Things I miss about England #35: BOGOF. Whilst once again perusing the shelves of Nordestão today I was struck by how few promotions there were. Sure, they label their discounts on each aisle but it's usually a saving of a paltry 4 centavos or similar. Only occasionally can you find something with a reasonable mark down but generally they haven't got the hang of it - at least, not like Tesco buy one get one free. The closest I saw to this was buy 2 bottles of olives, get the second at 37c less. Wow. Cash back. I'm sure, but I couldn't be certain, the vendor of pirate DVDs on the corner of the street tried to sell me 1 for 3R and 3 for 10...

SPECIAL POST: Polticial correctness

I need to be careful what I say here as political correctness does have it's place. Fighting demeaning socially constructed-language and systems is a good thing. You don't get to hang around left-wing historians and political scientists at York University to not see some sense in standing up to oppression in various forms as it exists in society and in the world. (Thank you, Rachel, for buying me the film Cry Freedom for my birthday. I love the scene in this film where Steve Biko is in court and is asked by the judge, "Why do you call yourself black? Surely, you are more brown than black...". Biko replies: "And why do you call yourself white? Surely, you are more pink than white...").

Things I love about Brazil #33: non-PCness. BUT, and this is a huge but, Brazilians seem to have got it a whole lot more sorted in SOME respects than we do back home. Blair's Britain, the New Labour experiment, has left us with a straight-jacket, ironically created in the name of tolerance, which stifles effective dialogue and open and frank discussion in favour of layers upon layers of meaningless (John Piper would say cornerless) language all designed to tread softy softly through the 21st Century landscape of religion, class, gender and sexual orientation (my goodness there was a lot of metaphors in that last sentence). Do Indians in London prefer to be called "Ethnic minorities" or "Minority ethnics"? Is the term "disabled" un-PC even when a wheelchair-bound professor chooses the name for himself? Political correctness fire-fighters are shunted out to every corner of society to pour water on fires that don't exist. Its soul-destroying at times and often a hindrance to the education of genuinely curious people trying to ask important questions.

OK, enough about that. Let's talk about Brazil. Let me not say that Brazil has got it all correct. The Paralympics finished this week and with it Brazilian sports coverage of the Olympics in Beijing. Brazil is a country learning about its own identity and trying to understand the identity of other countries, even rivals if you will. Generally, the Chinese are seen to be something of an object of quiet ridicule - buck-teethed and slitty-eyed. The international furore (led by a blustering section of the British tabloid press) that surrounded the Spanish Basketball teams appearance in an advert making slanty eyes hardly caused a ripple here. The reason being that Brazilians saw nothing strange about that. In fact, I've seen worse here. One of the culprits was (the American no less!) Sports network ESPN. Their Brazilian presenters ceaselessly dug away at the Chinese with the fascination of a small boy poking a frog. Presenters were sent out to find strange Chinese food to try and then ridicule. Back in the Braizlian studio, a goofy cartoon Chinaman doll sat alongside the presenters throughout (see pic above). In the centre of this was was a bonefide Chinese-Brazilian reporter Alex Tseng (of whom the doll was a caricature, I believe), an out and out Paulista who, because of his heritage, had been given the task of covering the Olympics from live in Beijing. Often the butt of his colleagues jokes, he seemed strangely aloof of and often complicit in this borderline political incorrectness going on. So, Brazil is still learning how to approach the people of other nations, especially other continents. Brazilians, for example, have very little to say about Africa and what they do have to say is mainly how much they would want to avoid a country [sic] like that...

Whereas the professionals of ESPN should probably know better, up here in the north-east away form the big cities the average person's exposure to things from other countries is minimal. Brazil is so big, you have to travel thousands of miles to even get to the border of another country. Television coverage on the national stations of world affairs is not great either. I am, to many of my students, their primary contact with a place that is not Brazil. In Joao Pessoa for Rachel's Granny's 80th in June we saw this first hand. During the church service the local Presbyterian pastor welcomed all the family who had come from different parts of the world. He noticed Rachel's Uncle, originally from Taiwan. The pastor started to dig a hole: "Welcome everybody! Including people from as far away as Japan... I mean, China... I don't know. They're the same thing right!? No, wait. China has the Olympics.... er.... everyone watch the Olympics!"

But, and finally I arrive at it, my main point is this - Brazilians are happy to talk about all this and seem genuinely interested in acquiring new points of view with which to approach the world. I have had far more constructive discussions with my students on a wide variety of taboo or controversial subjects - Jesus, hell, gender equality, immigration, sexual orientation, regionalism, Catholicism, corruption, abortion, Western tourists, US foreign policy etc - than I did back in the UK. I distinctly remember (and will never forget) a "social" at the pub I had with my MA colleagues back in 2005 in York. It was to be a quiet night of jazz. Rachel came along too - and simply on account of being Christians (stupid and irrelevant) who had got married (an out-dated and oppressive institution) and were deciding to have children in a home where Rachel wanted to take time out to care for them (sexist!) while I worked (so 1950s!) we were almost ejected from our seats by a hoard of hostile, muttering lefties. The Brazilian youngsters I meet are so remarkably free of assumptions and preconceptions (or at least preconceptions they would stubbornly hold onto) that I honestly wonder how I'll ever survive back in the UK again. There is real liberty in being able to speak openly here and share your lifestyle choices, faith experiences and eccentric opinions, however quirky they may be. Nobody seems to want to hit you with sticks for having an alternative point of view. On the contrary, they'd like to sit you down with an acerola juice and hear you out…