Rio, A.D.

Maracana Stadium.  Fluminense´s Christmas colors.  Soccer in Brazil.  Yeah, I said it, S-O-C-C-E-R.


Rio, A.D.

As the stage has already been set and I'm busy on my second microbrew of the day, I'm going to simply recap the places we did, and some we did not, visit.

Copacabana
Copacabana is a beach district and a bit like the defacto tourist headquarters of Rio.  It is a large 4km long halfmoon, bordered on the inside by the ocean, on the outside and above by enormous rock faces and at the bottom by the less iconic, but no less beautiful, Ipanema beach.  We first arrived here, we stayed here, we went to the beach here, we saw our first Brazilian bikini here and our first bright orange and mildly obese old man in a speedo riding a bike up and down the beach showing off what looked like an impregnated belly, outty and all, here.  Needless to say it was an interesting area, but we stayed because it was cheap, not for the bikinis.

We stayed at a hostel run by a woman with an autisticly anal retentiveness.  She also believed she was the most interesting woman in the world.  And though she didn't drink dos equis, she has taught belly dancing in Japan, grown up in Australia and built up her own hostel empire.  Her life story willl be released on Lifetime in 2014...if the world still exist.  Needless to say, we didn't get along.

Note on Pictures:
We didn't take a lot because we didn't want to lose (read: get stolen) our camera.  If it was dark, if we were on the beach or if we were drinking we left the camera, of which these activities took up a lot of our time.  Lo siento.

Ipanema Beach
The rich beach.  The "safer" beach.  No different, outside of the many Brazilians walking around hawking everything from fresh coconuts to hammocks, really from sitting on Newport (or, for those of you LA-ites, Venice) Beach during a perfect sunny day.  Thronged and thonged with people, it was a truly idylic setting for relaxing on the beach with thousands of other beach-goers.

Santa Theresa
A hill with great location.  Beautiful architecture.  Stunning views.  Steep hillside.  Trolly car.  Supposed to see the arches of Lapa, but me being nervous about some areas, forced us to get off too early.  Taking a trolly, you begin your ascent from the streets of Centro, passing a giant missile silo that doubles as a church, some graffiti-strewn buildings and finally into the lap-of-luxury that is Santa Theresa.  I'd like to say it is starkly different from the rest of the city, and it is, but as we stuck to the tourist roads, it was not starkly different from the city we experienced.  

Beths Bar
I'm pretty sure that no one can pronounce the name Beth properly in South America.  Variants such as "Bat,"   "Bet," and my personal favorite, as well as the name creating the most confusion amongst natives, "Pat."  That's why it was with great surprise that we came across a bar with Beths moniker.  I was sure that there would be a hitch, the owner loved the caped crusader or at least had some infatuation with flying mammals.  But alas, it was not the case, in fact someone just named their bar a gringos name they couldn't properly pronounce.  So if you're in Rio, on Nossa Copacabana st., stop in at Beth's bar and get yourself a cold one and a good laugh.

Walking Tour and The Philaharmonic/Playhouse (we don't remember what it was)
The downtown and cultural center, inevitably this is one of the poorest tourist areas and it is recommended to stay away at night and on the weekends and on holidays and if you're a tourist (the last is not true).  It's grimy, there is a lot of McDOnalds, a lot of shopping, a central market and, outside of the philaharmonic/playhouse, the most mmemorable things were: 1) the abundance of Brazilian flags--think Monday Night Football pizzaria banners with every football team flag--on every single restaurant and cafe supporting Brazilian football for the upcoming world cup (that worked out well...for Spain) and 2) Bahian street food, which is of Northern Brazil and slave decendency.  It is spicy and full of seafood.  My spiced shrimp stuffed in fried mandioc flour (imagine a crispy, savory donut) with hot sauce was delicious.  The building of unknown use was ornately decorated in gold, or fake gold, had rich people exiting its doors in the middle of the day, would not allow the likes of myself and Beth in its doors and was modeled after something in France.  Clearly it was quite gorgeous, pretentious and worth our ten minute ogling.

