While I was in Porto, I explored this beach fifteen minutes from the center of town. Think decaying buildings, factory plants, beach bums, and a medieval fort… I promise I took all of these photos in roughly a ten foot radius. 

Apparently it is also a big area for surfing. The day I visited there was a huge competition, complete with international sponsors and television coverage. I nestled into the rocky shore with a book, but gave up when I became a bit of a spectecal for the runners and bikers using a path next to my nest. Interesting as it was, the urban beach was too busy for my taste– and my romantic notion of the ocean as a place for solitary activities. 

Walking in, I was immediately conscious of being in a funky geometric shape that plays with height and orientation of space. The high polished of its concrete floor and walls, combined with strategically placed lighting panels create a lightness that gives even the stairs up to the ticket desk energy.  The first level is desgined to immerse visitors in a culture of appreciation and experimentation. On one side of the ticket desk is a pool of computers decked out with music recording programs for visitors to play with, create beats, mix entire pieces, and think about sound… on the other side, visitors can see musicians prepping for their performances in rehearsal rooms through a series of glazed panels.

The second level is home to the main auditorium (one of two) which apparently has the world’s second best acoustics. Every detail of the hall, down to the fabric of the seats, is designed to keep sound waves from bouncing back. Keeping with the idea that the hall should make performers, and their music accessible to visitors, the second level of the auditorium has glass panels so that people walking around the building can see down into the orchestra. Glass is generally not used by designs worried about acoustic fiedility because it doesn’t absorb sound like the usual suspects of wood or carpet. The use of curved glass provides a smart solution to this problem, and also looks pretty cool.

The most imaginative part of the building was one floor up, in an area designated for the entertainment of children while their parents attend the concert in the main auditorium. The first room, completely in orange, provides a space for kids to be more active,  while the second is intended to be calming in all purple. The music being performed downstairs is piped up, along with activities to teach kids about the music they are hearing. Another pool of computers floats between the two rooms, where visitors can create rhythms that project to the entire hallway.

Casa de Musica was completed 4 years late, and at the cost of roughly 100 million euros. But it breathes such life into its surrounding area, few are seriously complaining.

Batey Lecheria is on the outskirts of Santo Domingo at the foot of beautiful mountains. During the sugar boom, other farmers jumped on the Haitian bandwagon and soon there were bateys on all types of farms and later in the cities. When we got there, we could see the smoke from a trash fire in the foothills. Bateys are the poorest areas you’ll probably find in the Dominican Republic. Our van dropped us off on a ‘street’ looks like in those informercials you see late at night when that old guy holds up a starving/HIV-positive/worm-infested orphan, begging you to send just a few dollars each month to give him food and medicine. From the window, we could see this old woman beating the living crap of a girl that couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12 years old. There are little shacks made of tin in lots of different colors. There were chickens pecking in the dirt, trash piles burning in the streets and a strong stink.

We toured a Montessori school set up by an order of American nuns with the help of the Clinton Foundation. The school was the nicest place in the batey, which isn’t very big. One of the teachers, named Luz, explained that while the school teaches the usual reading, writing and arithmetic, they also have to teach the children how to use a toilet and wash their hands, since they’ve never really had to do it before. The school works with children of all ages, but the older kids don’t come until a bit later. We met the smaller children, who I think were only about 5 years old. They were so precious, and so excited when the blonder, whiter students from my program stooped down to say hello. The school also works to improve the health of the people living in the bateys; on the second floor, they have a doctor’s office.

This girl from a small town in Connecticut signed up two years ago to work with this program. She was short and pale to the point of looking sickly and had a weird, high voice. Something was off about her. Her Spanish was crap, even though she said she majored in Spanish in college. She gave us a tour of the batey. She showed us these wood and tin buildings where families lived in single rooms. We passed a cheerful fat woman sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of a wooden shack. The girl knew a lot about the batey and it was nice to be able to ask her questions in English. She told us about how at night people from outside the batey come to sell drugs, how women in the batey sell drugs themselves, how the men do construction in an illegal sandmine and the women work in rich houses for a living, how sometimes mothers accept money from neighbors in exchange for sleeping with their daughters, how there’s a lot of prostitution and teenage pregnancy and yet the clinic at the school only gives out condoms if you have a prescription–they’re Catholics, after all–and how the people in the community are her friends.

