So I hate Christmas and normally pracitce complete avoidance of all the Christmas nonsense, but being so disassociated from normal life has actually driven us to seek some sort of familiarity and commemoration, and we’ve been walking tropical streets singing Christmas carols.
We did our Christmas shopping in the Sao Cristovao market the day before Christmas eve. Thirty minutes and a 40 reais budget each, we each dashed off and reconvened with bags full of brilliant presents for each other. Sao Cristovao market is utterly brilliant; it runs from Friday evening straight through the whole weekend. It’s inside a kind of stadium thing (turnstiles and metal detectors to enter) and as well as over 600 stalls selling a combination of crafts, food (hot barbequed cheese on a stick, oh I am in heaven) and tat of the finest order, has several music stages and a host of pub-cum-restaurant-cum-dancehalls around the periphery, where old and young samba with friends and strangers, whirling each other about and around each other with a skill we are totally devoid of.
On Christmas eve we took a bus (actually the most comfortable coach I’ve e ver been on in my life) to Paraty, which is a sort of tropical St Ives, with white houses and cobbled streets, contained on one side a gentle sea, on the others, forested hills disappearing into cloud. We did some frenetic last minute Christmas shopping in the rain and gradually reduced our pace as the rain eased off and the soporific ambience of the town seduced us.
As the day faded we stepped into the doorway of a church, where a service was slowly unfolding by candlelight, the unfamiliar carols achingly warm and gentle. Locals and visitors, pressed close together and spilling onto the street, turned together as an enormous double rainbow suddenly framed the clearing evening sky, and we all stood together gazing upwards as the voices from inside the church swelled and soared. A and I stood with our arms around each other’s shoulders watching the rainbow until it faded, peacefully and blissfully happy.
Later, we came to the square; a group of men had taken a table into the street and sat around it playing and singing samba songs about Paraty, drums, guitars, pandeiros, percussion, a centrifugal force of songs that everyone seemed to know. Others falling in and out of the periphery, joining in, taking over the instruments, the men from the bar circling and refilling the beer glasses, “mais uma? Mais uma?”.
We woke up in our Christmas pousada, had our Christmas coffee and breakfast, then told a couple of white Christmas lies in order to check out of that pousada and took ourselves off to a much posher one round the corner. There we sat in the Christmas tropical garden, reassembled our plastic Christmas tree and pile of Christmas presents (wrapped using strips of elastoplast in the absence of any sellotape) and exchanged our Christmas gifts, which collectively included some Christmas cachaca, a Christmas catapult, some Christmas Havainas, a Christmas pamphlet entitled O Amor Na Tempo Do AIDS, an abundance of various Christmas sugary goods, some Christmas nuts, and much Christmas jewellery.
After a thorough session of Christmas epilation, we took ourselves off to the Christmas beach, where we did some Christmas swimming in the nice warm Christmas sea, ate some Christmas burgers, had a little Christmas nap and got a little Christmas sunburn.
We found a great restaurant to have our Christmas dinner (huge prawns in a passion fruit sauce), came back late, spoiled, sated, and finished the day pulling our three slightly squashed Christmas crackers
Our other flatmate, the lovely L, who is at home holding the fort while we gallivant around here, gave us the crackers when we left. They’ve been in my backpack for 3 weeks, which is why they were squashed. L has an amazing ability for creating surprises, crafting perfect little moments ages in advance. She had predicted with uncanny aptitude how much we would love wearing paper hats in a foreign clime (I’m typing this in bed at 2am, still wearing mine). We discovered in our crackers, alongside chocolate coins and some handmade Christmas decorations, a little handwritten quote each that she’d put inside each one. Anais Nin’s advice that “life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage” provided the perfect end to a lovely day. Thanks L.
Finally, much love to all, sorry I wasn´t in touch, but my thoughts were with you. x
Wednesday 26 December 2007
O Morrinho
Much debate between the three of us took place whilst in Rio re the ethics of favela tours (see my previous, somewhat caustic post). Whilst we’re all genuinely interested in finding out more about these communities, we all struggle somewhat with the ideology of paying to go on a tour round them. The other day, however, we got wind of an art installation created inside one of the favelas local to Santa Teresa, and decided we’d really like to check it out. As luck would have it, one of the women who works for Cama e Café, (the B and B network we are currently arranging our accommodation through), works as a volunteer on this project, and offered to take us up to see it. Favela Pereira Da Silva is a short walk from our B and B, so after a great breakfast courtesy of our host Augusto we set off with Daniella up the hill.
Pereira Da Silva, explained Daniella, is a very safe favela in which visitors are welcome and drug traffickers and the associated violence have been eradicated, both due in no small part to the success of the Morrinho art project, an installation was begun in the favela by two boys ten years ago.
The story of the Morrinho (literally, “Little Hill”) is a truly incredible one. It was begun when the two boys, who lived in a little shack in the forest at the edge of the favela, started to use the leftover hollow bricks from house construction to build a miniature town together outside their home, which they populated with people made from lego bricks. Gradually more local boys joined the game, and the miniature favela grew in size and complexity, becoming, over the next decade, a hugely complex and faithful representation of the boy’s community which today occupies over 300 square metres of land at the edge of the favela.
Some time ago, a documentary film maker heard about the phenomenon, and started to work with the boys to document their work. Slowly, visitors started entering the favela to see the world, and the boys (now men) have taken their Morrinho outside of the favela, constructing new versions as exhibitions, first in a Rio shopping centre, and then, as they gained national and international recognition for their work, further afield. They have since travelled to Barcelona, Paris and the Venice Biennial to construct new Morrinhos, and are bringing their world to Vienna, Berlin and Dubai in the coming year. With the assistance of the documentary film-maker, X, and an NGO, the boys have set up a media centre in the favela, have learned to film and edit episodes of this tiny soap opera, some of which have since been bought by Nickelodeon. This year, the documentary covering ten years of the Morrinho will be released in cinemas.
We walked through Favela Pereira Da Silva to where the neighbourhood gives way to the forest and the Morrinho begins. The first sight of it stretching up the hill takes one’s breath away. It is almost impossible to describe how powerful the effect of the Morrinho is, and no description I could write of it could do it justice. It is absolutely awe-inspiring. I’d have no hesitation in describing the Morrinho was one of the most powerful, moving and deeply affecting creative encounters I’ve ever experienced. It took my words away, and I walked around it completely dumbstruck, utterly humbled and totally overwhelmed by what I can only describe as the colossal creative energy of this endeavour. The Morrinho defies categorisation and all of the terms I have at my disposal fall flat. It’s an artwork of the most complex kind, and it’s also a gigantic playground, home to a phenomenal game.
The Morrinho is not a static model; it is truly alive, its inhabitant characters manipulated over years in a living soap opera by the boys and other children of the favela. It’s like Second Life, or The Sims, and a complex series of rules has evolved to govern this giant brincadeiro, written large on a sign nailed to a tree. There are no superheros in the Morrinho – characters live or die as they would in real life. Every aspect of the community has been reproduced. There are churches, garages, hospitals, a football team, crèches, bars, a TV station. The Morrinho is divided into districts, each looked over by one of the original boys (now men), and a map on the wall lays out the territory.
In Rio de Janeiro, the favelas exist pretty much outside state control and are governed instead by the organically arising justice systems of the gangs. Two main gangs, the Third Command and the Red Command, battle with each other to control the drug trafficking trade, and favela communities end up embroiled in the ongoing war between these gangs and the violent interventions of BOPE, the elite police force. Against this background, children grow up fast and sooner or later start playing with real guns, as young boys are recruited at an early age as foot soldiers for drug traders.
In Favela Pereira Da Silva, the young boys play out these deadly interactions with lego figures in the Morrinho. The details of the favela world, as seen through the eyes of these young men, are all there to be viewed: the BOPE headquarters, complete with helicopters, sits on high on the edge of the town, and look closely and you see trafficker’s lairs, guarded by armed lookouts and piled high with bling, BMWs parked outside.
href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RIwrchPiE2s/R3_OtuOsOxI/AAAAAAAAACU/iG0PpVhXUt4/s1600-h/IMG_2058a.jpg">
But in the favela itself, the drug traffic, arms and gangs have gone, due in no small part to a group of young men who opted out of involvement with the gangs in favour of a blooming future as international artists. These inspiring originators of the Morrinho obviously act as role models and mentors for the younger children who play in there now, gently enforcing laws of consequence. The Morrinho offers a powerful visual and psychological perspective on favela life for both its ongoing creators and those who visit it, and has clearly had a massive impact on the lives of its creators and the entire community. I was thrilled and moved by this unequivocal demonstration of how just how powerful play can be.
The Morrinho is, without a doubt, number 1 on my list of things to see while in Rio. Worth flying all the way to Brazil for, probably.
(the Morrinho´s own blog can be found here: )
Tuesday 25 December 2007
The Lonely Planet loses some more friends
The pleasure of travelling on the hoof is frequently tempered with boring periods of having to arrange stuff (anyone want to come and be our PA?) and there are times when it feels that we spend more time sat in hotel rooms huddled over the Lonely Planet (with which we have seriously fallen out – more of that another time) and slow internet connections, trying to arrange the next step, than actually doing stuff. Yesterday morning started with a complete mish. We realised that although we were telling people that we are going to Paraty for Christmas, we hadn’t actually quite managed to book anywhere to stay, or any means of getting there, and this was causing expressions of alarm on the faces of people we told our plans to.
However, our joint assault on the practicalities reaped dividends. I made a phonecall to a Pousada and somehow seemed to manage to secure a reservation in my crap Portuguese while A and E nearly fell over laughing at my attempts to spell all our names in an alphabet I don’t know (ME: “Ellie. EH ELE ELE EE EH…”etc), and then we all schlepped off to the bus station, which is the only place you can buy bus tickets here. Luckily we were all in a cheery mood as this involves a taxi across town, a descent into the seventh circle of hell inhabited by lots of flustered people, some of whom were dressed as sailors, with huge bags and tiny babies, all dragging things rapidly in different directions, a labyrinthine myriad of kiosks and long queues, and finally a negotiation with a dude in the Bilheteria whose name badge said he was Mr Wendel, which rather tickled us.
After this we tried unsuccessfully to get robbed at gunpoint by taking pictures of the area around the bus station, got freaked out by a local who said that doing so was the craziest thing he had ever seen, and so jumped in another taxi back to the centre of town, probably sensible seeing as the only weapon we had at our disposal was a bag full of rapidly decomposing plums. Looking at our map at the other end of our ride, we were surprised to discover that we seemed to be right near the Museum of Modern Art – a surprise because either the Lonely Planet is again telling lies or this museum has been teleported across town. I can confirm that, contrary to the Lonely Planet’s advice, it is actually located just a short amble from the city centre, if you take the route we did, across some desolate grassland inhabited by homeless drunk people, a car park and a motorway. In any case, the matter of its location is fairly irrelevant as it is actually pretty rubbish so I wouldn’t recommend going there.
Fortified by some tiny coffees we made our way back to Santa Teresa via the Bonde, the prospect of which has been exciting us for some days. We were not disappointed. The Bonde is a hundred-year-old yellow tram which costs about 15p and which winds up at bone-shuddering pace from the city centre to Santa Teresa. It’s like nothing short of a theme park ride where you are allowed to hang off the sides; Alton Towers eat your heart out. We decided we all want to move to Santa Teresa and commute to work on the Bonde. Eventually we realised that we were going the wrong way and were going to end up in a favela if we kept going, so we all jumped off, fortunately, right outside a rather lovely restaurant where we sat down and had a very filling dinner, which nicely rounded off a day in which things just seemed to go pretty right.
I am sleeping well in my comfortable bed at our B and B, after a serious of torturously hot sweaty nights at the Ipanema hostel lying crossly awake listening to the deafening noise of our utterly ineffective fan, which cooled us down not a jot but served only make my hair intermittently tickle my face and thus wake me up thrashing about thinking I was being eaten by mosquitoes again.
However, it is starting to be disorientating sleeping in a series of unfamiliar rooms. Last night A, half asleep, woke me up in a panic. “Trev, can you sleep here?” she whispered urgently. I assured her I could if she would stop shaking me awake. “Oh, it’s alright, we’re here!” she exclaimed. Turned out she had been dreaming and thought we were sleeping outside. Maybe too many adventures for one day.
On a final note, my thoughts on the Lonely Planet are that for something the size and weight of a small brick the benefits of its advice are meagre. You can all too easily fall into the trap of paying it biblical reverence, scouring the tome for pearls of wisdom, which actually lead you into over-subscribed and ill-described places full of other people without the wit to follow their own instincts. We had a conversation the other day with a table load of my least favourite type of backpackers – the ones who hoof it round a load of countries in a matter of weeks (partaking mainly, it seems to me, in binge drinking, stranger-fucking and adventure sports tours) and then have the audacity to tell you with authority that “Chile is shit”. These are the people that hang out in the establishments that Lonely Planet recommends. Egg or chicken? God knows.
However, our joint assault on the practicalities reaped dividends. I made a phonecall to a Pousada and somehow seemed to manage to secure a reservation in my crap Portuguese while A and E nearly fell over laughing at my attempts to spell all our names in an alphabet I don’t know (ME: “Ellie. EH ELE ELE EE EH…”etc), and then we all schlepped off to the bus station, which is the only place you can buy bus tickets here. Luckily we were all in a cheery mood as this involves a taxi across town, a descent into the seventh circle of hell inhabited by lots of flustered people, some of whom were dressed as sailors, with huge bags and tiny babies, all dragging things rapidly in different directions, a labyrinthine myriad of kiosks and long queues, and finally a negotiation with a dude in the Bilheteria whose name badge said he was Mr Wendel, which rather tickled us.
After this we tried unsuccessfully to get robbed at gunpoint by taking pictures of the area around the bus station, got freaked out by a local who said that doing so was the craziest thing he had ever seen, and so jumped in another taxi back to the centre of town, probably sensible seeing as the only weapon we had at our disposal was a bag full of rapidly decomposing plums. Looking at our map at the other end of our ride, we were surprised to discover that we seemed to be right near the Museum of Modern Art – a surprise because either the Lonely Planet is again telling lies or this museum has been teleported across town. I can confirm that, contrary to the Lonely Planet’s advice, it is actually located just a short amble from the city centre, if you take the route we did, across some desolate grassland inhabited by homeless drunk people, a car park and a motorway. In any case, the matter of its location is fairly irrelevant as it is actually pretty rubbish so I wouldn’t recommend going there.
Fortified by some tiny coffees we made our way back to Santa Teresa via the Bonde, the prospect of which has been exciting us for some days. We were not disappointed. The Bonde is a hundred-year-old yellow tram which costs about 15p and which winds up at bone-shuddering pace from the city centre to Santa Teresa. It’s like nothing short of a theme park ride where you are allowed to hang off the sides; Alton Towers eat your heart out. We decided we all want to move to Santa Teresa and commute to work on the Bonde. Eventually we realised that we were going the wrong way and were going to end up in a favela if we kept going, so we all jumped off, fortunately, right outside a rather lovely restaurant where we sat down and had a very filling dinner, which nicely rounded off a day in which things just seemed to go pretty right.
I am sleeping well in my comfortable bed at our B and B, after a serious of torturously hot sweaty nights at the Ipanema hostel lying crossly awake listening to the deafening noise of our utterly ineffective fan, which cooled us down not a jot but served only make my hair intermittently tickle my face and thus wake me up thrashing about thinking I was being eaten by mosquitoes again.
However, it is starting to be disorientating sleeping in a series of unfamiliar rooms. Last night A, half asleep, woke me up in a panic. “Trev, can you sleep here?” she whispered urgently. I assured her I could if she would stop shaking me awake. “Oh, it’s alright, we’re here!” she exclaimed. Turned out she had been dreaming and thought we were sleeping outside. Maybe too many adventures for one day.
On a final note, my thoughts on the Lonely Planet are that for something the size and weight of a small brick the benefits of its advice are meagre. You can all too easily fall into the trap of paying it biblical reverence, scouring the tome for pearls of wisdom, which actually lead you into over-subscribed and ill-described places full of other people without the wit to follow their own instincts. We had a conversation the other day with a table load of my least favourite type of backpackers – the ones who hoof it round a load of countries in a matter of weeks (partaking mainly, it seems to me, in binge drinking, stranger-fucking and adventure sports tours) and then have the audacity to tell you with authority that “Chile is shit”. These are the people that hang out in the establishments that Lonely Planet recommends. Egg or chicken? God knows.
Here Be Monsters
After a couple of days on Ipanema beach – one of them recovering from over-indulgence in Caipirinhas the previous night – I found myself growing rather restless. Maybe I’m just not overworked enough for that kind of holiday vibe, but I found myself craving the stimulation of previous days. Nice as it was, the three of us had become ensconced in a little English bubble, with days punctuated by little more than the need to eat (although we did find an amazing healthy kilo restaurant which we decided we would be happy to eat at pretty much every day for the rest of our lives). So yesterday we sacked off the plan to go and see Jesus (it was too cloudy – he really is a fair-weather friend here) and executed plan B, which was to go into the centre of Rio and get lost.
A and I share a strategy for getting lost and discovering a city. Armed with a jointly good sense of direction and A’s excellent visual memory, we do a pretty good job of looking for the most part like we know where we’re going. It is (like most places) stupid to look like a lost tourist with an expensive camera over here, so we do our best to blend in. We sneak peeks at the map and the compass (we know it’s geeky but it’s very useful) down alleyways and in café toilets, and A has got blindingly fast at whipping her camera out of her non-descript bag and back in while I keep an eye out, create a distraction or pretend to pose as necessary for her to get the shot she’s after.
We left the compass at home on this occasion but did stop off to buy a good street map of Rio. I love maps, particularly maps of cities. They always yield up stories and interesting clues as to why a city has grown the way it has. Cities are like giant organisms, morphing and mutating and multiplying, a battleground of order and chaos, imposed structure and organic growth. Rio is a particularly visual example, and you can see on a map the way that humankind has carved out a place between the sheer mountains and the sea, the favelas pushing up the sides of the hills, swanky buildings facing towards the light like flowers turning their faces to the sun. All cities follow a certain amount of the same logic in terms how different districts jostle together and overlap, and I reckon a couple of days walking about and following your instincts makes the map make sense so that you know which way is up.
There’s something joyous about walking without knowing what you’re looking for, and just turning street corners as they take your fancy. The pace of a city forbids ambling, (in any case I’m awful at walking slowly) and our purposeful pace makes us cover distance, sights and sounds assailing us as one district gives way to another. The little treats that the city offers up are so much more succulent than the ones you find written up in the guidebook and schlep to sample. We stopped off for a very cheap but hearty lunch of chicken, rice and beans in an incredible simple local, family-run joint and ate side by side at a bar off plastic trays. The afternoon telenovela (a kind of brazilian Sunset Beach) was playing on a little television balanced on one of the fridges and we had immense fun speculating about the storylines, which seemed to involve huge amounts of female jealousy and a small armadillo.
On another street, we happened upon a little gallery which was hosting a children’s community art project, girls and boys in paint-streaked aprons proudly hanging their canvases on the walls. We bought a couple of fridge magnets (OK I do like fridge magnets) and chatted to the kids, who jostled for attention and were fairly delighted with the fact that we spoke English and demanded a demonstration. We’ve decided that the best way to practice Portuguese is chatting with children and old people, as both are more than willing to overlook the matter of whether you’re conjugating your verbs correctly. We also managed to pack in a couple of exhibitions at the Centro Cultural Do Brasil (sponsored, like a lot of art things here, by Caixa, a bank) which had an amazing exhibition by a Viennese artist Thomas Vargas, who travelled to Rio on a ship in 1817. His incredibly precise and detailed watercolours and drawings documented incredibly methodically the life of the city in its early years.
We made a move today from Ipanema to Santa Teresa, a creative, bohemian neighbourhood up in the hills. It’s a stunningly beautiful place, winding streets full of old colonial houses in a state of decadent decay, backed by forest. We’re only a few miles away from Ipanema but it feels like it could be a different country, somehow reminiscent of the south of France but fringed with jungle. VW Beetles in sun-faded pastel hues line the streets, underneath trees adorned with spectacularly orange flowers. Turning a corner or peering through a fence will suddenly afford a stunning view across the city centre, of Corcovado, or of one of the many favelas that fringe the area.
It may seem like an obvious thing to say, but the favelas don’t start and stop with any kind of demarcation, apart from in one’s head. I’m having a right old time trying to work out where I’ve got these ideas from and actually how much is reality and how much myth. The legend that the word conjures up – a ghetto of lawlessness, guns, drug crime and desperation – where did I get that from? It can’t just be from City of God, can it? All advice for tourists on Brazil advocates complete avoidance of these areas, and one the maps, they are marked in red, in capital letters, like a warning. FAVELA BARONESA. FAVELA RATA. FAVELA PEREIRA DA SILVA. FAVELA JULIO OTONI. FAVELA MORRO DOS PRAZERES. FAVELA MORRO DA COROA. FAVELA TAVARES BASTOS. FAVELA CERRO CORAS. FAVELA SANTA ALEXANDRINA. Hundreds of separate districts, some only a few streets deep, some, like Rocinha, sweeping around the whole side of a hill. It reminds me of old maps of the world, where the cartographer’s knowledge of an area ran dry, so they just drew monsters instead. On a map, roads just look like they kind of peter out. In reality, streets just become a bit more shambolic and run down and sort of slide from organisation into something a little more chaotic. We realised this today when we came back from our little afternoon saunter around the local area and looked at where we’d walked on the map, and realised that it seemed we’d gone through one.
Is there a war going on here? Some social commentators will tell you there is. Demographically, the population of Brazil shows the same disproportionately low number of young men that a population at war would do. Luis Eduardo Soaves, a sociologist interviewed for the Brazilian documentary Bus 174, comments that Brazil is experiencing ‘a war without frontiers,’ a hugely divided society where 12 million people live in favelas. He posits that the transition to democracy in Brazil was never completed, and that a huge section of society were left out of the process, and aren’t served by the most basic benefits and social advances of a democratic system. The Brazilian middle- and upper-classes, he claims, live as if they are not part of this war;
“We rationalise, and deny the facts” he insists “because if we confronted this reality we’d be forced to put our lives on hold until the problem was fixed.” This seems born out in Ipanema and Leblon, the monied districts of Rio, where we saw children asleep on the pavement directly outside the gates of some of the more wealthy houses – you’d have to step over them to get in or out of the front door.
Talk to middle-class Brazilians and they’ll say “it’s not a war” in the same breath as warning you to be careful on the streets.
In the centre of the city, there seemed to be policemen or security guards on every corner. In the busy areas, it feels like you’re never more than a couple of hundred metres from a man with a uniform and a gun, which is either reassuring or deeply disturbing depending on whether at that moment in time you’re more concerned about your camera or your civil liberties.
Fernando and I discuss the Brazilian police system, and I ask him questions about it. Who is in charge of the military police? I asked him. “The drug lords!” he batted back. We both laughed, but there’s a lot of truth in it.
Brazil has a strange two-tier police system, with both civil and military police, who apparently don’t work in particularly effective partnership. I´m still trying to get a handle on how this actually works, but I found a really interesting and in-depth explanation of the Brazilian police systems and its inherent problems at http://www.brazil.ox.ac.uk/confreports/hr02.pdf. Well worth a read.
The elite police force, BOPE, who deal with trafficking in the favelas, are certainly due a rebrand - their logo is of a white skull and crossbones on a black circle. Tells you what you need to know about how BOPE view their role in this interaction.
So, yesterday’s newspaper story of note: Father Christmas got shot at as he flew in a helicopter over a favela. Theories about the attack vary; some say that the gangs mistook the copter for a police crew, others speculate that the helicopter got caught in the crossfire in a spat between two rival gangs. One sad fact for certain, Santa’s had enough. “I just don’t know if I can continue doing this” the actor said. “I’ve got two children to think about.”
I asked our new friend, Leao, one of the beach traders, why Pai Natal was in a helicopter in the first place. It’s hardly traditional, I said. Maybe he’s actually a big-time drug trafficker, said Leao. Who knows what’s in all those sacks or what he’s actually delivering?
