Brazil for Beginners - Part Two

I'm back again with another installment of Brazil for Beginners. I took a while to write the second part because I had to be in the right mood for it as it's about one of my favorite things about the nation of Brazil...

An Introduction To Its Inhabitants

The humans that live in Brazil are known as Brazilians (capital B). There are around 190 million Brazilians that occupy its 8,514,877 km² - that's around 22 Brazilians per km².

Brazilians like to think of themselves as a courteous, happy, pacific and kind people. That's not entirely true - Brazilians might be those things but there's something behind those things - a solid social law, a strict norm, a golden rule: Gérson's Law.

You also like to take advantage in everything, right?

- Gérson

Being courteous, happy, pacific and kind might all the means to an end, ethics and proper behavior can all be ignored if there is a way to seize an opportunity for profit. While it is a derogatory concept it is the hidden truth of what governs Brazilian behavior (translation).

It must be made clear that not all of us live and die according to Gérson's Law, most of us - I'd say 85% of the population - aren't inclined to being bastards, crooks and liars all the time - just on occasion, if no one is looking. Some of us, which is my case, hate the Law that governs us but must live with it - these people understand that a single Brazilian acting like a brazilian (lowercase B, derogatory form) is enough to ruin a good thing for the rest of us (translation). I have argued that brazilians are human locusts - where one goes, the whole flock goes and manage to destroy and shit on anything virtuous and interesting (examples are Orkut and MSN Messenger).

Enough bashing - as you can tell, I hate brazilians (lowercase B).

As far as what Brazilians really are, they - except for the brazilians - are hard workers and humble. We might not be as efficient as other "Third World" nations but the typical, salt of the earth, person does his best to work hard and earn his wage, feed his family, have some change left for a churrasco with his friends and watch the serialized TV soaps (another national plague, but I won't go into that today). Brazilians are easily found in non-tourist areas - basically anywhere except Rio de Janeiro, the spiritual home of Gérson's Law. Leaving the high density urban areas of the capitals, the pace of live slows to almost a crawl even with ample access to the Internets and other mass media outlets.

Brazilians have no single national fetish/interest although football and women tend to be very popular topics among most men - I'm not much into football, as I think it has too little blood, hence my "refined" taste for MMA. I'm not a woman, so I have no idea what Brazilian women talk about when they're with their friends so I can't help out with that, sorry. Although, I'm pretty sure the bitch about how men ogle their asses all the time and how stupid football is.