Cultural shifts

Small Town Habits.*

Having travelled around this massive country called Brazil—many times by road, both driving and by bus—Fogy has absorbed the contrasting nature of its diverse terrains and people.

Once you leave the bigger cities, travellers are often thrust into a version of the past where the modern world still hasn’t fully arrived. There are still places waiting for reliable electricity, and cell phone signals can be hard to find.

Thankfully, most regions today have at least a reasonable level of coverage, even if it’s not yet 100%.

The point here isn’t to criticise the pace of development in a country as vast as Brazil, but to highlight how differently people experience the world when their horizons are shaped by a kind of self-imposed isolation.

Many small towns and regional centres seem to have grown along similar lines—places where habits settle deeply and don’t easily shift. In some ways, it resembles stepping onto a fixed stage, where the script is already written and daily life plays out with few surprises.

Yet those who do step out—whether through travel, education, or exposure to the wider world—often find themselves changed. When they return, they carry new ways of seeing and doing things. And that can cause tension.

Even traditional festivals like Festa Junina or Carnival now reflect these shifts. Once grounded in local history and custom, they have begun to mix in influences from elsewhere—sometimes enriching the experience, sometimes confusing it.

But it’s the smaller, everyday behaviours that most clearly reveal the cultural gap. Things like tossing an orange peel onto the pavement instead of finding a bin.

Fogy was once busing back to São Paulo from Rio when the driver made a quick roadside stop. Seeing some delicious tangerines for sale, Fogy bought a few and returned to his seat. He offered a tangerine to those nearby, who were happy to accept. Each one, seeing the bag, placed their peels neatly inside. But before Fogy could say a word, the man beside him tossed his peels straight out the window. He had seen what the others had done but did it anyway.

Reflecting on it, Fogy realised—having chatted with the man earlier—that for many who come from remote, rural areas, throwing things on the ground is not seen as a problem. When only a handful of people do it, what harm can it do?

But multiply that by half a million people moving through a city every day, and the impact becomes obvious.

Travelling long distances by bus means stopping, infrequently but consistently, in places that are each strikingly different. It’s hard not to notice how people speak differently. The sounds seem more clipped, or drawn out, or rearranged entirely. Vocabulary shifts, and interpretation becomes a vital skill.

Then there’s the food. Foreigners often fall in love with bar snacks like coxinhas and pastéis, but these bus stops offer stranger, often unheard-of delicacies—regional specialties that rarely reach urban menus.

The dress codes, too, shift from town to town. What seemed out of place on the bus makes perfect sense in the terminal café.

And if you’ve paid enough attention, these differences start to resonate. They explain much of what once seemed so “normal” in your big-city life. Suddenly, you can recognise and relate to people from these regions through the customs they carry with them.

These small-town habits are easy to overlook, but they say a lot about how culture holds on—quietly, stubbornly—even as the outside world moves on.

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A greater part of our cities were built by people just like these.