“Due, maybe, to the fatalistic roads or to the shimmering quality of light in the high, semi-dry savanna of Central Brazil, we were quickly entering a mystic nation within a nation. The first premonitions were in Pirenópolis, another historic gold-boom town like Goiás Velho, only more spiritual.” – To Belém […]
Grade school kids perform for parents and teachers, here in the heart of Brazil. As poet Elizabeth Bishop observed, speaking of Brazil where she lived for two decades: “And children are really loved more than any place else…” ” order_by=”sortorder” order_direction=”ASC” returns=”included” maximum_entity_count=”500″]
Freed from waiting in the parade line, the kids take to the demonstration fields… Kids being kids, they fool around, spectate, cry, hug, and hear speeches, while teachers help out, here in the interior of Minas Gerais. ” order_by=”sortorder” order_direction=”ASC” returns=”included” maximum_entity_count=”500″]
I was invited by my local church to document a recent Family Day of its grade school called Betuel, at the church’s retreat in the interior of Minas Gerais. The charm of Brazil’s untouristed interior is in full flower here. As American poet Elizabeth Bishop characterized it a 1957 letter […]
“When we departed Minas Gerais for Goiás that day, we left the more developed Southeast for the wild Central West which used to be called Mato Grosso, or Dense Forest. Dense forest it is no longer, but then a good part of Goiás was always a relatively treeless grassland called […]
“If the state’s major tourist attraction was just a little too tacky, the economy of robust pink alligators too up and coming, the state of Goiás itself was fast growing on me. I felt as though I had found an older and simpler Brazil, untouched and undisturbed by oceans and […]
Minas Gerais is famous for its rolly-polly tropical highland hills and extensive number of backroads, many in dirt. The state is the size of France or Texas, after all, and a country unto itself: with different landscapes, accents, customs, and cuisine. In Minas “what developed was a distinctly Brazilian (as […]
