Mirtes' Indoor-Outdoor

First things first, if you have no idea who Mirtes' is, get acquainted.

For an evangelical, Mirtes was sure good at making her home a living hell. It still boggles my mind how someone living in a tropical city would not have doors. There was a front door, of course, but there was no door leading to the outdoor kitchen (yes, $2000 reais a month to cook camping-style), and no door leading to the outdoor bedroom/bathroom.

Not to mention, the wandering refrigerator. It is a well-known fact that middle-aged Brazilian women have an irresistable urge for non-stop rearranging. There is a ceramic donkey at my Sogra's house that pops up in the oddest of places. I play "Cadê o burro" every time I visit her house.

But, the refrigerator, really? One day it was in the living room, the next day the indoor kitchen, the next day the outdoor kitchen, until she finally ended up hoarding it on the outdoor veranda and locking the door so we couldn't eat. Luckily, it was carnaval and a bottle of warm cachaça was enough to sustain us.

No doors in Rio de Janeiro means waking up to cockroaches skittering around your room. It became clear very quickly that these illusive roaches had special training from years of wacked-out Mirtes chasing them around in her calcinhas (the sight alone could kill a colony of roaches).

Without a doubt, there was a new cockroach for everyday we lived at Mirtes' Indoor-Outdoor. Yes, we named the house. We also named the roaches: Bush, Hitler, Jim Jones...you get the idea.

Killing the roaches became an art. Since there were two of us living the in the room, there was a chaser/smasher and a scooper/disposer. After a botched smashing attempt, my PTSD made me eligible for permanent scooper duty, for that I was thankful.

I so desperatly wish I could turn back time and put my scooper duty to good use, carrying on my legacy of going away gifts for my homestay families. A roach bag would have suited Mirtes perfectly.

Mirtes - The Homophobic Hoarder - An Introduction

It's been a long time coming, but the thought of even trying to summarize Mirtes in a short blog post is extremely daunting, but here goes.

I left Esther the Nazi Pimp's House with enthusiasm and excitment because 'Gary' and I had just met a lovely Brazilian girl who just happened to have an open room in a beautiful apartment in Leblon and she wanted to rent it to us, for $400 reais a month! Only $400 reais a month and no Nazi slurs, smoke-scented panties, or man boobs!!!

Homeless for the weekend, Gary and I decided to head to Ilha Grande to pass the time before we could move into our new apartment. The weekend was amazing and we took some gorgeous photos.

Upon returning we got our first lesson in Brazilian's flakyness cultural understanding of casual commitments. Meaning, the Brazilian girl ditched us and I was left homeless. Literally, bags in the taxi and nowhere to go.

That's when Mirtes (Meer-chez) flew in and saved the day. The caring and selfless evangelical saint that she was, saw my desperity, and offered me a bedroom for the discounted price of $2,000 reais. I repeat, what a Saint!

Let's talk about the bedroom. The term "quarto" was really quite a stretch as I would have chosen "veranda" or "outdoor mosquito breeding ground with a crankable curtain-wall". She also took some liberty with the term "bathroom with hot shower", because all I saw was a hose sitting in the sun...


She assured us that rain wouldn't enter the room, but upon arriving home the next day to all of our precious belongings strewn about the house and a million fans on, it was clear that the veranda had flooded. My computer would have died had I not already killed it with a bottle of nail polish remover at the Nazi's house.


Mirtes had a few basic rules: no smoking, no drinking, no foul-mouths, no boys, no girls, no music, no unpure thoughts, NO GAYS! Did I mention we lived on Farme? We just nodded our heads and swore up and down that we were good evangelical girls. Well, needless to say it only took a few days for us to stumble in drunk at 3am in neon wigs and body paint for Mirtes to get suspicious...and that's when the hoarding began.

This post is already getting long and my brain is overflowing with ridiculous Mirtes stories, so I will save them for another post (or 10), such as:

-Mirtes sings about Cocaine

-Mirtes' panties in my bed

-Mirtes builds a cubicle in the living room

-Mirtes' Bible Bootcamp

-Mirtes' son's sex CD

and my personal favorite

-Mirtes gives the pedophile a key to our bedroom.

Homestay 1: Esther the Nazi Pimp

When I first came to Brazil it was through the exchange program at my University. My school here in Brazil (PUC) set me up with a family where I only had to pay $400 reais to rent a room. Unfortunately, there were and still are some MAJOR flaws with the whole home stay situation (such as, absolutely no criteria other than “must have ceiling fan” and no feedback from past students who have stayed there). As luck would have it, I ended up with a bunch of Nazis…literally.

Esther, my home stay mom, was about 50 years old and waited on her husband hand and foot. She forced me to bring bananas to school everyday, which I insisted I didn’t want (don’t get me wrong, I love bananas, but when the bruise to yellow ratio is 9:1, im not down). I hid the bananas in a purse in the corner of my room (the infamous “banana bag”) which later filled with a few million families of fruit flies and banana mush. I never threw it away.

Esther’s husband was about 150 years old and undoubtedly fled Nazi Germany after the war. He only wore boxers, spit on the ground (don’t worry, Esther mopped it up right away), and liked to smoke cigarettes in my room while I wasn’t home…there is no other reason my panty drawer would smell like lucky strikes! He called me Mary and my (girl) friend Gary. The first thing he said to me was “How are you going to shoot that monkey Obama while living in Brazil?”

Esther and her husband did not approve of my boyfriend. So Esther set me up on a blind date…without telling me. She woke me up at 6am, brought me to someone’s house, rung the doorbell, mumbled something, and left. I expected some nice old lady to invite me in for coffee and pão de queijo, but what I got was a shirtless 40 year old man with a scorpion tattoo on his breast...yes, breast. When he went to his room to put a shirt on I made a run for it. Fifteen flights of stairs. I packed up and left her house the next day.

In retrospect, I think my banana bag was the perfect going away gift. Like a classier version of a flaming bag of shit on the front porch.

It you can believe it, home stay #2 was even worse. Stay tuned for "Mirtes - the homophobic hoarder".