The Ride

Before going to Campinas, I needed to find a place to stay for a few days. With a tight budget, I couldn’t afford a hotel. My mother had a friend from when we lived in France, who was a Physics professor at Unicamp. She called him, and he said I could stay at his house for a few days until I got settled. I had the address, the name, and the phone number. The idea was to spend a few days there, take care of the enrollment, and then head back to Belo Horizonte to prepare for the permanent move.

At the end of the first day, after sorting everything out at the university, it was time to head to his place. The neighborhood was called “Novo Cambuí.” I asked the people at the office which bus I should take; no one knew for sure. After several people weighed in, a master’s student who was nearby and overheard the conversation offered to give me a ride. We agreed to meet at the door of the Institute at the end of the afternoon.

We drove toward Campinas and the route really did seem to be taking us out of town, along the same road the bus had used in the morning. After a while, we found the street. We checked the signs and the name was correct. We turned in and started looking for the number. We drove the whole length of the street and found nothing. We went back, double-checked, nothing. The street ended at a small square. It looked like the number simply didn’t exist.

We tried to find a payphone to call, but there weren’t any. The student who was driving stopped at a pharmacy to ask, and they said that was indeed the right street. We went back once more and kept looking. Half an hour had already gone by. She was doing me a huge favor: she had completely changed her route just to help me. We finally found a payphone, I called the house, and they explained: “yes, it’s that street; when you reach the square, the street continues on the other side, with the same name, and the numbering keeps going.” In other words, the street was split in half by the square. She dropped me off at the door and, honestly, I never forgot that kindness.

But the story didn’t end there. On the second night, my hosts realized my stay was going to be complicated. Besides the couple, the house was also home to their oldest daughter, her husband, and two small children. So they asked their youngest son — who was about my age — to host me. He lived on his own and agreed to take me in. The apartment was small but near the city center. There was a little couch where I could sleep, and that’s where I ended up.

I spent three days wandering around Unicamp and the area around campus, visiting real estate agencies, talking with people renting out rooms, and trying to decide where I would live when I came back for good. On the third day, the professor’s son-in-law (AKA Boy) told me there would be a party at the house (“república,” the Brazilian term for a student shared house) where he used to live, and invited me to come with him. It was a good chance to meet people and maybe find a place to live.

The party was great, the folks at the república welcomed me warmly, but the only room they had available was a small back room in a separate outbuilding, though it had a sink and a toilet. I said yes on the spot and we arranged the move right there. That’s how my adventures at República Falcão began, where I lived for a year while doing my master’s in Campinas.