Copacabana 7am

31 10 2008





Brazil needs change!

31 10 2008

Its interesting to see that in my ten years away, some things in Brazil haven’t changed.

Sometimes that is a good thing; like when the person next to you on bus still offers you gum as a courtesy, or you give up your train seat for an old woman, and half the carriage still comes over to offer their warm congratulations on your courtesy, and mini-hugs.

Sometimes its a tragic thing; the favelas are still with us.

And sometimes its plain annoying. Falling squarely into this category is Brazil’s chronic small change problem. The country doesn’t have enough coins. It means shop clerks are always imploring you to check you don’t have the extra 10 or 20 centavos that would make their job so much easier, or that sometimes people just give you too much back because they can’t make the change. Sometimes you have money, but the shop can’t break it, so you can’t buy the thing you want. The worst is when they just give you an embarrassed smile and some candies in lieu of money; I don’t want a lemon sweet, I want my 70 centavos goddamn it!

Surely this would be quite easy to fix if the central bank just took large bills out of circulation and pumped their equivalent, in 10 centavo pieces, into the economy?





Prefeitura

31 10 2008

I like this mural at Siqueira Campos train station. It is a tribute to the tens of thousands of orange-suited “Prefeitura” men (and occassionally women) you see everywhere in Rio. Basically, they are sanitation workers. I’m guessing “prefeitura” means “Prefecture” or  an employee of the city of Rio, not Rio de Janeiro state.

The Prefeitura people sweep the streets, maintain vast swathes of parkland, lop palm trees and rake the beaches every morning, always in their distinctive orange suits (suspiciously like US prisoner uniforms) . Its thanks to them that central Rio is in, generally, pretty good shape.

I’m guessing their employment is kind of  a substtitute-welfare-state policy, employing hundreds of thousands of workers in the public sector who would otherwise be unemployed. I’m not sure what I think. Its obviously a stop-gap measure, but short of creating a full welfare state, at least it means some people have jobs to live from. Plus the city stays in great shape.

On the negative side, the favela dwellers (from whom presumably, many of the “Prefeitura” workers are drawn) don’t get any of these most basic services, while upper class neighborhoods are primped and preened to the highest standards. And the middle classes complain about their taxes, which in Brazil are high, equivalent to Western Europe.

Still, its nice to thank the “Prefeitura”s for a hard job, well done.





Andrew´s incredibly lame adventure

31 10 2008

I have already overspent my time in Rio. According to the original plan, I was supposed to be out and about by now, doing other things in Brazil. But I’m still here. Guilt-stricken, I decided over the weekend to make an overnight trip; but it didn’t quite work out.

I wanted to go t othe historic seaside town of Parati. On the day I was supposed to be catching my bus, I got a message from one of the people on Couchsurfing (I had joined their Rio group) that he was free, and decided to catch up.  He turned out to be a funny, easygoing guy and on hearing my less-than-ideal impressions of Santa Teresa, he wanted to take me back, insisting it was one of Rio’s most beautiful places. We spent the afternoon riding the little tram through the cobblestone streets (while local teenagers held on to the rails and hung out horizontally, parallel with the ground, breakdancing on parked cars!) He took me to lunch and we ate chicken cooked in blood with rice, beans and manioc (in huuuge Brazilian portions) and showed me the golden domes of Santa Teresa’s Russian church and an old ruined house on the hill that is now a semi-restored cultural centre, with THE most stunning 360 degree view of the city, the mountains, the favelas, the city towers, planes taking off from the airport, ships on the bay, and the museum on the cliff at far-off Niteroi. We  walked down the hill, passing again over the Selaron stairs, and this time the artist himself was there working, so we chatted a little. He gave me (well, I paid 2 reals for it) a postcard with his email address and an earnest plea to send a tile, so that he could have one from every country in the world to put in his staircase.

By the time I said goodbye to my new couchsurfing buddy it was later than I had thought, and when I got to the bus station the sun was already setting. I just missed the bus to Parati so, making a spontaneous executive decision and being “free” and “wild”,  I bought a ticket for somewhere else instead; Ilha Grande. I could read about it on the bus.

Ilha Grande is a lush, mountainous island covered in rainforests and waterfalls, and ringed with beautiful beaches. Its four hours from Rio. The island was  was preserved in its natural state because its various uses; including a prison for political prisoners, and a leper colony (both now closed). Sounded great.

But you couldn’t get there directly. You had to stop in the town of Angra dos Reis, and wait for the ferry. Which only came once a day. Which I had missed. No worries, I thought, as Rio’s slummy outer suburbs receded outside my window in the equally receding daylight. I’ll stay the night. But none of my three guidebooks had any places to stay in Angras dos Reis.

I was starting to  get worried. I was arriving in the dark, in Brazil, with no idea where (if???) there was somewhere I could stay. I was going to be stranded in this town for 12 hours.

Well, if the worst comes to the worst, I’ll sleep in the bus station, I thought. Its a  sleepy country town.

