The first thing I did when I finally reached her was spray her with water.
Not on purpose. I had bought a bottle in the São Paulo airport for the connecting flight, and nobody told me that in Brazil you have to say whether you want it com gás or sem gás. With gas or without. I did not know there was a question, so I did not answer it, and I ended up with sparkling water that then rode a pressurized plane down to Belo Horizonte. I found her in the arrivals area, we hugged, I opened the bottle, and it went everywhere. All over me, all over my bag, all over the floor.
It was February 2020. We had been talking for three months and had never been in the same room.
People ask us how we met more than they ask us anything else about our lives, including the questions about living in a fifth wheel. So here is the whole thing, from a livestream app in 2019 to a truck and a trailer in Michigan.
One note before I start. This is Nathan's side of it. Fabiola was living an entirely different version of these same events, in her own country, in her own language, watching a foreigner turn up in it. She is writing her own version of these stories, and they will go up here next to mine.
We met on a livestream app, and neither of us spoke the other's language
In November 2019 I was watching a livestream and Fabiola was the one running it.
She seemed like a genuinely cool person. That was the whole basis for it. There was one problem, which is that she spoke no English and I spoke no Portuguese.
So we talked through Google Translate. Every message, both directions, run through a machine. She was learning some English and getting better at it, but at the start there was no shared language at all between us. Just an app in the middle, doing its best.
I want to be honest about what that was actually like, because it was not charming. It was slow and it was frequently wrong, and it caused real problems that took real work to undo. I wrote a whole separate piece about that part: Dating Through Google Translate. The short version is that the translation was worse in 2019 than people remember, and its favorite trick was flipping a sentence to mean the opposite of what I said.
February 2020: I bought a ticket to Brazil
After a few months of this I decided I wanted to actually meet her, and that a month was the right amount of time. She would show me around Brazil. I would find out whether the person I had been talking to through an app was the same person in a room.
I was already at ease by the time the water sprayed everywhere, which is the part I remember most. All the nervousness about the flights and the connections and the airport signage I could not read had gone quiet the second I saw her.
She, meanwhile, was taking in what I was wearing.
In Brazil, flying is an occasion. You dress for it. She had gotten ready to meet me. I fly often enough that I dress for comfort, so I came off a very long trip in a t-shirt and flip flops, soaked in sparkling water. Neither of us was doing anything wrong. We had just both shown up with completely different ideas of what the day called for, before a single word got spoken. That turned out to be a preview.
Prazer
A few days in, we were driving to her parents' house so I could meet them, and Fabiola decided I should say hello in Portuguese.
The phrase was prazer em conhecer você. Pleasure to meet you. She coached me on it the whole drive.
I could not say it. Specifically I could not make the r. The Portuguese r in the middle of a consonant cluster like that is a sound my mouth had no idea how to produce, and no amount of practice in a moving car was going to fix it. It took me about a year to get that sound. So I spent the drive getting more nervous about four syllables than about meeting the family.
Then we got there and it was fine, because they hugged me and sat me down and started asking questions. Her family does not speak English either, so now I was doing the translation thing in a room full of people, in real time, on a phone. They had a lot of questions. A blonde gringo had turned up at the house and they wanted the details.
Her mom made lasagna, the Brazilian version of it.
I had booked a hotel. I never really used it, because partway through the night they told me to just stay, so I stayed. After that their house was where I was.
They are up on top of a big hill, and this is the view.
Belo Horizonte is built across hills and the houses climb every one of them, out to the horizon, in every direction. I had never been anywhere that looked like this. I still stop at those windows every time we visit.
Amazing view, amazing food, and people who decided in about an hour that I lived there now.
Sunday lunch at her mom's
If you want the honest answer to “what is the best food in Brazil,” it is not a restaurant. It is Fabiola's mom's cooking, on a Sunday, at her table. We went almost every Sunday I lived in Brazil, for two and a half years. That is where I learned to eat feijoada, and it is also where I found the one I would actually pick first, which is feijão tropeiro. Beans and farofa cooked together with sausage and egg and greens, and torresmo, fried pork belly, on top. It is a Minas Gerais dish and it is the thing I ask for. She also makes frango com quiabo, chicken and okra, which is another Minas thing and which I will drive a long way for.
Out in the world there is picanha, usually as a porção with fries, which we ordered constantly. And there is caipirinha, made with cachaça, which is very good and which they make properly there in a way that has ruined the ones I have had since.
The one thing I could not do is pão de queijo. Cheese bread. It is the single most famous food of Minas Gerais, it is everywhere, it is in every bakery and every gas station and every kitchen, and I am lactose intolerant. I moved to the cheese bread capital of the world and had to sit that one out for two and a half years.
