Rio, so far

The last few days have been unbelievable! I somehow got lucky enough to have the ultimate tourguide in a city with so many unusual, interesting, and beautiful things to see.

My last few hours in Salvador were spent wandering around a bit. I made a point to visit O Cravinho, a small shop in which the man behind the counter specializes in flavored cachaca (like Brazilian rum). It seemed like a unique cultural experience of Bahia, so I buckled down and had my shot of canela cachaca (cinnamon) around noon. It was very sweet and delicious! I went back to the hostel, packed up, and headed for the busses with plenty of time to spare. But as I walked, a rainstorm blew in, and none of the infrequent busses that rolled into the stop seemed to be bound for the airport. I asked some transit officials which bus would take me, and they pointed to a random one that did not say “aeroporto,” but assured me it would go. I got on, hoping for the best. While on the ride, I heard a German man answer a phone call in English, so I asked if he could help me figure out where the bus went before he got off. He told me I had to do a crazy switch to another bus to a taxi, that the bus would go for a half hour straight along the ocean, then turn, then I should get off, take the airport shuttle, and then a cab from the shuttle station at the airport. Shit! I didn’t have time for all of that, what with all the waiting I had to do for the first bus, and the hard rain storm making driving much slower on the coastal road. I could hardly enjoy the fresh rainfall, the smell of wet grasses, muddy cobble stones, and a fishy ocean. When the bus turned left, I started to panic, and the irritated bus driver told me to wait for the airport, wait for the airport. I waited for what felt like too long, and started asking passengers whether we had gone past the airport. But a simple question like that takes a long time to formulate and then remember when the language is so new! They smiled and basically told me to chill, and so the sight of low flying planes and then signs for the airport were much welcomed. It turned out that the bus drove me right to the departures door. I'm not sure if the driver was being kind or if the German was wrong, but I was so happy either way! I made it to my gate on time, but there was a flight delay because of the weather. I had a two hour layover in Sao Paolo, so I started to get nervous when the delay went for more than an hour. By the time we took off, it was a full two hours late. And I knew that these were the last flights of the day, and that if I missed the connection to Rio in Sao Paolo I would be sleeping in the airport, which is not a fun, exciting option. Plus I had no way to get in touch with Alessandro! The wireless just wouldn’t work. When I arrived in Sao Paolo at 9.30 for a 9.40 flight, I could only hope that they would hold the plane for a few minutes so stragglers like me would make it. I ran through the airport, through the pilots’ and attendants’ security check, and down to the gate, where, luckily, this flight was delayed, too, at least an hour. The plan was to take a shuttle from the main Rio airport to another smaller Rio airport, where Alessandro would meet me. But, again, I couldn’t call him, and couldn’t get an internet connection, so I was hoping that he wasn’t irritated, waiting til after midnight for a friend that he is generously putting up. I got into Rio so late, grabbed my bag, and found a payphone on which to call Alessandro. Miraculously, he told me he was outside waiting! He said that the shuttle stopped running two hours ago, and that he didn’t want me to have to navigate Rio on a Saturday night. `

We grabbed a cab and went back to his neighborhood. The cab dropped us off at the top of a cobble stoned hill, where there was a concrete staircase leading up. We climbed the staircase and were put into a maze of paved footpaths, inclines, stairs, and slopes. We were in the favela, for sure. The houses were all made of brick with thick mortar coming out from between them. The roofs were sometimes concrete slabs, sometimes, tin, sometimes plastic tarp. And they all seem piled on top of and into each other. Up and up the hillside we went, until we reached his place. Which is one of the sweetest apartments imaginable! It is clean, with neat lines, and a completely surreal view of Sugar Loaf mountain, one of the iconic sights in Rio. We had a beer, and Alessandro began to tell me about the project he is working on here (Alessandro is an anthropology graduate student at CUNY, with whom I took a class at the New School). The group that he is studying is a collective of young artists from this neighborhood, who years ago began constructing a miniature version of a series of favelas on an open plot of land near where they live. It is called Morrihnos (mo-HAY-nios), which means little neighborhoods (the word “favela” is like “ghetto” in the US. You would never be in the Stapleton projects and ask, “so, do you feel safe in your ghetto? What other ghettos have you been to recently?” you would use the word “community” or “neighborhood.” And so from here on out, a “morro” is what we refer to as a favela.). He began describing all of the character (there are hundreds), which are made from Lego blocks stacked, painted, and decorated. They move about this miniature world through the carved, painted, and positioned bricks that constitute the different morros they have made. Alessandro informed me that he was recently given a character/avatar in the game. He moves him around the city through a very specific set of rules of transit, money, police, drug traffickers, and families. They refer to the avatars in the third person, and speak in falsetto voices while playing. “Alex,” Alessandro’s avatar, had recently had an altercation with the police, though a trafficker stepped in to right the situation. He asked me if I wanted to see it, as he had full rights to go and visit it as a member of the game. I was tired, and at first declined, but reconsidered the offer when he said that there was electricity there, and that it wasn’t far.

