🇬🇧 Adaptability and nomadism

I saw a girl telling her experience with Uber in Curitiba on Twitter. She said the driver wasn’t from the city and as she said “Good morning” he told her she wasn’t local. It was true. She was from Campinas. If it’s your first time here, both are brazilian cities and I live in Curitiba.

Why did the driver know she wasn’t from Curitiba? In most of brazilian cities people use to say good morning and other little expressions of... humanity. It’s a habit, even when we couldn’t care less if the day will be good for the other. But in Curitiba people just don’t say this for pure habit. I want to believe they say when they care. Being so, I agree with this choice. To do something just for habit is so poor! 

Don’t tell me I’m rude if I’m eating chocolate and don’t offer you a bit. I’m jealous of my chocolate (but if I have two maybe I offer you a bit if you deserve). I’m jealous of my cat and gadgets too. And I’m the best person you’ll ever know. 

Since I moved to Curitiba I had some acquaintances who brought some gifts to me the first time they went to my apartment. Yes, Curitiba is far from being the warmer place in Brazil. It’s probably among the coldest places, not only regarding temperatures but also the behaviour of its citizens. But it have some qualities for those who are not afraid to know different cultures. And, about the cold, some people say the climate is the responsible for people here in the south be so unfriendly. It’s a lie! The cold is the same for all and in the same cities we find nice people and those rude ones.

Once, in Porto Alegre, I was moving to a new apartment and the lady who rented the space for me didn’t tell me there were a schedule to move and I couldn’t do it at night. I moved in an evening with heavy rain. It was around 6:00 PM. The concierge told me I couldn’t enter! 😳😰 While I was trying to find a way for him to allow this, he called the manager of the building. The lady who rented the place for me arrived, leaving to work. The manager arrived first. I tried to explain to him the situation and I called him “moço” (a word in portuguese meaning young man, but often used as people use “guy” in english, and this is the sense I use this word, always). The man just listened to this world and got furious with me. He screamed “Don’t call me ‘moço’. Call me old man, but don’t call me ‘moço’!”🤬. In fact, he wasn’t young. And then? What kind of jerk gets crazy for this? He did. The lady with whom I had negotiated arrived and make him calm and he accepted me moving that hour. Lucky me, I never had to meet the manager again.

I lived in four cities and meet people from the whole world all the time. Long time ago, when I started to use the internet, I knew a muslin girl from abroad and I knew almost nothing about her religion. One day she asked me about typical brazilian food. Brazil is very rich of typical local food in many regions. I chose to tell her about feijoada. My english wasn’t very good, but I could tell her it was a dish made of beans and pieces of pigs. She stopped talking to me for a while. I noticed there was something wrong. So I asked what was the problem. She told me about what had shocked her. I apologised, explained there are many other options of food here, etc, and we kept on chatting.

I like to keep my mind open. Astrology would say it’s because I’m aquarian. It can be. And I believe to live in different places is helpful to understand different people as it exposes us to new realities we cannot experience living all life in the same city, no matter how much we travel.

In each city I had some goal to achieve and then, I went to a new place. This way I practice continuous self-improvement. I think my next destination can keep me there longer, and at the same time to provide me much more excitement and challenges than any other. Along life I’ve been discovering qualities and defects in each place I live and I’m learning to set higher goals according to what I learn.

How do you deal with change? Is the new and unknown scary or exciting for you?

Nycka, the nomad