All the Brazilians

Post by Ella

For our excursion to Punte del Este on Sunday, we shared the bus (kinda of a medium sized bus with lumpy seats) with 10 Brazilians and one Equadorian. Being the only non-Spanish, non-Portuguese speakers, we were invited to sit up front so Marcella, our guide, could speak to us in English without using the microphone.

Brazil is pretty close to Uruguay and they (the Brazilians) do enjoy an occasional jaunt over to Uruguay. 

Marcella had promised the Brazilians that we would make a stop at a casino in Punta del Este since Brazilians don’t have casinos. Then she suggested to us that we might like to go across the street and have a walk on the beach because, you know, casinos are not a novelty for us Americans, because Las Vegas.

On the beach instead of in the casino. We could out do the young with photo poses any day, ya think?

Then there is the selfie / posing thing that Grubb mentioned. I mean, selfies have been around for years and always annoying but somehow it seemed over the top here. The Brazilians would pile out of the bus and spend the entire allotted time at a stop posing for selfies. They had no shame about spending an inordinate amount of time documenting themselves. Posing with pursed lips, or sideways sexy glances. The smile disappearing the moment the phone is lowered. Sure, sure, not all strictly “selfies” but you get what I mean.

Of course, we all know this is not a Brazilian phenomenon. Seems global among the young (say the 20s, 30s, maybe even 40s crowd). Grubb said “we never did that!”. Welllll, no, because taking a selfie was an onerous process with setting a timer on the old film based SLRs and running around to the front, hoping you’d got yourself in the right place so you weren’t out of frame. And hey, we don’t do it now because why would we want to document our age lined faces that much?

Every so often, Grubb and I have to remind ourselves to take a picture of each other. Not really because we want to see ourselves, but maybe more for those later years when the memory fades and we come across a photo with our image in it, we can say, “what? We were there?”.

So on that note, let me post of few more pics of the old man and me.

Admiring the Atlantic side of Punta del Esta