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Brazil!For quite a few years, I'd been in contact with the people at Devir -- a Brazilian game distributor, translator, and publisher -- about coming down for a convention, but it never seemed to work out. Finally, almost a year and a half ago, they pinned me down and forced me to agree to come to Brazil this July. Okay, maybe not forced. It was my honor and privilege, actually, to be invited by to be a guest at EIRPG (Encontro Internacional de RPG) in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on July 8 and 9. Sue and I went down a bit early, on July 3, to get a chance to experience a little bit of Brazil, and we're really happy we did. Getting There It's a ten-and-one-half-hour flight from Chicago to Sao Paulo. Thankfully, we got upgraded to a nicer class on the way there. Basically, it just meant a few more inches of leg room, but those inches really counted.
In Sao Paulo, a young man named Thiago Fink was waiting for us at the airport, holding a copy of Arcana Unearthed so we wouldn't miss him. Thiago would be our guide, our shepherd, our caretaker, our driver, our translator, and eventually our great friend throughout the entire trip. I can honestly say that the entire experience would not have been nearly as enjoyable without him. He explained everything, answered our silly questions, and took us to places we likely would never have seen without him. We also had the pleasure of meeting his girlfriend, a law student named Juliana, and spending some time with both of them together. They're a lot like Sue and myself, actually -- their idea of a good time is going out to a great restaurant and then to a movie or a club to listen to great music (both of which we did with them). The Sights Thiago took us to a variety of places to show us the best of Sao Paulo. Of course, Sao Paulo is the third largest city in the world, so we actually saw very little of it. In no place was this made more clear than at the top of the Sanpander bank building, where we were able to look out from an observation deck and view a 360-degree panorama of the city. Sao Paulo is huge. Let me say that again. It's HUGE. It literally stretches in every direction as far as you can see, an endless sprawl of buildings. Unlike most U.S. cities, it doesn't seem to have a single prominent "downtown" area. It doesn't have any truly huge skyscrapers. Instead, it has an endless sea of medium-sized buildings. And from the vantage of the bank rooftop, you can see each building is turned this way and that -- no straight steel-and-glass canyons like you'll find in New York, for example. Instead, the streets wind through the buildings in seemingly random patterns. The whole effect paints Sao Paulo as a very exotic locale, which of course it is. I won't say it's a beautiful place (although certainly places within it are beautiful) but it is always impressive. For lunch one day we went to an extraordinarily busy market district and ate the Brazilian version of meat/cheese/veggies wrapped in bread. Mexico has the burrito, Italy the calzone, Ireland the pasty, China the spring roll... every culture, it seems has developed a variation on this dish. (In Brazil, it was called the pastel.) And thank goodness, because I love them all. After lunch, we found a fruit vendor that allowed us to try almost every kind of fruit he had. Now, that's saying a lot, because Brazil clearly has many, many times more kinds of fruit than the U.S. We ended up buying a number of tropical fruits and taking them back to our hotel. Sue tried to ask for room service to send us a knife to help us eat it the next day, but she got the word for knife wrong and asked for a spoon instead. We eventually got this sorted, but not without a lot of laughter. We also went to Ibirapuera Park, a vast Central Park-like place built around a lake in the middle of the city. We visited a great zoo, a fabulous art museum, and an exhibition on the human body using the extremely well-preserved cadavers of real people (which sounds far more gruesome than it is). The Food I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the food. Because Sao Paulo is large and a true melting pot of cultures, you can get any kind of food you can imagine there. We had a fabulous Italian dinner one night, for example, and ate at a great Japanese place the next night.
I already mentioned the hot lunch pastels, but Brazilian cuisine is known for much more than that. On our first day, we had feijoada, which is a thick, dark stew with black beans and a number of kinds of meat (my interest in cutting back on the amount of meat I eat was thoroughly foiled in Brazil, but oh well -- it was delicious). And speaking of meat, we also went to a world-famous churrascaria, which is essentially a Brazilian barbeque. You may very well have heard of this or even eaten it before. My friends always called it a "meat on swords" place, and that's sort of what it is. While you get served a lot of other things, the main course comes on long skewers brought around by waiters who slice off some for you in an endless parade of meat. There are usually dozens of varieties, and you can have as much as you would like. The Convention Brazil has a very active gaming community, focusing primarily on card games and roleplaying games. According to Douglas Reis at Devir, attendance at EIRPG this year was around 7,000 people -- an impressively sized convention in any country. Held in a huge Catholic school (Brazil's schools are on winter break in July) the convention encompassed two large open courtyards and some smaller ones, a gymnasium, a Japanese garden, a few large lecture halls, and I don't know how many smaller classrooms and other rooms. People kept asking me what differences I saw in the convention compared to those in the U.S., and to be honest the differences were quite trivial. It really felt like any other convention that I've been to, albeit an incredibly well-organized one. I guess the main differences would have been the variety and high quality of the on-site food available, and how much of the convention was effectively outdoors. My responsibilities included giving two hour-long speeches with questions after, and then two book signing sessions. The first talk was about "How I wrote my first RPG book at age 19," and the second was titled "Rolemaster to Ptolus: 20 years of RPG design." (I cannot take credit for these topics -- they were the convention organizer's ideas and, I must say, really good ones.) The experience of giving a long speech with a translator was new to me. It took me a little while to get into the rhythm of saying a sentence or two and then waiting for the translation, and then saying another sentence or two. It was fun to see how many people in the audience reacted to something that I would say, and then to see the rest react to the translation. Overall, I felt it went well. As an aside, I should mention my translator, Erick. It took me a while to accept the fact that Erick was Brazilian. Not only was his English perfect, but he had a Midwestern accent and looked like a Midwesterner as well. A nice guy and a long-time gamer, Erick stayed by my side throughout the entire convention, which was nice. While a lot of attendees spoke at least a little English (better than my limited Portuguese), many did not, and Erick helped facilitate many discussions in addition to my speeches. Both at the convention as well as before and afterward, Sue and I were treated like royalty. I can't say enough good things about our hosts from Devir, which also organizes and puts on the convention, and how well they ran the event. I think by the end every attendee was as happy as we were with the entire experience. In fact, it almost seems a shame it had to end. I could get used to having someone drive me around, read all the signs and menus for me, and generally look after my every need. Seriously, though, we made a lot of new friends in Brazil and had an experience we'll never forget. Here are some more pictures from the trip...
See more great photos of the convention at Devir's website: Saturday Gallery and Sunday Gallery Related Articles
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