A and I share a strategy for getting lost and discovering a city. Armed with a jointly good sense of direction and A’s excellent visual memory, we do a pretty good job of looking for the most part like we know where we’re going. It is (like most places) stupid to look like a lost tourist with an expensive camera over here, so we do our best to blend in. We sneak peeks at the map and the compass (we know it’s geeky but it’s very useful) down alleyways and in café toilets, and A has got blindingly fast at whipping her camera out of her non-descript bag and back in while I keep an eye out, create a distraction or pretend to pose as necessary for her to get the shot she’s after.
We left the compass at home on this occasion but did stop off to buy a good street map of Rio. I love maps, particularly maps of cities. They always yield up stories and interesting clues as to why a city has grown the way it has. Cities are like giant organisms, morphing and mutating and multiplying, a battleground of order and chaos, imposed structure and organic growth. Rio is a particularly visual example, and you can see on a map the way that humankind has carved out a place between the sheer mountains and the sea, the favelas pushing up the sides of the hills, swanky buildings facing towards the light like flowers turning their faces to the sun. All cities follow a certain amount of the same logic in terms how different districts jostle together and overlap, and I reckon a couple of days walking about and following your instincts makes the map make sense so that you know which way is up.
There’s something joyous about walking without knowing what you’re looking for, and just turning street corners as they take your fancy. The pace of a city forbids ambling, (in any case I’m awful at walking slowly) and our purposeful pace makes us cover distance, sights and sounds assailing us as one district gives way to another. The little treats that the city offers up are so much more succulent than the ones you find written up in the guidebook and schlep to sample. We stopped off for a very cheap but hearty lunch of chicken, rice and beans in an incredible simple local, family-run joint and ate side by side at a bar off plastic trays. The afternoon telenovela (a kind of brazilian Sunset Beach) was playing on a little television balanced on one of the fridges and we had immense fun speculating about the storylines, which seemed to involve huge amounts of female jealousy and a small armadillo.
On another street, we happened upon a little gallery which was hosting a children’s community art project, girls and boys in paint-streaked aprons proudly hanging their canvases on the walls. We bought a couple of fridge magnets (OK I do like fridge magnets) and chatted to the kids, who jostled for attention and were fairly delighted with the fact that we spoke English and demanded a demonstration. We’ve decided that the best way to practice Portuguese is chatting with children and old people, as both are more than willing to overlook the matter of whether you’re conjugating your verbs correctly. We also managed to pack in a couple of exhibitions at the Centro Cultural Do Brasil (sponsored, like a lot of art things here, by Caixa, a bank) which had an amazing exhibition by a Viennese artist Thomas Vargas, who travelled to Rio on a ship in 1817. His incredibly precise and detailed watercolours and drawings documented incredibly methodically the life of the city in its early years.
We made a move today from Ipanema to Santa Teresa, a creative, bohemian neighbourhood up in the hills. It’s a stunningly beautiful place, winding streets full of old colonial houses in a state of decadent decay, backed by forest. We’re only a few miles away from Ipanema but it feels like it could be a different country, somehow reminiscent of the south of France but fringed with jungle. VW Beetles in sun-faded pastel hues line the streets, underneath trees adorned with spectacularly orange flowers. Turning a corner or peering through a fence will suddenly afford a stunning view across the city centre, of Corcovado, or of one of the many favelas that fringe the area.
It may seem like an obvious thing to say, but the favelas don’t start and stop with any kind of demarcation, apart from in one’s head. I’m having a right old time trying to work out where I’ve got these ideas from and actually how much is reality and how much myth. The legend that the word conjures up – a ghetto of lawlessness, guns, drug crime and desperation – where did I get that from? It can’t just be from City of God, can it? All advice for tourists on Brazil advocates complete avoidance of these areas, and one the maps, they are marked in red, in capital letters, like a warning. FAVELA BARONESA. FAVELA RATA. FAVELA PEREIRA DA SILVA. FAVELA JULIO OTONI. FAVELA MORRO DOS PRAZERES. FAVELA MORRO DA COROA. FAVELA TAVARES BASTOS. FAVELA CERRO CORAS. FAVELA SANTA ALEXANDRINA. Hundreds of separate districts, some only a few streets deep, some, like Rocinha, sweeping around the whole side of a hill. It reminds me of old maps of the world, where the cartographer’s knowledge of an area ran dry, so they just drew monsters instead. On a map, roads just look like they kind of peter out. In reality, streets just become a bit more shambolic and run down and sort of slide from organisation into something a little more chaotic. We realised this today when we came back from our little afternoon saunter around the local area and looked at where we’d walked on the map, and realised that it seemed we’d gone through one.
Is there a war going on here? Some social commentators will tell you there is. Demographically, the population of Brazil shows the same disproportionately low number of young men that a population at war would do. Luis Eduardo Soaves, a sociologist interviewed for the Brazilian documentary Bus 174, comments that Brazil is experiencing ‘a war without frontiers,’ a hugely divided society where 12 million people live in favelas. He posits that the transition to democracy in Brazil was never completed, and that a huge section of society were left out of the process, and aren’t served by the most basic benefits and social advances of a democratic system. The Brazilian middle- and upper-classes, he claims, live as if they are not part of this war;
“We rationalise, and deny the facts” he insists “because if we confronted this reality we’d be forced to put our lives on hold until the problem was fixed.” This seems born out in Ipanema and Leblon, the monied districts of Rio, where we saw children asleep on the pavement directly outside the gates of some of the more wealthy houses – you’d have to step over them to get in or out of the front door.
Talk to middle-class Brazilians and they’ll say “it’s not a war” in the same breath as warning you to be careful on the streets.
In the centre of the city, there seemed to be policemen or security guards on every corner. In the busy areas, it feels like you’re never more than a couple of hundred metres from a man with a uniform and a gun, which is either reassuring or deeply disturbing depending on whether at that moment in time you’re more concerned about your camera or your civil liberties.
Fernando and I discuss the Brazilian police system, and I ask him questions about it. Who is in charge of the military police? I asked him. “The drug lords!” he batted back. We both laughed, but there’s a lot of truth in it.
Brazil has a strange two-tier police system, with both civil and military police, who apparently don’t work in particularly effective partnership. I´m still trying to get a handle on how this actually works, but I found a really interesting and in-depth explanation of the Brazilian police systems and its inherent problems at http://www.brazil.ox.ac.uk/confreports/hr02.pdf. Well worth a read.
The elite police force, BOPE, who deal with trafficking in the favelas, are certainly due a rebrand - their logo is of a white skull and crossbones on a black circle. Tells you what you need to know about how BOPE view their role in this interaction.
So, yesterday’s newspaper story of note: Father Christmas got shot at as he flew in a helicopter over a favela. Theories about the attack vary; some say that the gangs mistook the copter for a police crew, others speculate that the helicopter got caught in the crossfire in a spat between two rival gangs. One sad fact for certain, Santa’s had enough. “I just don’t know if I can continue doing this” the actor said. “I’ve got two children to think about.”
I asked our new friend, Leao, one of the beach traders, why Pai Natal was in a helicopter in the first place. It’s hardly traditional, I said. Maybe he’s actually a big-time drug trafficker, said Leao. Who knows what’s in all those sacks or what he’s actually delivering?
Tuesday 18 December 2007
Christ! We are in Ipanema!
And so now we are in Rio de Janeiro, and it is absolutely one of those places where you hear the clichés about it so often you can’t believe that they can possibly be true, and then you see it and it is so ridiculous it makes you laugh out loud. Or maybe that’s just me.
After arriving in the rain after a long long journey, on our first night we barricaded ourselves inside our rather cell-like room (oh we miss Ju’s house!) and fortified ourselves against the world with a bit of American series The Wire on dvd on our laptop, while Friday night Ipanema raged outside.
The next day we were suitably fortified to brave the outside world, took ourselves off to the Ipanema beach, and actually could not believe it. Blazing blue skies over a huge long stretch of white sand, covered in a slew of toned, oiled, bronzed human muscle. It really is true – all the men look like they rightfully belong on the cover of Men’s Health magazine (and don’t they know it) and all the women are brown, firm, hairless and clad in miniscule bikinis.
