Going to School with Monkeys

I saw monkeys on the way to school the other day. They were playing tag on the power lines just outside the campus, and they were completely adorable. At first I thought they were squirrels, but then I remembered that Brazil doesn’t have squirrels, and upon closer inspection I realized to my delight that they were indeed little monkeys. I’d heard that monkeys lived in the trees that surround campus (PUC abuts one of the two national forests within the city of Rio de Janeiro), but I’d never seen them firsthand. I so wished I’d had my camera with me.

In addition to being squirrel-free, PUC differs from OU’s campus in a variety of other ways. In Oklahoma, there’s seemingly limitless space, and the campus has expanded accordingly. To walk diagonally from the National Weather Center at the far southeastern edge of campus to the Catlett music building at the far northwestern edge would easily take more than an hour and a half. Even in the section of campus where most of the academic buildings are, it’s often hard to go from class to class in the allotted ten minutes. PUC, on the other hand, could probably be crossed in its entirety in under fifteen minutes. Since they’re caught between mountains and Gávea, there’s really no room for them to expand outward, so instead they build up. The majority of classes are held in just two huge buildings, and all of mine are held in just one. Instead of racing across a sprawling campus, I simply go up or down a couple floors.

I like that PUC is so compact. PUC has somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 students, but it feels much more intimate than OU, which has only a few thousand more students. It is not at all uncommon for me to go a day at OU seeing hardly anyone I recognize on campus outside of classes. At PUC, on the other hand, where I know far fewer people, I always seem to be running into people I know. One popular hangout that has emerged is the outside Wi-Fi area. Since I have no internet at home, I spend a great deal of time there, and it seems that others do, as well. There’s almost always one of my friends around. In fact, I ended up making friends with a Brazilian guy simply because we always seemed to be there at the same time. Sometimes a whole group of my friends will gather just to hang out for awhile, killing time between classes, or just pausing for awhile to catch up with people. In that regard, there seems to be a better sense of informal community for me here than at OU.

the wireless area

On the other hand, I miss the overall sense of a college community. Brazilian students typically live at home, so PUC has no dorms and, at least as far as I can tell, no group that organizes campus-wide events to draw students together. There are no school sports teams, and PUC does not have a mascot. I’m not even sure that there are official school colors. I come from a school where football is everything (heck, I even planned to study abroad in the spring so I wouldn’t miss football season), and I miss the sense of community generated when the entire student body comes together under the name of the Sooners. In the United States, being a College Kid is a full-time occupation. For at least the first year, most kids eat, sleep, and breathe the “college experience,” and they develop an immense feeling of pride for their school. They are a Sooner, or a Badger, or whatever their school mascot might be, and that becomes a defining element of their identity throughout their college years, and often far beyond.

In Brazil, on the other hand, it seems that a college affiliation makes up only a very small part of a student’s identity. They come and go on campus, attending classes, perhaps stopping to get a bite to eat or use the internet, but then they leave and go back to the rest of their lives. The “classic college experience” exists in a very different form here. I don’t get the sense that people cultivate a fierce pride in their particular school, or that there is any sort of significant rivalry between schools. In the US I am automatically obligated to “hate” anyone I meet from Oklahoma State or Texas, OU’s two biggest rivals, but I’ve never come across anything like that here, even though there are many universities just within the city of Rio itself. Perhaps the lack of sports teams helps reduce rivalries.

In a way, the city futebol teams step in to fill this role. I’d be willing to bet that for most Carioca college kids, their allegiance to their futebol team is far stronger than their allegiance to their university. Instead of seeing people proudly sporting PUC apparel, there are always students around wearing Flamengo, Fluminense, Botafogo, or Vasco da Gama jerseys. These teams weave together entirely different webs of loyalty, ones that connect not only students from different universities, but also people from all across the age range and socio-economic spectrum, and in the end they generate just as much support, if not more, as the most popular US university sports teams.

In the same way that college affiliation doesn’t seem to be particularly important here, class years don’t appear to hold as much significance in Brazil, either. Older students play jokes (“trotes”) on freshmen at the beginning of the school year, which consist of everything from painting their faces and clothes, to making them dress up in costumes and beg for money (for beer for the older students) at intersections, to things more sinister. However, after this initial hazing dies down, the lines dividing class years apparently fade as well. In the US there is the unfortunate tendency of upperclassmen and grad students to look disdainfully upon younger students simply because they’re younger, but I’ve never seen that here. My group of friends has included everyone from first-semester freshmen up through grad students, and nobody takes any notice whatsoever.

a trote: first-year med students from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro begging for change on a street in Leblon

some of the food kiosks on the way into PUC - the vendors are so nice - the chocolate croissant seller recognizes me and calls me "dear," the pizza salgado seller calls girls "princess," the coconut water guy sings to himself, and the soda guy wished me a happy stay in his country

along one of the main walkways

the open area under one of the two huge buildings

the open area under the huge building where my classes are held

the hallway

one of my classrooms