And it was one of the most unbelievable things I have ever, ever seen. It is a sprawling collection of thousands of delicately carved bricks, all different colors, with hand painted signs for the bars, the hospitals, the gas stations, the restaurants. There is graffiti for the girlfriends of the guys who play. There are cars, motorcycles, roads. All women have long hair on their Lego characters. Police all have grotesquely huge machine guns glued to their avatars. Alessandro showed me a number of avatars, and told me about how sometimes they just hang out and eat, sometimes they go to all night dance parties sponsored by the traffickers, sometimes they steal cars, sometimes they have fights, sometimes they chase girls… all within a strict set of rules, just like the ones they must really live by in the morro. It is a magical, fantastical world, and I was blown away. We went back, I pulled out the sleeper sofa and made the bed, and I had the most normal dreams ever. I have found that the intensity and absurdity of my dreams has an inverse relationship to the intensity of the reality I am perceiving. Normal days yield weird or scary or crazy dreams, but on days like this, I literally dream that I am sitting and watching Leslie eat the mango sorbet we served at the kosher restaurant.

The next day, Alessandro told me that he had to put in at least a small appearance at the birthday party of a friend of his in the morro. He had become super close to his neighbors. They really cared about and accepted him, and he was very obliged to visit with Marcia on her special day. What was meant to be an hour visit turned into five. We had much fun! All of his friends were there, drinking beers, grilling, eating delicious soups, rice, beans, potato salad, and friend cheeses and meats. Alex translated everything for me. I learned all about the bailles, which are the huge rave-like hip-hop partied the traffickers sponsor on some weekends. The girls tried to teach me to dance like they do, which was pretty damn hard for me to do. The girls here learn to gyrate and twist their hips and bodies from a very young age. Like, the 4 and 5 year old girls there were getting dance lessons. It looked mildly obscene, but it was a family party, after all. They couldn’t have been more generous. The music was blasting from a DVD player hooked up to a huge amp, in the front room of Marcia’s house. Despite the precarious, uneven, handmade look the house had on the outside, inside, it all looked pretty darn normal, with a TV in an entertainment stand, a stereo, pics of her kids on the walls, area rugs, bird cages (standard here), a dining room table, a little kitchen with linoleum and an untidy but clean hutch. Out back, the guys were making crazy batida concoctions. Batidas, as I knew them from the Brazilian restaurant i worked at in NYC, were delicious fruit smoothies with cachaca (rum) in them. But here, they were vodka, condensed milk, and fruit juice. Alex and I did our best to get through the coconut one (not bad) and the raspberry one (pretty bad). The hardest to drink was the most unusual: I took a sip, tried not to let my face betray how repulsive it tasted, and said, “Mmmm! Grape?” Turned out it was a Paola Coxa, which is condensed milk and wine. Like, grape juice cheap red wine. I still can’t believe I drank that. but the food and hospitality couldn’t have been better. It really was a neat experience to hang out and party with Alex’s friends here.

We tried to leave in time to make it to Ipanema beach for sunset, but got too late of a start. We went anyway, and enjoyed watching all of the people on the sceney, urban beach. There are huge stadium lights that illuminate stretches of the beach, so we walked from the gay beach to the family beach to the hippie beach to the surfer beach to the fishing beach at the end. It was very cool to see everyone enjoying the sand and water. We got some gelato and had to decide what to do with the evening: try to make it to one of the free rehearsals of the samba schools in the stadium as they prepare for Carnaval, or go to a very cool club called Casa Rosa, which was once the most happening brothel in Rio but had been converted to a bar. It was getting late, so we forwent the samba, hoping to catch it next weekend. Casa Rosa was, indeed, a super cool club. All of the walls were painted pink, and there were probably 10 different spaces, all with different music and vibes. There was the baille hip-hop dance room (sweat fest), the chill bar, the outside meat market space, and, my favorite, the live music space, with this completely awesome Brazilian band playing rock/samba/funk, with horns and all. They decided, instead of taking a set break, to give the crowd their interpretation of the history of Brazilian hip hop, which was hilarious, fun, and sounded totally great.

On Monday, Alessandro realized he really had to get some work done for a grant he was applying for. So we had lunch at a Lebanese place, spent a bit of time in a really nice park that had an exhibit for kids on insects in Brazilian culture. Then we went down to Ipanema so I could get some beach time in while he worked. I got a chair and a coconut from one of the beach vendors. The water was so beautiful, I stayed in and swam for almost an hour. Nice little waves, light current, not crowded, and so warm. A little reading, a little nap, another dip, and Alessandro was back so we could meet some grad student friends of his for pizza and beer. They were lovely people, with lively conversation, awesome artinesal pizza, and ice cold beers (so nice on the hot nights they have here. There’s no respite from the heat except maybe the air-conditioned supermarkets.).

Tuesday was laundry day. I did a whole big load of laundry all by hand in Alessandro’s laundry sink, and hung it to dry in the sun out the window. He made a delicious Italian/Brazilian lunch: eggplant mango curry pasta. And we were off to see Rio’s downtown. It was an interesting mixture of very old, rundown buildings, high-art state buildings, and “ugly” modern structures that I think of as creating that 1940s-60s Latin capital city look (Rio was the capital until 1960). We saw these truly amazing stairs that a local artist has covered in brilliant tiles from around the world. And he was there, working on a new section! So neat. Then we waited on line for an hour to take the only still-operating electric trolley car in Latin America. But, as we waited on the ancient trolley for it to move (playing with the heavy gears, cranks, and dials; the greasy ropes; crusty, crunchy window shades; and the now-soft movable wooden windows), a cinematically huge, apocalyptic style thunderstorm rolled in from the south, with cool strong winds that felt like they could blow you away, and gigantic bolts of lightning between mountains and buildings. As we debated the safety of traveling on the rickety metal electric street car up a mountain in a lightning storm, the trolley station lost power, making the decision of whether to take a bus much easier. We moved through downtown in the radically decreasing pressure, hoping to beat the downpour, which we did! Most of the streets didn’t have power, so the bus drove slowly through the steep, cobble stoned, hillside roads, affording wonderful views of Rio in the early evening rain. The smells were wonderful, too, with grasses, bus grease, stones, dirt, and pumpkin (not sure why, but that was the smell! Earthy and sweet…) creating a fragrant portrait of a summer storm on the urban periphery. We were rushing back to save the computers that had been left near an open window, and so grab the clean laundry hanging on the line before it blew away. we trotted through the slippery, winding paths of the morro back to the apartment, and battened down the hatches. But by then, the big bad storm had crapped out, more hype than anything else. We decided to try to go see Avatar 3D, both because it has gotten interesting media attention and because Alessandro works with avatars of a different kind on his project. So I got to experience a shiny, white mall in Rio, where, like in the US, the middle class hangs out, eats quick food, gets herded around between clothing, sunglasses, and handbag shops, and sees movies. I love to going to malls and supermarkets and K-Marts when I travel. The regional differences always remind me that the idea of a hegemonic, globalized monoculture is not a completely accurate portrayal of life in a postmodern world. The similarities, too, remind me that “the real Rio” or “the real Tucson” or “the real New York City” don’t just involve favelas, desert artists’ studios, or chic dark cafes, but rely deeply on the experience of the mall or the megastore, where people really go to live the kinds of lives they want to live.But it was sold out. All of the other movies showing were in Portuguese, so we decided to have a caipirinha near another beach and call it a day.

Today, we are going to take the trolley down the mountain, and getting off to the boat that goes across the bay (think Staten Island Ferry…). It’s a public holiday (St Sebastian Day?) so museums etc are closed. This evening, we might go the Muay Thai classes that a group in the morro offers every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, which Alessandro said will kick your ass, but which I’m sure are fun, nonetheless (if I can understand the instructions!). Off for another day of seeing the different sides of Rio that only a “local” like Alessandro could offer…