On the ride back, we talked about how horrible all of this is and why the hell would the government pump hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars into building a metro line with maybe 6 stops while people are living in unbelievably bad conditions. It was weird, too, though to walk through as a group and peeking into houses. I felt like such an intruder. I can’t believe our teacher asked us to bring cameras.

Our handoff process is still being worked out but Barnard and Columbia undergraduates and graduate students from any departments are encouraged to speak with the current board by mid-April to get involved.

Best,

Rhapsody

*The law working against the people

Ok. So bear with me for this is my first attempt at blogging. This is a picture of two building that have been cleared out by the city of Sao Paulo. They are an example of the government clearing out space in the city (space previously occupied by lower-middle-class people) to build a park and a parking lot for an area they are trying to gentrify and bring in private investment. Meanwhile, I visited the building on the left on a Manday. There were about 35 families still living there, and the story that they told was that the city bought out their apartments (which most families were leasing) and essentially turned a few hundred people living in a building legally into squatters. The Security was tight to enter the building, there were no fire extinguishers, no maintenence of the elevator, and many of the apartments are sealed off. It’s aweful. When we went, we talked to the community organizer for the building and he said they were in negotiations with city hall to find new apartments in the dowtown area. On wednesday we heard that all 35 families (about 120 people) were evicted. They were essentially thrown out into the street.
It will be interesting to come to this same area (it is right next to the municipal market in Sao Paulo) in a few years and see what the follow through has been with whatever the city has planned for this area.

At the same time, the euro is creating more radical aesthetic and material change through major construction. It is difficult to walk more than a block without running into at least one catepiler, crane, or announcement of a new infrastructure project. Perhaps most interesting is the decision to leave the facades of old buildings intact, kept standing through the elaborate use of steal beams… for now.

photo c/o guardian.co.uk

My host sister and I rode bicycles to Maejo University past backyard boarding houses (one-room bungalows with thatched roofs), fields of all kinds of vegetables, grazing water buffalo and bony cows, little shops, homes– a mish-mosh of land uses. The whole way we dodged manholes that lead to a ditch. After a bit of sleuthing I figured out that this ditch is where we toss our dirty water, full of detergent and fabric softener, after washing clothes by hand in these big basins. I assume everyone else in the neighborhood does the same, plus some people probably have their sewage piped there. This ditch follows the road until the road starts to curve, then empties into a big rice paddy. So the water full of chemicals, raw sewage, and oily runoff is being used to grow the rice. If only plants had some sort of biological mechanism for filtering that stuff out before sucking it up via transpiration.

Chicken nugget: since there’s no direct translation for this delightful snack, Dominicans just say chicken nuggets. However, it comes out sounding more like “cheeckehn-noggit”.

Lighter: the Spanish word for lighter is encendedor, but people in their teens and twenties find it easier to just say lighter.

Baby: “Baby” seems to be the first English word Dominican men learn. As in, when a woman is walking down the street, she hears from some random man, “I love you, baby.” Baby is spelled “beivi”.

Flow: “Flow” describes what we might call swagger. This one I think we can chalk up to the strong presence of hip-hop culture in the Dominican Republic. I hear my share of throwback Snoop Dogg songs in clubs.

Heavy: One of my favorites. Outdated in the States but perfectly current here, “heavy”, spelled jevi, describes something cool. When I asked my host sister if she liked a particular club, she replied in all seriousness, “Sí, es muy jevi.” It’s hard not to smile when I hear it because if I used “heavy” at home to say something was cool, no one would take me seriously.

More Dominicanisms on the way.