After ten days of being, or so it seemed, the only tourists in Sao Paulo, this bit of Rio is taking me a little while to get used to, catering, as it does, largely to the tourist dollar. As a result it is, like many holiday resorts, a little bit anodyne and no-place. Plenty of places to spend money in bars or restaurants filled with other holiday makers. Fancy boutiques, ice cream shops, postcards etc. I have an absolute allergy to feeling like a tourist and doing touristy things, which is sometimes a bit of a disadvantage, because often the genuinely incredible things in a country are completely touristified. Living in London, you realise that the tourists live a parallel life to the citizens: they do stuff you never do, and vice-versa. The thing I can’t abide is the sensation of buying a pre-packaged experience of a place, which is essentially an experience that thousands of others have had before you. To you right is the sea, to your left is the mountain, let’s all take exactly the same photo and then have a ludicrously overpriced coca-cola and buy a fridge magnet shaped like this natural wonder in order to properly commemorate this day for ever more. Often the tourist experience seems to involve dicing with perceived danger in the safest way conceivable – hang-glide over Rio! Rock climb up Sugar Loaf mountain!
Here is Rio, you can now go on a tour of the favelas, which my gut reaction to seems like grossest form of cultural voyeurism, with an added kick of adrenalin for those who saw City of God and want to boast to their friends that they’ve been to gangland. I’ve had it explained to me that these tours are actually welcomed by favela communities, who see it as a good thing that tourists are finally registering them and not turning the blind eye that most of Brazilian society does, and perhaps it’s wrong of me to judge the motives of the people who go on these tours. But it’s very difficult for me to get away from the idea that it’s treated like some sort of safari – the favelas are too dangerous for non-residents to go into unguided, we are constantly told, so you must pay to be escorted there to see the wild life. Putting myself in the position of someone living in a community dealing with those sorts of problems, I can’t see myself being grateful for a shed load of tourists turning up to take pictures of how shit my house is. I could see that being, actually, pretty fucking irritating.
So yesterday we went up Pao do Acucar (Sugarloaf Mountain), two of the giant boulder-like hills on the edge of the peninsular, strung together by cable cars, which afford an incredible view of the city. We had spent the last couple of days (ever since seeing some sloths in a park in Sao Paulo) trying to remember the seven deadly sins, of which we can only list six. Joined by another friend here in Rio, by the end of yesterday remembering the seventh had turned into quite a competition, with a prize of a massage for the winner. So far we’ve got sloth (slothity), gluttony, lechery, covetousness (envy), pride and wrath. Shamefully our knowledge of this is not gleaned from the Bible, but rather from the film Se7en, of which we all have hazy memories. We spent much of the day yesterday accusing each other of various combinations of sins, and making nominations for what the seventh should be. Bitchiness? Dithering about? Saying you’re going to do something and then not actually doing it? We sat on the top of Sugarloaf mountain discussing this and watching the sun dropping over the mountain tops on the other side of Rio, our backs pointedly turned to the throng of other tourists and the shops selling fridge magnets. Unfortunately our view of Christ the Redeemer, on one of the mountains opposite, was obscured by cloud. We passed a cold can of Guarana back and forth between the three of us. “I’m actually a bit annoyed with Jesus’s failure to make an appearance” I said, and at that exact moment, no word of a lie, the clouds parted for a moment and there he was, backlit by the setting sun. Almost enough to make me believe….oh all right then, it wasn’t. But the timing was immaculate.
After arriving in the rain after a long long journey, on our first night we barricaded ourselves inside our rather cell-like room (oh we miss Ju’s house!) and fortified ourselves against the world with a bit of American series The Wire on dvd on our laptop, while Friday night Ipanema raged outside.
The next day we were suitably fortified to brave the outside world, took ourselves off to the Ipanema beach, and actually could not believe it. Blazing blue skies over a huge long stretch of white sand, covered in a slew of toned, oiled, bronzed human muscle. It really is true – all the men look like they rightfully belong on the cover of Men’s Health magazine (and don’t they know it) and all the women are brown, firm, hairless and clad in miniscule bikinis.
After ten days of being, or so it seemed, the only tourists in Sao Paulo, this bit of Rio is taking me a little while to get used to, catering, as it does, largely to the tourist dollar. As a result it is, like many holiday resorts, a little bit anodyne and no-place. Plenty of places to spend money in bars or restaurants filled with other holiday makers. Fancy boutiques, ice cream shops, postcards etc. I have an absolute allergy to feeling like a tourist and doing touristy things, which is sometimes a bit of a disadvantage, because often the genuinely incredible things in a country are completely touristified. Living in London, you realise that the tourists live a parallel life to the citizens: they do stuff you never do, and vice-versa. The thing I can’t abide is the sensation of buying a pre-packaged experience of a place, which is essentially an experience that thousands of others have had before you. To you right is the sea, to your left is the mountain, let’s all take exactly the same photo and then have a ludicrously overpriced coca-cola and buy a fridge magnet shaped like this natural wonder in order to properly commemorate this day for ever more. Often the tourist experience seems to involve dicing with perceived danger in the safest way conceivable – hang-glide over Rio! Rock climb up Sugar Loaf mountain!
Here is Rio, you can now go on a tour of the favelas, which my gut reaction to seems like grossest form of cultural voyeurism, with an added kick of adrenalin for those who saw City of God and want to boast to their friends that they’ve been to gangland. I’ve had it explained to me that these tours are actually welcomed by favela communities, who see it as a good thing that tourists are finally registering them and not turning the blind eye that most of Brazilian society does, and perhaps it’s wrong of me to judge the motives of the people who go on these tours. But it’s very difficult for me to get away from the idea that it’s treated like some sort of safari – the favelas are too dangerous for non-residents to go into unguided, we are constantly told, so you must pay to be escorted there to see the wild life. Putting myself in the position of someone living in a community dealing with those sorts of problems, I can’t see myself being grateful for a shed load of tourists turning up to take pictures of how shit my house is. I could see that being, actually, pretty fucking irritating.
So yesterday we went up Pao do Acucar (Sugarloaf Mountain), two of the giant boulder-like hills on the edge of the peninsular, strung together by cable cars, which afford an incredible view of the city. We had spent the last couple of days (ever since seeing some sloths in a park in Sao Paulo) trying to remember the seven deadly sins, of which we can only list six. Joined by another friend here in Rio, by the end of yesterday remembering the seventh had turned into quite a competition, with a prize of a massage for the winner. So far we’ve got sloth (slothity), gluttony, lechery, covetousness (envy), pride and wrath. Shamefully our knowledge of this is not gleaned from the Bible, but rather from the film Se7en, of which we all have hazy memories. We spent much of the day yesterday accusing each other of various combinations of sins, and making nominations for what the seventh should be. Bitchiness? Dithering about? Saying you’re going to do something and then not actually doing it? We sat on the top of Sugarloaf mountain discussing this and watching the sun dropping over the mountain tops on the other side of Rio, our backs pointedly turned to the throng of other tourists and the shops selling fridge magnets. Unfortunately our view of Christ the Redeemer, on one of the mountains opposite, was obscured by cloud. We passed a cold can of Guarana back and forth between the three of us. “I’m actually a bit annoyed with Jesus’s failure to make an appearance” I said, and at that exact moment, no word of a lie, the clouds parted for a moment and there he was, backlit by the setting sun. Almost enough to make me believe….oh all right then, it wasn’t. But the timing was immaculate.
House of Cheesy Bread (qualidade)
Brazilians love things with cheese, which suits me admirably. They even have a shorthand for things with cheese on a menu – just a big ‘X’, which seems very apt to me as I am somewhat of a cheese worshipper. Early on we discovered pao de queijo – basically like a little hot cheese scone thing, and have had days where our unsuccessful forage for food has led to nothing more significant than a succession of these little delights on a series of street corners.
In the airport leaving Sao Paulo I discovered to my utter delight a cafeteria called Casa de Pao de Queijo – literally, House of Cheesy Bread – and toddled over to get a coffee.
They have a bizarre system of paying for things here, which seems to be designed around the idea that only one person has access to the till. So, in a bar for example, you just rack up a tab which your waiter marks drinks on and you pay on exit. This all just serves to make it take a tediously long time to play out the interaction where you get something in exchange for some money. House of Cheesy Bread was perhaps the most extreme example I’ve yet encountered, which involved a woman going down the queue for the till asking customers what they wanted, then marking it on a piece of paper which she gives to you, which you then give to the woman on the till, who then puts it in the till and generates a ticket which you pay for, and then you have to wait because she doesn’t have any change, so she goes away to ask someone else for some change, and comes back empty handed and asks you to wait while she gets some change from the next customer, who doesn’t generate any either, and then finally you get to give the ticket to the person behind another counter, who then gives you the wrong thing because the woman on the till put the wrong thing on the ticket, and so you have to ask another person to change it, and so you finally get your coffee after complicated interactions with five people.
I am mounting a ‘take no prisoners’ approach to learning Portuguese and have been decoding newspaper articles word-for-word, which takes ages but really gives you a very solid appreciation of the information you eventually understand. Yesterday’s article was about Ignacio Lula de Silva’s pronouncements on the South American trade agreements. He seems to be straddling a rather difficult position, on the one hand trying to broker an agreement with the other richer South American nations to concede a little in order for poorer nations to grow (“We have to understand that a good commercial relationship is not one where I sell a thousand and buy ten. A good relationship is that where I sell a thousand a buy 900, to maintain an equilibrium”), whilst addressing the poorer nation’s claims that Brazil and Argentina and acting like imperialists, and still trying not to sound like he’s bossing everyone about. (“Everything I say ends up as a negative headline. Governments, politicians and the press should understand that the honourable thing in international relations is the respect for the sovereign decisions of each country…each country decides what is good for itself.”). I’m really interested in the language that Lula uses – it’s simple, direct, bold, and, unless my translation is way off, not particularly couched in nuance. Whether he actually follows through with these bold pronouncements is, according to the Brazilians I’ve spoken to, another thing entirely.
In the airport leaving Sao Paulo I discovered to my utter delight a cafeteria called Casa de Pao de Queijo – literally, House of Cheesy Bread – and toddled over to get a coffee.
They have a bizarre system of paying for things here, which seems to be designed around the idea that only one person has access to the till. So, in a bar for example, you just rack up a tab which your waiter marks drinks on and you pay on exit. This all just serves to make it take a tediously long time to play out the interaction where you get something in exchange for some money. House of Cheesy Bread was perhaps the most extreme example I’ve yet encountered, which involved a woman going down the queue for the till asking customers what they wanted, then marking it on a piece of paper which she gives to you, which you then give to the woman on the till, who then puts it in the till and generates a ticket which you pay for, and then you have to wait because she doesn’t have any change, so she goes away to ask someone else for some change, and comes back empty handed and asks you to wait while she gets some change from the next customer, who doesn’t generate any either, and then finally you get to give the ticket to the person behind another counter, who then gives you the wrong thing because the woman on the till put the wrong thing on the ticket, and so you have to ask another person to change it, and so you finally get your coffee after complicated interactions with five people.
I am mounting a ‘take no prisoners’ approach to learning Portuguese and have been decoding newspaper articles word-for-word, which takes ages but really gives you a very solid appreciation of the information you eventually understand. Yesterday’s article was about Ignacio Lula de Silva’s pronouncements on the South American trade agreements. He seems to be straddling a rather difficult position, on the one hand trying to broker an agreement with the other richer South American nations to concede a little in order for poorer nations to grow (“We have to understand that a good commercial relationship is not one where I sell a thousand and buy ten. A good relationship is that where I sell a thousand a buy 900, to maintain an equilibrium”), whilst addressing the poorer nation’s claims that Brazil and Argentina and acting like imperialists, and still trying not to sound like he’s bossing everyone about. (“Everything I say ends up as a negative headline. Governments, politicians and the press should understand that the honourable thing in international relations is the respect for the sovereign decisions of each country…each country decides what is good for itself.”). I’m really interested in the language that Lula uses – it’s simple, direct, bold, and, unless my translation is way off, not particularly couched in nuance. Whether he actually follows through with these bold pronouncements is, according to the Brazilians I’ve spoken to, another thing entirely.
A to B
Sao Paulo is impossible to get around. Paulistas insist that the only way is to have a car, and the rubbish public transport system does bear this out to some extent. But new apartments are built with seven parking spaces each, and the number of cars, like the population, is increasing exponentially. The pace of change here is incredible – yesterday, in a bookshop on Avenida Paulista (the busiest commercial district in Latin America) we found two photographs comparing Sao Paulo in 1902 with the view of the Avenida today. In a hundred years it has gone from a few stately mansions set on acres and acres of land that stretches out to the hills, to the skyrise mega-metropolis it is now.
But it’s a city that feels like it’s almost at breaking point, like a heart with badly clogged arteries. Paulistas describe over and over the pressure of their working days, which often don’t end until 9pm and involve a 3 hr daily commute. Yesterday, (by accident rather than design) A and I ended up in Barra Funda metro station at 5.30pm, rush hour, in the end of the line station that serves an enormous industrial quarter of the city. We were virtually carried down onto the platform, where the queues for the train doors (which build up in little fenced-in corridors) were already 30 people deep. When the trains arrived it and the doors opened it seemed, as A said, like a vacuum – the speed and force at which people seemed to be sucked in to the train, literally running, or being swept along anyway, was like nothing we’ve experienced before. London rush hour seemed like gentle tea dance in comparison. The train arrived and we found ourselves relinquishing all control and surging forward, riding a wave of people from the platform to the middle of the carriage, clutching each other’s hands and whooping with laughter.
One of my favourite things is going to a city where I have friends and doing as the Romans do when in Rome, getting carried along with whatever ride they take you on. Wednesday night in SP found us tagging along with Fabian, which turned into meeting Anatoli for a Lebanese dinner, then doing a bit of riding in cars with boys, and finally pitching up at the opening of a furniture design exhibition at the Museo do Casa Brasileiro at about 10pm. Free champagne bar in a marquee outside, filled with the elegant an beautiful of SP, A and I trying and failing miserably not to look like bedraggled backpackers after a day battling the rain. A did nothing to help the situation by smuggling free canapés into her bag to eat later. Who gets invited to these events? I asked Fabian. Oh, it’s not invitation, he told me, you just find out about it and turn up. Seemed to me like a fairly arbitrary entrance criteria to the champagne lifestyle here, but we weren’t complaining. We all ended up so sitting on a terrace, so drunk on conversation and laughing so hard that it was a surprise to discover that everyone else had gone, as had all the furniture, and we had two waiters apiece hovering for our empty glasses. We continued in form by nicking someone else’s guarda chuva (umbrella) on the way out – someone had nicked ours first but we definitely ended up with a better one. All in all, a solid endorsement for following the law of placing yourself in someone else’s hands and seeing where you end up.
Left Sao Paulo on Friday after a lovely last evening where we went out with Ju, Rodrigo and Anatoli and ate, literally, a boat full of sushi in Liberdade, the Japanese district (SP has the biggest Japanese population outside of Japan) and then, perhaps unwisely, gave in to Anatoli’s boundless enthusiasm for our company and ended up playing pool in a karaoke bar til 3a.m. Final shameful score Brazil 2, England 0. The next morning, flew to Rio to avoid the six hour bus, which was perhaps a false economy given that it took us two groggy hot cross hours to the airport, which we had to arrive at two hours early to pay for our one hour flight, which was 30 minutes late anyway. Interior flights here seem a very casual affair where you almost amble onto an aeroplane, once everyone is more or less ready to depart.
A and I are having fun with the Portuguese language, having worked out the patterning that allows one to replace the ending of a word with its Portuguese equivalent. So for example, a word that in English ends in ‘ty’ will generally end in ‘dade’ in Portuguese (because the ‘d’ sound in Portuguese is pronounced like our ‘dg’ sound, this sounds like dargy, as in to rhyme with argy-bargy). So we have liberdade, equalidade, our favourite, celebridade. I must admit we have been throwing the dades round willy nilly to make each other laugh. I asked A if she knew what a flight was in portuguese. Flidade? she replied. It is still making me laugh days later.
But it’s a city that feels like it’s almost at breaking point, like a heart with badly clogged arteries. Paulistas describe over and over the pressure of their working days, which often don’t end until 9pm and involve a 3 hr daily commute. Yesterday, (by accident rather than design) A and I ended up in Barra Funda metro station at 5.30pm, rush hour, in the end of the line station that serves an enormous industrial quarter of the city. We were virtually carried down onto the platform, where the queues for the train doors (which build up in little fenced-in corridors) were already 30 people deep. When the trains arrived it and the doors opened it seemed, as A said, like a vacuum – the speed and force at which people seemed to be sucked in to the train, literally running, or being swept along anyway, was like nothing we’ve experienced before. London rush hour seemed like gentle tea dance in comparison. The train arrived and we found ourselves relinquishing all control and surging forward, riding a wave of people from the platform to the middle of the carriage, clutching each other’s hands and whooping with laughter.