Maracana Soccer Stadium
A few facts about this stadium and Brazilian futbol for the uninitiated.
- Set the record for most people to ever attend one game
- Future home of the world cup, it is closing for a three year renovation, and probably already hosted a world cup, but when I haven't a clue.  Though, like Yankee stadium, they are apparently shrinking capacity presumably to over charge for seats and create a better [read: more elitist] experience.
- My friend Raman was heading to the World Cup in a matter of weeks and when I told him I was heading to Maracana stadium he said, and I quote, "I'm jealous".
- The last "a" in Maracana actually has a tilde attached to the top.
-Baseball is a much better game than soccer or futbol, even with the clear worldwide viewership advantage, but I have to admit that soccer fans might have the advantage in dedication.
- Brazil has won the World Cup more than any other country, five times, [fact] and may be the most passionate futbol country in the world [observation, though limited in scope and by my inherit American-ness].
- A completely random fact: futbol is actually called soccer in Australia, New Zealand, the good ol' US of A and apparently in South Africa, this years host, amongst probably other countries and to the assured disapproval of England.

Our experience was fantastic.  We watched Fluminense, one of the big four Rio teams, take on a middling team.  The Fluminense fans showed up in force, banners, jerseys for all from toddlers to the soon-to-be-deceased,  fireworks, the literal and figurative "whole shebang".  Which meant that, as we witnessed the second to final game preceeding the world cup, their half of the stadium was thoroughly full, while the opposing teams was almost completely empty.  It was a raucous, bumping crowd and when, in the second half after their opposition scored an equalizing goal, Fluminense came back and scored the crowd went absolutely insane--and this was a game that meant nearly nothing.  I can only imagine a game between two rivals or one in the heat of a close cup race.  A rabid fan base, loads of support and a passion (not to mention payload) to raze the stadium.

Lapa on Friday
Perhaps my favorite Rio experience and our one true night "going out".  Every single Friday a street party of true Carioca indulgence takes place.  5
 Reals, and freshly made, Caripinhas adorn the streets.  Countless beer and food vendors supply the masses with their elixirs.  And the youth of Rio comes out in full force to celebrate their two day liberty call.  It's the incarnation of Rio's vitality and we drank it up until 330 in the morning.

We spent the first part of the evening discussing blowing up cows in Thailand with grenade launchers, drunk American tourist and setting up obscene Make-A-Wish Foundation opportunities (yes, one and three relate)  with our hostel cohort, and part-time employee of the most interesting woman in the world, Patricia and her recently arrived boyfriend Nick (both of British origins). While the second half included me devouring a triple bacon cheeseburger with fried onions (an odd love affair South America has with fried onions and fast food), our desire to see the Arches of Lapa finally coming to fruition (which also happens to be the starting point of Lapa Friday nights) and me finally being sandwiched by two Brazilians...in a taxi van, one asleep, the other irrate that he either a) didn't have my beer, or b) that I was drinking the beer in a taxi at all.  Lots of music, booze and merriment to cap off our second to last night in Rio.

And now the things we didn't do, but will do, someday.  This list is not exhaustive by any means, just the three main ones.
 
Reserve (natural, not a state-of-being) Surrounding Jesus
A huge natural reserve surrounds the Christ the Redemeer statue.  It's probably the most legitimate urban jungle in the world.  Tons of different, and to us exotic, bird species, monkeys and countless other jungle inhabitants all right next to the metropolitan center of Rio.  There's supposedly hundreds of trails to be hiked and no doubt stunning views even beyond that of Christ.  We didn't have the chance to explore this area, but I'm sure you could spend days walking the jungle, and perhaps next time we will.  

