Then there is the matter of language.  Of course, I procrastinate and don´t try to cram in any of the language until after I board the plane at Seatac.  Language study is a good way to while away twenty five hours of dead time in flight.  My self-study cram course in an Asian language like Hindi was a pretty hopeless effort.  Hindi is based on Sanskrit after all, and its beautiful ancient letters register upon my aged, untrained brain as meaningless squiggles.  With Portuguese, the language spoken in Brazil, I have a better chance.  When I was in high school, the system wisely required that I study two years of Latin. Because Portuguese is a Latin language, I have been able to cram in enough to get by.  After I ask someone a carefully rehearsed question, I can sometimes even ferret out a word or two of the person´s rapid reply, enough to guess at the general gist of their meaning.  Because my expectations are based on last year´s trip to India, I have found communication in Brazil to be pure joy.

Another joyous aspect of Brazil is its diversity. One reason we looked so out of place last year in rural India was because Caucasians rarely show up there. However, here in Curitiba, Brazil, I feel less of an oddity than I do on the Number 7 Bus in Seattle. Curitiba has a wonderfully diverse population.  No one even notices us. Even though it is way down here near the bottom of the earth, Brazil is still America after all. So its demographic history followed a pattern similar to that of the U.S.  Back before the1500´s, there were only native peoples living here.  Then along came the greedy Europeans, in this case Portuguese bandeirantes, bent upon extracting Brazil´s natural resources and selling them for profit.  First the Europeans tried to enslave the insufficient supply of native Americans who, of course, were unwilling to cooperate with the game plan anyway.  So the Europeans started capturing African slaves to work the sugar and coffee plantations, bringing them here by the droves.  A lot of Africans also resisted enslavement and escaped into the Amazon jungles.  More than 700 Brazilian towns and villages surviving today began as settlements built by escaped African slaves.  Much later came other groups of European immigrants such as Germans, Italians, Poles, and more.   Today Curitiba has a wonderfully diverse population, and it´s pretty easy for us to blend in--at least until we board our tandem bike and start pedaling down the coast road.

A particular hazard of looking out of place and linguistically confused in India was that we were harrassed by scam artists called touts.  Those were weird characters posing as "helpers" who wanted to take us on tours or to expensive hotels and receive kick-backs from sleazy proprieters.  So far, in Brazil we have not yet been targeted by any opportunistic crooks of any kind.  We just walk peacefully along the streets with lots of other pedestrians enjoying the beautiful parks and clement weather.

The image of happy pedestrians calls to mind an aspect of Curitiba that vastly exceeds even the expectations of our comfortable life at home in Seattle.  For a couple of decades, Curitibans wisely elected as their mayor an enlightened city planner named Jaime Lerner.  As a result, Curitiba is a well planned city that manages its phenomenal growth around an excellent transit system.  A carefully designed system of wide "trinary roads" stretches out in all directions around the city´s core.  Each of these roads has separate protected bus lanes.  Passengers pay their fares and access buses from tube stations at the edge of the bus lanes, so the buses don´t  have to pull off into traffic.  When one of these long doubly articulated buses stops at a tube station, dozens of passengers can therefore get on and off within a few seconds.   The buses travel quite fast and can get you downtown or to any part of the city within minutes, faster perhaps than in your own automobile.  The result is fewer cars, smoothly flowing traffic, and virtually no traffic jams.  Cars are not even allowed in the central core of downtown Curitiba except in a separate lane for making deliveries.  Instead, the entire downtown area serves as a huge pedestrian mall full of shops, sidewalk cafes, and beautiful parks with huge tropical trees.  When the mayor first introduced the no-cars ruling, downtown property owners and shop keepers reportedly complained--that is, until their sales figures skyrocketed.  Seattle could learn much from Curitiba.

But what exceeds my wildest expectations so far of this ´third world´ country  is the relative dearth of litter.  Curitiba´s streets aren´t nearly as littered as Martin Luther King Way in Seattle, let alone India.  Curitiba is a remarkably tidy burg.  And besides being clean, the place is quite green.  It has lots of grass, trees, plants and flowers.  The green of surrounding hillsides is decorated with colorful neighborhoods with Spanish tile roofs.  Even so, I caution future visitors not to expect Greece or Italy.  There are reminders of South Africa in Curitiba, with here and there some hastily built houses, walled compounds and barbed wire fences.  But these "third world" trappings are few enough to leave the city with an overall sense of freedom and joy--at least for one whose expectations were modest from the start.