One of my favourite things is going to a city where I have friends and doing as the Romans do when in Rome, getting carried along with whatever ride they take you on. Wednesday night in SP found us tagging along with Fabian, which turned into meeting Anatoli for a Lebanese dinner, then doing a bit of riding in cars with boys, and finally pitching up at the opening of a furniture design exhibition at the Museo do Casa Brasileiro at about 10pm. Free champagne bar in a marquee outside, filled with the elegant an beautiful of SP, A and I trying and failing miserably not to look like bedraggled backpackers after a day battling the rain. A did nothing to help the situation by smuggling free canapés into her bag to eat later. Who gets invited to these events? I asked Fabian. Oh, it’s not invitation, he told me, you just find out about it and turn up. Seemed to me like a fairly arbitrary entrance criteria to the champagne lifestyle here, but we weren’t complaining. We all ended up so sitting on a terrace, so drunk on conversation and laughing so hard that it was a surprise to discover that everyone else had gone, as had all the furniture, and we had two waiters apiece hovering for our empty glasses. We continued in form by nicking someone else’s guarda chuva (umbrella) on the way out – someone had nicked ours first but we definitely ended up with a better one. All in all, a solid endorsement for following the law of placing yourself in someone else’s hands and seeing where you end up.
Left Sao Paulo on Friday after a lovely last evening where we went out with Ju, Rodrigo and Anatoli and ate, literally, a boat full of sushi in Liberdade, the Japanese district (SP has the biggest Japanese population outside of Japan) and then, perhaps unwisely, gave in to Anatoli’s boundless enthusiasm for our company and ended up playing pool in a karaoke bar til 3a.m. Final shameful score Brazil 2, England 0. The next morning, flew to Rio to avoid the six hour bus, which was perhaps a false economy given that it took us two groggy hot cross hours to the airport, which we had to arrive at two hours early to pay for our one hour flight, which was 30 minutes late anyway. Interior flights here seem a very casual affair where you almost amble onto an aeroplane, once everyone is more or less ready to depart.
A and I are having fun with the Portuguese language, having worked out the patterning that allows one to replace the ending of a word with its Portuguese equivalent. So for example, a word that in English ends in ‘ty’ will generally end in ‘dade’ in Portuguese (because the ‘d’ sound in Portuguese is pronounced like our ‘dg’ sound, this sounds like dargy, as in to rhyme with argy-bargy). So we have liberdade, equalidade, our favourite, celebridade. I must admit we have been throwing the dades round willy nilly to make each other laugh. I asked A if she knew what a flight was in portuguese. Flidade? she replied. It is still making me laugh days later.
Wednesday 12 December 2007
Finding our feet
So, what has a week done? The days no longer each feel like a year and we’re not exhausted by over-stimulation at the end of each one. We’re taking it as it comes, we’ve got over the exaggerated sense of danger that precedes Sao Paulo, we can read signs on the walls and we don’t worry about getting lost. We have walked for miles and miles and we know where the buses and metros go and where we are on the map. My feet are finally coming out evens in the battle of My Feet vs My Havaianas (who’d have thunk that breaking in flip-flops could be so hard?).
So we’re braving the city now, trying to treat it as we would our own metropolis. We spend time trying to separate out myth from perception. Are we jittery walking down the street because we are actually unsafe, or because we keep being told we are? Brazil’s reputation precedes it – everyone you speak to has a story about them or someone they know being robbed at gunpoint. Hijackings, kidnappings, bag snatchings…Paulistas don’t stop at red lights at night. Kids on the street snatch anything that’s not attached to your body. It all has the accumulative effect of making you feel like you’re constantly waiting for a gang of crack-crazed bogeyman to leap out at you and violently alleviate you of your worldly possessions.
It’s a horrible position to be in because you become ruled by fear. When you actually talk to the Paulistas, they’ll admit that nothing has ever happened to them – or certainly, nothing we’ve heard about has surpassed by any margin what you might expect in London. All my male friends in London have been mugged – it’s a fact of life, and one which you don’t let prevent you from doing as you please.
Walking the streets, eyes on stalks, we try to rationalise it. Is anything actually making us feel uneasy? It’s dark but normal. There are people about. They all look normal. A case of learning to use your judgement and perception rather than allowing yourself to be governed by worse-case-scenarioism. Because if everyone barricades themselves in against the invisible threat, then it all just gets worse.
That said, when push comes to shove, we’re still jumpy. We thought for a brief moment that we were being kidnapped the other day. Ju left us in the car while she popped into the bank. We had the radio on and I was looking at something on the back shelf of the car and singing along loudly to Luther Van Dross when the car started to move. I assumed Ju had returned and was mightily surprised when I turned round, still singing, to find the car being swung round in the car park by a teenage boy. “Why is this dude driving the car!” I squealed at A, who for some reason that I couldn’t immediately comprehend, didn’t look shocked. She had had a couple of seconds longer than me to digest the situation and had realised that he was one of the car park attendants and was moving our car out of the way. Luckily the car park dude found it almost as funny as we did.
There’s a strange sensation of two cities existing next to one another. On the metro, you could be in any European well-off city – then you step out of the station and see another lifestyle hidden under the flyovers.
We passed this building yesterday that Ju pointed out to us – a towerblock of maybe 40 stories which looked like it had been ravaged by time and misery. Every window had been smashed or boarded and the outside was scarred by grafitti – if you saw it in London you’d assume that the bulldozers were just about to move in. 
It reminded me of that tower block in 28 Days Later where they’ve barricaded themselves in with shopping trolleys at the end of the world. It’s inhabited though – a vertical favela, squatted by hundreds and hundreds of people with no other option. As we waited for the lights to change, a procession of people flooded round the stationary cars trying to sell what they could “cinco reales, quarto reales, dois reales, por favor?” Ju warns us not to have our bags anywhere near the open car windows. We go with Ju to the market on Rua 23 Maio, she’s there to buy fabric for her set design. The place is crazy; brilliant wholesale shops selling beads and feathers, street traders being cleared sporadically by teams of police – a birds eye view would see them disappearing ahead of the police like a Mexican wave only to reappear behind them shortly after. We tried not to stick out like sore thumbs which was not easy as we were the only non-Brazilians there as far as we could tell. Overwhelming at first – just the sheer amount of things to look at and look out for, your eyes constantly being pulled and your body being brushed and bumped. But I love markets, they’re always bonkers, and there’s a common denominator whether it’s 23 Maio or Marrakech’s souks or just good old Brixton on a Saturday. All the normal structure of life seems to go out of the window, and a new, much more organic structure emerges. They’re brilliant because everything is so negotiable and chaotic.
Once you stop dedicating your attention to noticing the unfamiliar things about a place, and start instead to notice the universal familiarities, the whole world shifts, and you start to feel like you fit in it.
Were going to head to a place brilliantly named O Do Borogodo last night but didn’t because we got home late and knackered after walking about for hours and hours and hours, and were then greeted by the news via email that the apartment we thought we’d secured in Rio for NY had fallen through, mainly because of our unwillingness to send a large amount of money to an unknown person via Western Union, so maybe a good thing. Trying to find a place to stay in Rio over NY is a fucking headache and we couldn’t face trawling the internet again. Prices skyrocket to ridiculous levels – Juliana was absolutely appalled when we told her what people were asking for a shoebox with a view in Ipanema – it works out as twice as much for a week as her monthly rent here, which is a really lovely 3 bed house with a big art studio and a garden. In London terms, the equivalent of about £2500 for a week, which I swear tops even Mayfair shoebox prices. Criminal. And yeah, we could afford it here, but I’m adamant that just because you could pay for something doesn’t mean that you should. Opting out of the reality of a city because you can afford to throw money at it just makes me feel like a dickhead.
