Christmas under the Southern Cross - Cycling out of the comfort zone (7.)

My husband is an avid cyclist, I'm a rather lousy one. For that reason, you've also never seen me ride my bike and carry my little ones in an attached child seat since I became a mother. I simply did not - until a certain point - dare trust my children's lives to something so rickety and precarious (and my cycling skills to boot).

 

In Brazil, cities work a little differently than they do here. The hills and mountains would be a sight to behold in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Streets are often rectangular and points of interest within the city are too far apart to walk given the local temperature conditions.

 

Thus, after the first two weeks of hearing daily "Are we there yet?" "It's far!" and "my feet hurt!" my husband ran out of patience and one fine morning he brought home two borrowed bikes, each with one child seat, and excitedly announced that this was what we would be riding from now on. A slight frown came over me when I saw this. However, there wasn't much choice, so I meekly put my little daughter on the seat in front of me and after a series of short bike exercises (meaning riding back and forth, or in circles) I was ready to go.

 

Our first trip was to a farm to stay with friends. My daughter loved the ride, sitting on the seat in her dress and cap she looked like a doll and we enjoyed a beautiful sunset overlooking endless pastures. The ride back was worse as I was tasked with carrying my son in the car seat behind me for once. Despite his happy wiggling and fussing, we rode pretty well, except that I couldn't keep my balance during the final parking and we both spilled out. He took it sportingly, but since then he has been yelling at me at the slightest jerk while driving, "Well I thought you were going to fall again!"

 

Despite my initial embarrassment, the freedom and liberty of cycling with kids thrilled me. So now we ride like hell. To visits, to the store, to music rehearsals. We pass tall palm trees, smiling people and mango trees with fallen fruit. (And then I cry in my head when I find out that people feed it to cows, because in the Czech Republic we are asked to pay a lot of money for mangoes, and the mangoes we buy are not half as delicious as these Brazilian "bad boys").

 

We go and I realise that for the fourth time I am getting what I need so much at the moment - a chance to step out of my comfort zone and the rut of Czech motherhood, a chance to try something I would never have the courage to try in my country and start thinking in a new and different way. Even if it is "just" such a "banality" as riding a bike with children.

 

That's Brazil too.

 

A country where 75% of the population professes the Christian faith and is not afraid to live or publicly profess what they believe.

 

A country where you can find Christian praises in hair salons, Bible verses on the windshields of trucks, and where people routinely bless each other in the street.

 

A land of beautiful melodic praise and deep spiritual insight.

On the other side, then, as a nice contrast, is the incredible wildness and unbridledness of local nature and the human heart, which dreams without limits here - doing something it was always meant to do.

 

Brazil is a heady combination of brownish-red loose soil, lush green trees and grass, and white clouds against a sky of azure blue.

 

Brazil's wild parrots are wild parrots that one minute are squabbling in a tree above your roof, only to be perched demurely side by side on telephone wires a few minutes later, shouting Tudo bem? as they learned from humans (tudo bem = how are you, the most common Brazilian phrase).

 

Brazilians are toucans and macaws nesting in tall trees peacefully in the middle of the city.

 

Brazil is the hummingbird that comes to drink the water from the pool and doesn't mind that you're swimming there right now.

 

Brazil is dancing in the rain, soaked to the bone, with your feet buried in the reddish-brown earth.

 

Brazil is a tropical garden not unlike Eden.

 

Brazil is starry nights with a huge moon that makes you dizzy, because the proximity of the sky is more than tangible here in this country...