roles was groom. Groom, like bride, is a strange part because you're asked to publicly demonstrate in front of a large audience (many of them strangers) the choices and promises you've made in the privacy of your life's most intimate moments. You're folded into dozens of poses by photographers that you would never put yourself in even though, yes, you can admit it looks romantic when you lean against this random wall beside her like that.
The theatrics of the whole thing does skew the romanticism behind it all. It was almost like I was the co-author of a love story that was now being adapted by strangers. As I got dressed before the ceremony, a photographer and videographer captured from multiple angles me putting on my rented shoes. After I tied them, one of the guys said to me, "That was great. Can you do that again?"
The part of groom in this adaptation might be easy to play were it not for the fact that the love story this was all based on was a true one. That I was actually playing myself in this production and I feared I might not be doing a very good job of it. The vows I was supposed to say to her weren't the same ones we said to each other in that diner in West Virginia when we first discussed spending our lives together.
Getting married is stressful. What had started as a romantic choice of two people was now a race to fit together 25 moving parts before curtain.
But all was not lost. Amid the chaos of organizing the string quartet, and confirming we had a sound guy and printing out lists of who would ride the shuttle, the emotions that started it all peeked their little heads back inside.
At the rehearsal dinner that suddenly arrived on Friday evening, I went from instructing the restaurant staff to clean the bathrooms in one moment to publicly speaking about the importance in my life of each person at the table in the next. I quieted the to do lists buzzing around in my head, stood and began with my mom and dad. Maybe four or five words got out of my lips before they quivered and I fell apart in tears. I was so thankful for them and their example. For each of my friends at the table. For her family. For my lovely bride who was teaching me so much about life. A woman that I want to share everything with. A woman that I will never leave.
"I'm getting married." The words reintroduced themselves to me every few hours that Friday and Saturday. The emotions of our true love story randomly cutting through the big-budget production of it. The difference between rehearsing vows and taking a step back to see the gravity of them.
By the time my cue from the string quartet played and I entered the back of the church with my mother on my arm (as is the Brazilian custom), it was the first time in a week that all I wanted to do was not play the part. To be as authentically myself as I could ever be. I wanted to savor and store every moment of this experience. Make it all mine again. To be the guy that inspired the story, not the one hired to play in it.
I stood at the front of the room beside my father, our minister, and took deep breaths to calm myself as each bridesmaid slowly graced her way down the endless aisle. The doors shut and the room went quiet. And then it was me and her again. I just had to smile and remember my lines.
Time sped into a tornado and I found myself an hour later a few miles away on top of a hill in the jungle again playing the part of groom. The photographers bending me this way and that. I kissed Dani at their request, take after take, as they attempted their Scorsese-like tracking shots.
There were hands to shake, cheeks to kiss, strangers to meet and some very limited Portuguese to be spoken. "Obrigado. Obrigado. Obrigado. Obrigado."
The set around us was spectacular. O Velhão is a venue that neither I nor anyone else can accurately label, describe or even photograph. It looked flawless.
The caipirinhas were muddled and poured continuously and after an hour or so I didn't feel like I was playing the part of groom. I was really him again. I hugged the strangers around me tighter, scraped together a few jokes in Portuguese and said thank you to each of them again, this time from the heart.
As a man who has thrown a few parties over the years, I can say this one was undeniably a great one. Whether it was exploring the dark jungle trail behind the venue with my American guests or dancing my first dance with Daniela to a song written by my friend Katie Dill, everything was beautiful, fun and kept moving forward. The high fives multiplied as the bottles got fewer and by the time quitting time hit at 1:00 am, I savored the warm feeling many brides or grooms don't get to have: "That was exactly what I wanted."
Dani and I made it to our hotel room an hour or so later. We spent ten minutes working her out of all 40 buttons on her perfect dress and promptly collapsed into bed. We had our first real conversation of the day (you don't get any of those on your wedding day) and shared some laughs about our favorite moments at the reception. We heated up some shitty leftover pizza and lay there together, feeling like us.
This night just like all the ones that got us here. Just like the endless number to come.
Some time ago, after watching two or three ripe years go by that only yielded a sliver of the success I wanted to have with the opposite sex, I forced myself to play the part. Be the guy that goes up to the group of four girls on the other side of the room, smile and introduce myself. Try to string a joke together. Restrain myself from embracing any initial interest they showed me.
Things started to turn around, but it never got easy for me. Every time was a steep hill I made myself climb. Standing there, crossing off opening lines in my head before finally just gritting my teeth and stepping forward. Like a stunt driver, staring at a brick wall that he's been hired to drive straight into, life is about ignoring the old familiar voice in your head that exists to warn you: "This will hurt."
It turns out that at the top of one of those hills one Saturday afternoon I found a group of friends, all of them new in town, out celebrating a holiday with some drinks. One of them with a head of hair I couldn't take my hands out of and a shoulder I couldn't keep my arm off of.
At the top of another hill a few weeks later, a conversation about whether she would stay in my country for a second year or go home to hers. Another about her future. Then my future. Then our future. Another when I told her I wanted to follow her wherever she goes.
And the latest of them all, a yearlong climb up the marital aisle. An aisle covered in flower petals and to do lists, swooshing around from the wind tunnel of cash simultaneously sucking out of our bank accounts. The grandest stage show in life.
I was out of Brazil for most of the month leading up to the wedding. My job called on me for back-to-back work trips to Virginia. I was thrilled. After six months away from the States, I don't think I've ever been more excited to go somewhere. It was a euphoria at first, made of Five Guys burgers and nights with old friends. But as the tenth, eleventh and twelfth days ticked by, the mounting responsibilities awaiting me south of the equator had me desperate to escape the Land of the Free.
