Dear Harvard, I Miss You So Much

After going through customs, I turned the corner at the Rio de Janeiro airport, and searched the awaiting crowd for a familiar face. Almost instantly, I spotted both of my grandmothers waiting for me like two elderly women looking for their grandson—as luck would have it, that is what they were doing.

I frolicked toward them. One of them moved towards me first for a passionate embrace, but I said, “No! I shall hug you both at the same time, so that one will not be jealous of the other!”

It was a wise thing to do. I was even slightly taken aback by my own sensible actions, and tried to figure out what had prompted me to achieve this new, profound level of astuteness.

For a while, I thought there might be a complex scientific explanation linked to the cabin pressure of the plane flight in conjunction with the change of hemisphere, combined with the state of my stem cells. Of course, this seemed too obvious.

Then, after much soul-searching, I realized that my new sagacious, erudite, and non-pedantic ways were undoubtedly due to the fact that this was the first time I was visiting Brazil since enrolling at Harvard. Yes, I was now coming back to where I was born, coming back to see my entire family—and, so help me, they were going to see just what one scholastic year in the Ivy League does to a man. A bearded man.

You see, it was at the moment that I simultaneously hugged my grandmothers that I decided from now forth to let my facial hair grow freely, because wisdom and beards are proportionate in the follicles of knowledge.

But ho! there were other scientific dilemmas to be solved! Namely: it was June going on July, and Brazilians all over were bundling up, saying it was winter. Impossible! The beaches in Rio were packed, and at times temperatures hovered around 80 degrees!

“Winter at Harvard lasts from September to May, and it snows several feet a week,” I bragged to people on the streets. To my astonishment, some people didn’t even have an idea of how much a foot was! Instead, they told me about their strange “metric” system, one based on actual logic and good sense. It was simply bizarre. To make things worse, some of them didn’t even speak English! My facial hair was disgusted, and I stayed up many a night musing about it all.

Could it be that the Harvard winter is unnatural in some strange way?

Of course, I discarded this thought immediately. Nothing at Harvard is unnatural. Instead, I started thinking more logically, and put my productive Quantitative Reasoning core to practical use.

If it was winter in Brazil, I deduced, then it obviously meant that this was a heat wave and that the snow would hit at any time. I therefore grew my facial hair with more intensity, gearing up for what was definitely going to be an epic blizzard.

Alas, the blizzard has yet to come. Some natives have told me they have never seen snow. This I am still grappling with.

To be honest, I am beginning to fear the snow will never come, and I miserably bask on the sands of Ipanema beach, mingling with the sparsely clad natives, my heart longing for those February mornings at Harvard when I stumble out of my room and step into a deliciously crusty puddle of slightly-polluted slush. Instead, I stand atop the Pão de Açucar, a prominence circled by Guanabara Bay, facing the city, and I see Rio soaking in its own mild winter (scoff!) sunset, the waves washing up against the city lights. I kneel on the ground and lift my arms to the sky, weeping and shouting “No!” for a substantial amount of time.

Tropical beauty is overrated. I’d rather absorb the lopsided metallic aura of the Science Center, or better yet, take a long stroll in that charming Canaday courtyard.

But still, like my facial hair, I have had an amazing growing experience in Rio. I have learned that there are foreign lands that are completely different from Harvard. There are foreign lands where people speak in a different tongue that isn’t Spanish. Foreign lands where people interact with each other on a consistent and spontaneous basis and do not need to hire alumni to improve their social lives.

I know. Ridiculous.

Gabriel A. Rocha ’08, a Crimson magazine editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Quincy House. He hopes that by not shaving, he will suddenly be able to avoid studying.