We are planning to put Fabiola's Brazilian recipes on the site at some point, so if you want the actual food rather than my description of it, that is coming.
Ouro Preto
She took me to Ouro Preto, which I will say plainly is my favorite city in the world. Baroque churches, streets made of stone that will destroy your ankles, gold mines underneath the whole thing.
That is us on that first trip, on a balcony over one of those streets. Still in the flip flops.
We have been back since and filmed it: The Most Beautiful City in Brazil and the palace tour and gold mine.
A week in Rio, during Carnival
We also spent a week in Rio de Janeiro, in a hotel right along the beach. We did the tourist list properly. Beach time, the aquarium, and Christ the Redeemer up on the mountain.
Rio also taught me that carrying my phone in my hand was not a neutral thing to do. Phone theft is common there, often grabbed by someone going past on a motorcycle, and holding one out in the open is what marks you as worth taking it from. I grew up in Marquette, Michigan, where your phone lives in your hand and nobody gives it a thought. I did that in Rio for about a day before Fabiola started quietly telling me to put it away whenever she clocked someone. She was reading the street the whole time, at a level I was not reading it at all. Nobody ever took anything from us, and that is partly because she was paying attention.
I had not planned the trip around Carnival. I did not know enough to plan a trip around Carnival. It just happened to be when I was there, so we got VIP passes to the parades.
I do not have a good way to describe it to somebody who has not been. Floats, drums you feel in your chest, dancers, an entire city's worth of people, Portuguese coming at me from every direction at a volume where the translation app was completely useless. We lasted until three or four in the morning and left before it was over because we were falling asleep standing up, and took an Uber back. There was a different night that week we biked back to the hotel in the dark, which was its own kind of stupid and great.
Here is the part I did not think about until years later.
That is my own footage, and look at the banner. The slogan that year was o futuro está em nossas mãos. The future is in our hands.
That was the last week of February 2020. Brazil confirmed its first case of COVID-19 during that same week. I was standing in one of the largest gatherings on earth, under a banner about the future, at the exact moment the thing that was about to separate us for eight months arrived in the country.
Then the month was up and I flew back to the US. That was deliberate. We wanted to find out what happened when we were apart again, whether the whole thing had been the novelty of a trip.
We missed each other. That question got answered fast.
Then a different thing happened.
COVID
Not long after I got home, the world closed.
I was in Michigan. She was in Belo Horizonte. The borders shut and there was no version of this where either of us got on a plane. So the relationship went back to being a phone, except now with no end date attached to it, and no next trip to plan toward.
We did that until October 2020. At some point I worked out that I was waiting for something that was not going to arrive. COVID was not going to be over. It was going to be a thing that kept going, and I could either keep waiting or go.
So I put on a mask and goggles and gloves and flew to Brazil to live.
That is the actual flight. I do not think a photo has ever dated me more precisely.
Moving in, fast
Fabiola had bought a house shortly before I came down. So we moved into it together.
She had wanted to date slowly. That was the plan she had in her head, and it was a reasonable plan. It did not survive a global pandemic and a closed border and a boyfriend arriving from another hemisphere with luggage. We went from long distance to living together in one step, in the middle of COVID, in a country where I could not order food without help.
It worked. But I do not want to pretend we skipped the hard part, because we did not.
That house is still ours, and we still go back every year. If you want to see the place I am describing, we filmed a full tour of it: We're Leaving Serenity Behind. The video is packaged as us putting the RV in storage, but the second half is the house, the rooftop hammock, and our two rescue dogs, Bolt and Belinha.
A lot of what I had to learn that first year was just the house. Every home has a gate and a garage off the street. There is no hot water tap at the kitchen sink, so dishes get done cold. Your cooking gas shows up as a bottle somebody delivers to your door. And the shower is heated by an electric head that warms the water on its way out, which is safe, which is normal, which millions of people use every day, and which I still look at sideways.
Two and a half years in Brazil
I worked remotely the entire time as a programmer, for the same company, on US hours from a house in Minas Gerais.
Before we were married I could only stay in Brazil for so many days out of every twelve months, which meant leaving the country and coming back to start the clock over. Normally you drive to a border. The borders were closed.
So on February 4, 2021, I flew to Santiago, Chile, spent four hours there without ever being admitted to the country, and flew back.
I did not pick that date. Brazil did. My allowance runs from the day I first entered the country, and I first entered on February 4, 2020, so my window rolled over exactly one year later, to the day. I spent the anniversary of the day I met her flying to another country and immediately turning around. That one has its own post, because what happened at both airports is too good to summarize: The Four Hour Trip to Chile.
There was also a stretch where the vaccine existed in the US and not yet in Brazil, so I flew home for a month, got vaccinated, and flew back down.
And underneath all of that we were figuring out how to be two people who are not much alike.
Fabiola is outgoing. She performs, she is comfortable in front of people, she lights up a room on purpose. I am an introvert and a programmer. Certain textures bother me. Noise bothers me. Plans changing bothers me more than it should. I have never been formally diagnosed with anything, but after watching Love on the Spectrum I recognized myself in it clearly enough that I stopped explaining it any other way, and since then we have met people on the road who I click with instantly in a way that makes sense in hindsight.
So: a performer and a guy who needs the plan to hold, trying to have a disagreement through a translation app that would sometimes invert his meaning. That is the part I wrote the separate post about.
We got there. It took work and it took time and it took her being patient with a version of me that arrived without any of the context.
2021: married in Brazil, streamed to Michigan
We got married in 2021, in Brazil, with COVID still very much on.
My family could not come. So I built them a broadcast. Four webcams, streaming software, somebody switching cameras as people moved around the room, our own music. My family watched the whole wedding live from the United States.
Being married also fixed the visa problem. I filed the paperwork and got Brazilian residency, and the Santiago trips stopped being necessary.
December 2021: her turn to be the foreigner
For two years I had been the one who could not read the signs. Then Fabiola got a visitor visa and came to Michigan, and it was her turn.
I am from the Upper Peninsula. I grew up in cold and I am fine in cold. Fabiola came from Belo Horizonte, where the house has no heat and no air conditioning because it does not really need either. Marquette sits on Lake Superior and gets something like two hundred inches of snow a year.
She had never seen snow. Not less snow than this. None.
We landed right after a blizzard. She spent the descent looking out the window trying to work out what she was looking at, because from up there it reads as a white desert with nothing in it. There was about four feet on the ground. And she was not just seeing it for the first time, she was trying to figure out how it works. What it does. What happens when you step on it. Whether it holds you.
Then we walked out of the airport to my mom's car and she found out what the cold does to your face.
We got to my parents' house, where we were staying. My parents have a large white German shepherd. Fabiola is afraid of dogs she does not know, and he was barking at her, so she announced that she would stay outside.
Outside. In December. In Marquette. She was fully prepared to take her chances with four feet of snow rather than walk past that dog.
What solved it was straightforward. They took the dog out so she could come in, and my mom hugged her, and then they let him back in. He barked for a second. Then he sniffed her and that was the end of it. I think what actually settled her was watching everyone else be completely relaxed about him. They are good friends now.
The other thing she had not counted on was that it was warm in there. When your house in Brazil has no heat and no air conditioning, “inside” is not a category that means what it means here. She and her family had been trying to picture how you survive a Michigan winter and had landed somewhere around “you bundle up indoors too.” She packed extra warm clothes expecting to need them in the house.
That was her introduction to the United States. Not a mild one. The real thing.
June 2023: Marquette, for real
Her green card came through, and in June 2023 we moved to Michigan.
That closed out two years and eight months of living in Brazil. We kept the house in Belo Horizonte, which is why we still go back every year, and we went and did the whole thing in reverse.
Which is where the story of how we met actually ends. We were married, she had her green card, and we had an apartment in Marquette.
What we did next, working out that we did not want to be in any particular city at all, and the RV show that changed the question, is its own post.
So do you two speak each other's languages now?
Not equally, no.
Fabiola is fluent. A few things still come out sideways, but she gets meaning across without effort, and she is now well past English and into the harder problem of American accents. She goes out and does things, so she has had to decode Alabama line dancing, Georgia, Florida, and whatever is happening in the rest of the South. She is collecting accents the way other people collect magnets.
I am on something like day 240 of Duolingo. We go back to Brazil every year and her family notices each time that I have more than I did. I read Portuguese reasonably well and I understand a lot of what I hear. Speaking it is where I fall apart, so anything complicated still goes through a translator, and anything simple I handle with a few words and a fairly committed amount of gesturing. It works. They get my meaning. It is not elegant.
Almost seven years in, she learned my language and I learned enough to be understood with my hands. That is a real thing about us, not a failure. More on that in Dating Through Google Translate.
The part I only noticed writing this down
I met my wife on a livestreaming app. When COVID kept my family from her wedding, I built a four camera livestream so they could be there anyway. Now the two of us point cameras at our life and put it on the internet every week.
Same move every time. If the people I care about cannot be in the room, build the broadcast.
That is how we met. A livestream in November 2019, a bottle of sparkling water in an airport in February 2020, and a great many translated arguments in between.