When Angra dos Reis appeared four hours later in the gloomy night, it was surprisingly big and city-like, ringed with favelas, and bus stops where homeless people were already sleeping. The centre of town was a huge shipyard where oilrigs were constructed,  and there was a nuclear power plant.

 But no youth hostel.

When the bus stopped, at 10.30pm, I rushed out in a panic to find somewhere to sleep. I followed the huge sign atop the “Hotel Acropolis” nearby, only to be quoted an outrageous rate of 220 reals a night. I would hesitate to pay that for a night in the real Acropolis, let alone a lino-floored flophouse next to the bus station in the light industrial zone of an obscure South American provincial town.

Luckily there was a sweet British couple waiting for the bus, having come off the ferry. I explained my predicament and asked if I could see their guidebook. They looked at each other, nodded slightly and said “Yes, sure….but…why do you want to stay in Angra dos Reis?” To get to the island, I explained. The couple exchanged another meaningful glance, and the woman said; “We have just come from there, and to be honest…don’t go. It was absolutely full” (and here she had a look of genuine horror on her face) “with French people!” Her eyes bugged out. “French people, having midlife crises.” The boyfriend or husband continued; about the generic tourism development, the nature treks that were lots of trek for very little nature, the boredom of it. They showed me insect bites and demonstrated chest colds they had picked up on the island.

So that was that, then. There was one last bus, heading straight back to Rio. I got on it.

The next day, to my deep satisfaction, it rained for the first time since I have been in Brazil. I had escaped the wet clutches of the holiday isle from hell 🙂





Catete

31 10 2008

One good thing about the whole non-adventure to Ilha Grande is that it relocated me to a new, and lovely part of Rio.  Catete and its neighboring suburbs of Flamengo and Gloria sweep along the bay  to the doorstep of the central business area of Rio. They are filled with stately treelined streets with lovely old mansions and apartments, lively local shopping districts, bars, bookshops, parks and churches ; as well as a few dodgier areas, and a small favela, reputed to be the “friendliest” in Rio. (“The Invincable Hulk” movie shot here for its favela chase scene (!!) , standing in for the more notorious Rocinha).

I am staying in the 50 reals a night Hotel Riazon – the ultimate in gone-to-seed glamour, now a divey budget hotel, but right out the front of the Catete Palace, formerly home of the Brazilian President and now a museum. It was here that Getulio Vargas, twice president, and founder of Brazil’s quasi-fascist “New State” (the Estado novo) shot himself in the head, on losing popularity with his people.

Inside the palace, guarded with elaborate wrought iron gates and topped with gloomy condors, is an exhibition of presents given to Brazilian heads of state – starting with quills and saddles and ending with a pair of Nikes and an AK47 – and a model of Oscar Niermeyer’s proposed (and never built) Monument to the Victims of Torture ; a flailing stick figure human, at the end of a tall and curving spike. But the best bit is Vargas’ old bedroom, the scene of his suicide. The room is dark, and kept cold, with just a huge bed in the middle. A film is projected onto the bedsheet of a man tossing and turning restlessly in the night, while a disembodied voice whispers the paranoid last entries from his diary. Very high drama.

Outside in the gardens I found this bizarre statue of a child wrestling a kangaroo, called “Oceania”.





Museu de Folclore

31 10 2008

Right next to the gardens of the Catete Palace is another museum, the Museu de Folclore Edison Carneiro, also known sometimes as the National Centre for Popular Culture.

One of the great joys of travelling in Brazil is that there is no distinction here between folk  and pop culture. Brazil’s folk culture is its pop culture. Samba, for example, is  both; a style of folk music that is living and breathing and still hugely popular. And although they are not as wellknown to the outside world, almost every city has its own comparable genre of music (Salvador has “axe”, Recife “maracatu”, Fortaleza “forro”… “Samba” is Rio’s, which is probably why it is better known).

The Museum concentrates not on music, but on crafts like sculpture, wood carving and textiles from across Brazil, and really hits home its point about the beauty and variety of Brazilian folk art; there are baskets woven by Indians in the deepest Amazon, ponchos from the cowboys of the South, African-derived Candomble religious figures from Bahia, and costumes from the Bumba-Moi-Beu festival of the Northeast, a ritualistic play held every year about a cow that is killed and comes back to life. And they are all moodily lit and imaginatively displayed.

This was my favorite; a chillingly expressive carving of a horseheaded man, grinning as he cuts the throat of a chicken. I don’t think I have ever seen anything more sinister in my life.

Also:

Candomle charms dangling

Creepy plaster body parts, left hanging in churches by those seeking a cure for some ailment inflicting that part of their body

This very African Christ

Colored sand landsapes in bottles

And amazing puppet sets of little wooden circuses, rodeos, Carnivals or samba shows from Sao Paulo. Every single piece is rigged to move, so while the circus performers twirl, the audience claps.





Art na rua

31 10 2008

 

Appropriately enough, the streets around the Museum of Folklore in Catete are rich with examples of the folkart of our modern, urban, industrial times: street art and grafitti: