tonight we dine in Rio

Ontem no avião eu tive que escrever sobre o inferno terrestre que tava acontecendo em volta de mim, só que eu não queria que a mulher do meu lado conseguisse ler, então escrevi em inglês. Vou copiar e postar em inglês mesmo e foda-se, aí posso deixar isso pra trás e voltar à lingua da pátria mãe:

After sleeping for one hour (which would have been 40 minutes if I hadn't overused the snooze button), after the rush hour tube ride to Heathrow, after arriving in the airport to an overbooked flight and not knowing whether I would be able to board until 20 minutes before the flight was scheduled, after having to quickly rampage my luggage to take out 4 extra kilos, running through security, etc etc, finally everything seems alright. I have a seat on the aisle, one empty seat to my left by the window, it's on the front row so I have space for my legs, individual TV (gotta love British Airways), my fully-charged ipod, a new book and the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing the plane is going straight to Rio – not Lisbon, not Sao Paulo.

Then, the lady who is going to sit on the window to my left arrives, with a baby girl in her arms. Turns out she is the nanny for the family to my right, sitting accross the aisle: a 2-and-a-half-year-old boy who screams wildly, another baby girl (8-month old twin to the baby to my left), a mother who is clearly annoyed by everything the nanny says or does, and a bland-looking father in glasses. The mother refuses my helpful offer to switch places with the nanny so they be next to each other, saying it would be inconvenient for me, because once they open the little crib it would be difficult for me to leave my seat and go to the toilet. What she doesn't know is that I'm like a camel when I travel, and that the inconvenience ship had long sailed (and, obviously, the nanny will get up like 17 times during the flight, forcing me to get up too so she can squeeze by the crib). The baby starts crying, and the nanny smiles at me and says "poor thing! looks like you won't get much peace in this flight!". I laugh nervously and turn up the volume on my ipod as loud as I can.

The plane stays on the ground for two hours before taking off, while I bury myself in the book (which, thankfully, has nothing to do with babies, and is instead describing tantric sex with ostriches). To my right, the 2-year-old screams and pulls his mother's hair, who in return yells (to the husband, I presume): "Stop, him, Juliano! Do something, Juliano!! Hit him, Juliano!!!". As soon as the plane is in the air I recline my chair and sleep for an hour, out of sheer self-defense (although vertical sleeping SUCKS).
During the mealtime, I am forced to make conversation. I learn that the nanny, who is Brazilian, doesn't speak a word of english and is very uncomfortable with airplanes (as am I right now, for entirely different reasons). She stays in the house all day in London, where the family will live for the next four years, unable to adapt to the cold or the foreign language. I feel sad for her. For the rest of the flight, my sadness will transform into irritation, as I have to translate everything the fight attendants say, and help her fasten her seatbelt, unfasten her seatbelt, open the table tray, close it, recline her seat, etc etc. To my right, the baby twin starts crying. I can smell baby shit coming from my left. I am in hell.

The flight continued in what I can only assume was an elaborate 13-hour-long government-funded family-planning campaign. I can't possibly understand what happens to human beings that all of a sudden your life starts revolving around a tiny person's body secretions. Or, in this case, two tiny person's body secretions, and another very small person's sudden outbursts of noise and hair-pulling.

Later in the flight, of course, the boy starts running around and, as kids often do, makes a 2-year-old friend. They come over and stand to the aisle next to me. They look at the nanny and the baby to my left, look at me. The baby's brother has evil in his eyes, while the other (new) 2-year-old just looks at the baby with fascination. They look at me again. I decide not to make eye contact, terrified that it might encourage them to try and reach the baby and touch me with their sticky little hands. Their dads are standing in the aisle, their butts unpleasantly on my eye level, talking about the kids and cleaning their runny noses. The baby girl to my left os smelling bad again, while the nanny sings and does baby talk, while the baby to my right starts screaming and throwing stuff on the floor. The new little two-year-old gets a little toy car and sarts running it accross my arm, and the evil-looking one hands me a half-drooled paper cup, trying to touch it on my face. I PANICK. "Excuse me, I have to use the toilet!", and I hurry off. Arriving at the toilet, another overly-reproductive family is waiting at the door, with a desperate-looking mother trying in vain to control four kids between 3 and 9 who won't stop jumping. I wiggle by them in terror and rush to the toilet on the back of the plane. Once I am inside, I decide to stay in there hiding until the plane lands. However, minutes later a turbulence announcement tells me to go back to my seat. I reluctantly walk back to my seat.
It smells like baby shit. Again.

I do hope dinner in Rio is good.


Agora que eu parei de reclamar em inglês, posso comemorar que meu café da manhã foi excelente, e que aqui não tá frio.
Enfim, to no rio, fico um mês, beijosmeliguem!