Even broader than that was the realization, for the first time since moving, that this wasn't my world anymore. After six months in São Paulo, I had finally relocated there.
I played the part in Reagan Airport, smiling, leaning over the the US Airways customer service counter, using every language tactic I had learned from this book and that to coax a woman named Sarah into upgrading me to first class all the way to Brazil (for the second time in a month). When I told her I was going for my wedding, she smiled and her printer spit out a new white ticket with my name on it.
I flipped through a few movies, pushed away the remains of my half-decent steak and reclined my seat all the way flat into a bed. The sun disappeared outside the window. I pulled down my complimentary eye mask and went to sleep--the chaos quietly waiting for me beyond the curve of the Earth.
Dani handled the lion's share of our wedding planning as brides often do. My main job on a countless numbers of days was to walk to the local ATM and withdraw the daily max of R$1,000 (US $450) to pay for this and that. I hadn't really been stressed at any point in the process and didn't expect I would be. That changed as Tuesday crept into Wednesday and then Thursday, and there appeared to be no treatment to stabilize or shrink our swelling, last minute to do lists.
We were blessed to have a handful of friends and family come down from the States to enjoy the festivities with us. I played various parts as host, tour guide, cultural consultant and occasional translator. I did my best to assure them I had more answers than questions about this place I found just as strange and different as they did.
Biggest and most important of all my roles was groom. Groom, like bride, is a strange part because you're asked to publicly demonstrate in front of a large audience (many of them strangers) the choices and promises you've made in the privacy of your life's most intimate moments. You're folded into dozens of poses by photographers that you would never put yourself in even though, yes, you can admit it looks romantic when you lean against this random wall beside her like that.
The theatrics of the whole thing does skew the romanticism behind it all. It was almost like I was the co-author of a love story that was now being adapted by strangers. As I got dressed before the ceremony, a photographer and videographer captured from multiple angles me putting on my rented shoes. After I tied them, one of the guys said to me, "That was great. Can you do that again?"
The part of groom in this adaptation might be easy to play were it not for the fact that the love story this was all based on was a true one. That I was actually playing myself in this production and I feared I might not be doing a very good job of it. The vows I was supposed to say to her weren't the same ones we said to each other in that diner in West Virginia when we first discussed spending our lives together.
Getting married is stressful. What had started as a romantic choice of two people was now a race to fit together 25 moving parts before curtain.
But all was not lost. Amid the chaos of organizing the string quartet, and confirming we had a sound guy and printing out lists of who would ride the shuttle, the emotions that started it all peeked their little heads back inside.
At the rehearsal dinner that suddenly arrived on Friday evening, I went from instructing the restaurant staff to clean the bathrooms in one moment to publicly speaking about the importance in my life of each person at the table in the next. I quieted the to do lists buzzing around in my head, stood and began with my mom and dad. Maybe four or five words got out of my lips before they quivered and I fell apart in tears. I was so thankful for them and their example. For each of my friends at the table. For her family. For my lovely bride who was teaching me so much about life. A woman that I want to share everything with. A woman that I will never leave.
"I'm getting married." The words reintroduced themselves to me every few hours that Friday and Saturday. The emotions of our true love story randomly cutting through the big-budget production of it. The difference between rehearsing vows and taking a step back to see the gravity of them.
By the time my cue from the string quartet played and I entered the back of the church with my mother on my arm (as is the Brazilian custom), it was the first time in a week that all I wanted to do was not play the part. To be as authentically myself as I could ever be. I wanted to savor and store every moment of this experience. Make it all mine again. To be the guy that inspired the story, not the one hired to play in it.
I stood at the front of the room beside my father, our minister, and took deep breaths to calm myself as each bridesmaid slowly graced her way down the endless aisle. The doors shut and the room went quiet. And then it was me and her again. I just had to smile and remember my lines.
Time sped into a tornado and I found myself an hour later a few miles away on top of a hill in the jungle again playing the part of groom. The photographers bending me this way and that. I kissed Dani at their request, take after take, as they attempted their Scorsese-like tracking shots.
There were hands to shake, cheeks to kiss, strangers to meet and some very limited Portuguese to be spoken. "Obrigado. Obrigado. Obrigado. Obrigado."
The set around us was spectacular. O Velhão is a venue that neither I nor anyone else can accurately label, describe or even photograph. It looked flawless.
The caipirinhas were muddled and poured continuously and after an hour or so I didn't feel like I was playing the part of groom. I was really him again. I hugged the strangers around me tighter, scraped together a few jokes in Portuguese and said thank you to each of them again, this time from the heart.
As a man who has thrown a few parties over the years, I can say this one was undeniably a great one. Whether it was exploring the dark jungle trail behind the venue with my American guests or dancing my first dance with Daniela to a song written by my friend Katie Dill, everything was beautiful, fun and kept moving forward. The high fives multiplied as the bottles got fewer and by the time quitting time hit at 1:00 am, I savored the warm feeling many brides or grooms don't get to have: "That was exactly what I wanted."
Dani and I made it to our hotel room an hour or so later. We spent ten minutes working her out of all 40 buttons on her perfect dress and promptly collapsed into bed. We had our first real conversation of the day (you don't get any of those on your wedding day) and shared some laughs about our favorite moments at the reception. We heated up some shitty leftover pizza and lay there together, feeling like us.
This night just like all the ones that got us here. Just like the endless number to come.
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