wowmarch

'You'll never guess what's near here.'

'You're right. I won't even try. What?'

'Walmart. It's a five minute walk.'

This was almost a year ago, so I don't remember the actual conversation, but I remember thinking Mark was lying. Not just about the five minutes - Mark is amazingly ungood at 'time' and 'measuring it' - but about the Walmart too. I thought he was setting up a joke.

We had been in Brazil about two months before we moved to this neighborhood, and besides Coca Cola and McDonalds and sometimes Starbucks, very little looked familiar. I figured he was taking me to a junkyard or a coconut stand and calling it Walmart. you know, like how I used to tell people I was taking them to a fancy restaurant and then lead them to the dive bar under my apartment in Brooklyn (that didn't have food). The good old fashioned 'psych.'

Anyway, I felt even more sure of being bulshitted the more we walked - down a tiny one way street that ended at a T, the next street even tinier, small clusters of houses, left onto a street of apartment buildings, up a hill a little, and then on the right...

Indeed. Walmart.

Huge, and identical in logo and fanfare to any back in the US, whether upstate New York or Montana or New Mexico or Florida or ... anywhere, really. I looked up at this virtual portal to home and thought, "gross."

Seriously, why can't the Walmart corporation calm the F down? Why did they follow me to this otherwise cool neighborhood in Brazil?

I don't know why, but there's something gross about being able to go to one store and buy an apple, some sneakers, a quart of milk, a lawnmower, some string cheese, a bicycle, a bra, some cake mix and a shovel. I don't want a shovel that comes from the same place as cake mix.

And all this is gross and creepy even before you find out your total for all that stuff is like $39. All I see when I go into a Walmart is a blurry, foggy hell-cartoon of child factory workers and prison laborors and robots taking over earth. A horror-rolly-ball of how cheap things are made.

But I will say three things in its favor:
1. Hating on Walmart makes me feel at home.
2. It's pretty convenient if you have dogs who love gross meats.
3. The people here pronounce it 'WowMarch,' which is kind of great.

And the WowMarch of Santo Amaro is at least a little different than the Walmarts in the US. It has a weird mini-flea market in its parking garage, where dudes sell used antique furniture, paintings and mu-mus. So that's kind of cool. And inside there are chicks on roller skates zipping around helping people. I don't know if Walmarts in the US have roller-chicks, but this seems like a great idea. And their snack bar is a Casa do Pão de Queijo, instead of like, Arby's.

Oh, and across the street from it is a Shell station.