Favela Tour
Maybe this isn't a "we" event.  I debated about doing a "tour" through the favelas.  We talked about the moral dilemma of taking a walk through the lives of people who live in miserable conditions of poverty, treating the experience as essentially a zoo--how demeaning that could feel, how resentful we would be under similar circumstances, how sad and frustrating the idea seems as a whole.  We decided not to, independantly.  The sense of being a voyeur in traveling in general has merit in its own right, but seeing the favelas firsthand as an "experience" felt, for lack of a better word, weird.  In hindsight, I wish I had.  My outlook of Rio is overwhelmingly positive.  I adore the city and its people, but I also have a one-dimensional understanding and appreciation for the city and its obscenely large population, most of which live in parts I did not visit.  This is not justification, but rather an acknowledgement.  There are tours that can purportedly be done of which the "profit" goes back into the community.  It is still riddled with moral dilemma, it still is voyeuristic, it still is abiding my curiousity more than it does anything else, but I think if I were to go again I'd probably like to see more of the darker side of Rio, morally hazardous though it may be.    

Christ the Redemer
One word: closed.  Christ was completely covered in scaffolding, sans his lips (strange that his lips either did not need renovating, they are too large to cover up, or they chose not to cover them.  Weird anyway you break it down.) until our last day in Rio.  Besides this Rio had been pounded by rain the weeks before our arrival and thus the road was closed sporadically our entire time there due to unsafe road conditions.  This precluded us from making the iconic Mecca.  It is still not perfectly clear whether either one of us felt we missed out.  The view and the picture of me and Jesus might have been epic, but in reality, not defining of our time in Rio.  

Two Random Events/Sightings 
Beth exacted sweet revenge on some teenage girls who thought it funny to give us change for a meal we bought by giving us all the change in Brazilian nickels.  She was so incensed she spread out their menus All Over Their Counter of their five foot long beach bar. (1) Nothing says fuck you like doing someones job for them.

No pictures for this, but I swear to Obama that either he was in Brazil driving us on the local bus to the bus terminal or some Brazilian plastic surrgeon is performing "Obamas" on people.  Uncanny, and if we weren't too awstruck, we wouldve have snapped his resemblance, his Brazilian brother.

(1) She and my uncle Ken are about on the same playing field for mature vengence.  Our (mu Uncle and mine) running $5 Dolphins vs. Chargers bet is covered by 500 pennies in a Crayola box, exchanged annually, but began by a bitter 50 year old repaying his 12 year old nephew.

P.S.  One other place to at least look up is this weird guy named Bobbi, who is an expatriate of somewhere,  bought a mansion and has parties once a month at "Casa de Bobbi.". We didn't go because there is a cover (and I'm adamantly opposed to paying any covers in life) and, more importantly it was during Lapa Friday night, but it sounds like an incredibly eccentric function, and I'm definitely not opposed to eccentricities. The other semi-positive is that pharrel and snoop shot a video there, I believe it is called "Beautiful", so you can see the mansion as well as the steps of lapa there, the steps being artsily fascaded steps, in Lapa.



A cloudy view of Rio from atop Sugar Loaf hill, as seen through funicular cables.



¨In the Copa, the Copacabana...¨  Two girls, one dirty old man: who said threes a crowd?...and I guess me, taking the picture. 



Santa Theresa from a trolly car.  Not pictured, missile silo church.  I was scared of retribution by religious fantics, so decided not to publish any images.  Sorry.


Mas Maracana.  The upper level is where all the die-hard fans sit.  We got there early to check out the stadium.  We also, accidentally, got lower level seats, though the Lonely Planet recommends sitting downstairs if you don´t want to be pegged by dead chickens and bottles full of piss, seriously, that is almost verbatim their recommendation. 



Pat´s gringo bar in Rio de Janeiro was all the rage for the Brazilians...and Beth.




Brazil, the only country in the world where the mens bathing suits have less material than the womens.   This is Ipanema beach, in all its glory.




Sunrise with Obama.  The view greeting us as we waited for Obama to pick us up and take us to the bus terminal.