Brazil, layered and maravilhosa

I've been in Brazil for a bit over 2 weeks now. Summer has already been incredible and deeply fulfilling.
First I went to see incredible Sicilian sites with my loving family. They are always there for me, to help me breathe and vacate when reality feels overwhelming. Now I'm in Brazil, studying Portuguese on this fellowship and enjoying every minute of the lovely new experiences, the dramatic, funny, kind (and sometimes treacherous,) people, the scenery, the soul moving music. Tudo bom.
The classes are getting a little tiring as they are early in the morning and last for several hours each day. Maybe today needs to be a day off. I was supposed to go to the countryside with a boy but we had a falling out over class differences (he thinks I'm an American princess who looks down on him.) It reminds me of a book I read recently, Goodbye Columbus. Some of the words he hurled at me were way too much, and he ran away after throwing them like useless old rocks. He wanted to take me on a field trip to see poverty, show the over-privileged "Beverly Hills" (he called me,) girl poverty, see how the American ginnypig reacts. His own experiment, his own environment. As much as I want to see the country, I don't appreciate being called Beverly Hills by an angry lover. Hilarious for someone who has been living most of the year on the South Side of Chicago in cheap rooms because a graduate student stipend is hardly enough to cover rent any where in the US. I'm not saying I'm a terribly poor person. I'm not. I've got a great family who supports me when I need it, and even treats me to lovely experiences most people never have. But I'm no Beverly Hills either. Anyway, enough. I wrote him an email explaining...maybe I'll post it here later out of interest.
So either he'll get over the economic battle he picked with the wrong tourist, and I'll go to the country today, or I'll do the more typical bourgeois thing and enjoy the glorious rays at the beach with a couple new Brazilian friends. It's going to be an interesting day regardless, and I'm going to make the best of it. I want to be the best of me but I want respect too. I want to be a good person but I also want to enjoy and enjoy the beauty and truth that is here without being pigeonholed in hurtful ways.