I prefer writing outside, late at night, perched on some porch someplace, accompanied by the discordant sounds of cicadas and crickets. I enjoy waiting until it gets dark, when the weather is more comfortable and most everyone is asleep.
As I write this, I am still outside, but I hear a different set of insects making a different tone of music. They are joined with the howls of stray dogs, barking at a moon setting behind a different outline of mountains. These mountains form a circumscribing boundary between São Pedro and its neighboring cities. When I look to my left, I see a hillside with parallel roads with identically sized houses, made of concrete and painted different colors.
Every night, the sunset turns to blazing orange like the fruit that grows in my back yard. I have found a fatal flaw in this writing space. It’s that São Pedro, the place I have spent half my summer, is just too distractingly beautiful to get anything done.
I stepped out of the airport with a freshly stamped passport and met my host family, who were holding a large homemade welcome sign with bright smiles. They remarked how cold it was, and that’s when I first learned Brazilians have no idea what constitutes “cold weather.” It was a sunny 65 degrees.
When traveling abroad, it is important to learn basic phrases before you arrive, advice I should have taken before my arrival. Fortunately, my host family covered the house in yellow sticky notes with vocabulary and presented me with a children’s coloring book that taught me names of animals in Portuguese. For the first week I was there, my dialog included vital phrases such as, “The monkey is in the tree.” People showed mercy on me by occasionally speaking in English.  And so I began my life in Brazil, plopped in a country completely foreign to me.
This differed from most trips I’ve taken because it didn’t stink of overscheduling and sunscreen. This came as a shock to me. M incipient question was always, “What are we going to do today.” But I learned Brazilians don’t share our compulsion to always be doing something, oftentimes content in spending a day napping or staying home.
When we weren’t sleeping or eating, the latter being my favorite pastime, we went into the city to see what we could wander into. I rode bikes to friends’ houses when my host brother couldn’t persuade his family to let him have the car. I introduced, and subsequently binge-watched “The Walking Dead” with friends on rainy days.
I stayed up late into the night in backyards listening to acoustic guitar. I even got the opportunity to go to their equivalent of the DMV, which I learned was just as riveting as in the states.
I did not expect to make so many close friends and indelible memories in my short time as a guest in this country. I will never forget the many games of Truco played with family, drifting down the Tiete River, or hiking to waterfalls with other Rotary exchange students.
I will always crave the taste of homemade pastel that I helped the aunt cook. Saudades, a word used frequently down here, is a Portuguese word that even the best English speakers can’t translate. It means something like a wistful longing for the past or present. As I sit here, my host family sleeping soundly, listening to the dogs and the collective sounds of trees near my house, I put the finishing touches on a short article that doesn’t come close to how much I have experienced, grown, and learned in my time in São Pedro.
Rylan Lorance is a WCHS student who writes articles for the Southern Standard.