Lots of people disagree with me but I do think that when you’re travelling in another country you have to think about the money you’re spending in real terms, i.e. linked into the local economy and in parity with local earning potential, otherwise you are behaving in a way that seems to me to be colonial. And it’s really fucking sore here where so many of the social problems are caused by the enormous disparity between the lifestyle qualities of the haves and have nots. There's lots of sensible arguements to counter that rationale, but at the end of the day that is just how I feel and I have a very hard job getting over it.
The lovely A has got leprosy, the skin is falling off her fingertips. I told her this morning that it’s because she’s losing her identity since she started wearing that religious icon thing that she bought yesterday in the market.
Sunday 9 December 2007
upwards and outwards
A little catfish in a bowl cleans the glass over and over, at a gig where a geeky-chic man is singing an incredibly drunk girl falls over and is patiently looked after by the security guards, a man looks around as he gives you back your change: don’t let people see you’ve got money, his manner implies, bad bad sexy santa outfits, service staff who seem too accustomed to being in service, edgy cool middleclass creatives rule the street. A homeless man’s cracked heels as he sleeps on a bench on a concrete island in the traffic. A marijuana plant flourishes in the garden, dogs howl in the morning, high fences and gates, is it a house a shop an office? The bus looks like the one on Bus 174. And the paderias with their huge selection of things that are kind of made of bread, a man heaps two huge spoonfuls of sugar into a tiny cafezinho, the beads of condensation on a cold guarana can. Antarctica Beer has blue penguins on the can and oh it’s cold and good. How did they get up there to scribble that graffiti? The advertising hoardings have all been taken down and the graffiti is the only word on the street. Cars don’t stop. Tower blocks go up. Friday night parties rage from bar to street to house. Chlorophyll green pops loudly from between the concrete slabs. Friends radio each other on mobile phones with aerials and helicopters whirr overhead.
The population of Sao Paulo is increasing exponentially. If you look over Sao Paulo, you can see that this city is growing upwards and outwards. The lack of planning laws means that, as Fernando said as we surveyed the cluster of houses sprouting from the side of a hill “the conditions here are the architect”. At a party in his place last night Anatoli lamented that there aren’t enough good houses; developers buy a cluster of them, knock them down and throw up a high-density ‘luxury’ apartment block. The skyrises here aren’t social housing; they’re coveted. People like living high: it’s safer. Apartment blocks have security guards and swimming pools.
We drove out today to the Jardin Pico do Jaragua with the two brothers, Rodrigo and Fernando. Winding up the a road through the forest, huge rain drops splatting on the windscreen, out of the top of the clouds, then a climb up to the television aerial that crowns the hill, and a vista over the whole sprawling city and its suburbs.
Money takes you upwards in Sao Paulo, away from the streets and the favelas and the crime, up into the luxury apartment blocks, and finally, from the top of buildings in the helicopters which buzz across the sky like so many insects, away to somewhere exclusive.
We drove back through one of the districts which clings to the edge of Sao Paulo. Roughshod thrown-together houses all on top of each other; little entrances between them from the main road into alleyways that rapidly become a labyrinth. There’s no planning here, amenities are stretched. A sign on the side of one building proclaims that it’s a hairdressers and beautician, another equally non-descript building is a Pentecostal church. It’s a million miles away from the gated mews that we sipped caipirhoskas in last night. Boys and men fly small kites everywhere; taking off into the sky.
Last night we were trawling the streets trying to find the house of a friend. It was dark and we were nervous and felt pretty lost as we trekked up an extremely long road for the elusive number 74 (we couldn’t find it, we eventually discovered, because we had misheard Juliana and should actually have been at the other, much safer end of the street looking for number 724). I wonder if we’re safe here? we asked each other, not exactly sure what signs of menace we should have been on the lookout for. Exactly at that moment two young blokes rounded the corner – and a second later we realised that both of them had white canes and were feeling their way down the road with their arms linked. The blind leading the blind, quite literally.
Our immense enjoyment of the visual embodiment of this uncannily appropriate expression had us dissolving into laughter, not least because it keeps happening here (yesterday we saw a bag of shite). Anyhow, we stopped caring that we were lost, and all sense of menace dissipated.
We have added Flopi sweets and Diamante Negro chocolate to our collection of misnamed foreign foodstuffs.
Saturday 8 December 2007
hitting the ground
We woke on Wednesday morning in Ju’s house, in an apartment on a street in a suburb of this enormous new city, not knowing where we were or how to leave or get back. Feeling like tiny specks on this swarming ant-hill and totally pole-axed by the process of getting a fucking bus.
Luckily, Ju’s flatmate Fernando adopted us over breakfast, and took us off to work with him -thereby setting a precident which has continued all week, as we've been looked after by a series of lovely people and taken off on little forays into their world. A and I have been joking that we feel slightly like children being passed between working parents. But it's been a great way to get into the city.
So, day 1: Fernando.
The 26 yr old younger brother of Ju's partner, he’s a musician who teaches at the local conservatoire, but who also works with a performance/research group of other musicians/artists/dancers who’ve recently undertaken a couple of government-grant funded trips to research Carimbo, a little-known type of Brazilian folk music that’s played in the north of Brazil. So we ended up sitting in on the workshop Fernando was leading on this, and watching videos of Carimbo groups in Belem. Carimbo varies from place to place, but is played with loads of percussion instruments, and usually a banjo and a saxophone – an odd combination which got me thinking about the migration and interbreeding of musical instruments. The last Carimbo group Fernando showed us was led by a very feisty 60-odd year old woman who made intense love to the video camera and sang melancholy sexy compositions about sucking the poison from the mouth of her “Moreno” while her teenage nephews played the percussion. The whole thing ended in a dance-off in the street between this fearsome matriarch and another very very old but extremely dapper lady with a big skirt and a flower in her hair who had sidled in a grabbed the limelight, as a group of drunks across the street applauded. Brilliant.
Afterwards, sat in a local bar with Fernando, talked about politics in Brazil and the UK, drank beer, made each other laugh, while the waiter viewed my attempts at Portuguese with an undisguised combination of irritation and pity.
“If you see a bit on a map where it’s just kind of green and there aren’t any streets, that’s a favela – not a park. They don’t pay their taxes and so they don’t deserve to go on a map. It’s like a social hole.” (Fernando, 5 Dec 07)
Later that night, we turned up at the birthday party of one of the one-time-London-Brazilian gang – an old friend who lived with us for a bit but who had no idea I was coming over. “Luciano” said Ju, “here’s your birthday surprise!” We all watched the birthday-drunk Luciano try to comprehend my face in totally the wrong place, which was priceless – the pieces finally fell into place, and he was slightly overwhelmingly pleased to see me.
Fall about laughing in the street afterwards at "Cunty" cake which we spy in a shop window.
Day 2: Juliana
On Thursday, Juliana took us to work with her. She's a set designer, but is currently freelancing with an up-market design agency, which lands us in Sao Paulo's equivelent of Chelsea for the day. Had a wander round the streets and through the nearby park (Parque do Ibirapuera) which had a big long pond and reminded us of the Serpentine. Discovered to our amusement that the Sloane Ranger uniform is the same worldwide. Boat shoes, chinos, linen shirt, jumper over shoulders, neatly buckled belt, silver rimmed glasses, keys to a 4WD. Boutiques and cafes…and private security guards in little blue or green boxes on every corner.,.maids and domestics flit around corners. Signs of hostility, reminders of disparity. Locked gates, Razor wire, electric fences, spikes, high walls, all say: Keep away from my fucking money. Or this man I’ve employed will shoot you.
Get lost in the park as the skies opened again so we make up a song to practice our Portuguese...Onde ficar a endrada do Parque, onde ficar a entrada do parque? we sing, over and over, as we march through warm rain feeling like right old tourists with with a wet map and our flappy anoraks.
We steal a newspaper from someone's recycling and sit in a cafe to read it, equipped with a newly acquired dictionary. Today's stories, refracted through the prism of my bad portuguese: armed robbers fleeing a hold-up run into Sao Paulo's busiest metro station, 14 people suffer abrasions. 9700 officals and soldiers undertake operations on Brazil's borders to combat drug trafficking and ambient crime (? - is that like ambient music?). President Lula goes on a pacifying visit to a Rio slum, accompanied by 80 Military Police and 50 armed guards, and makes some promises about investing in social structures. “To live on the hill in Rio, to wake up in the morning and see this marvellous sea, is not for every brazilian. When the rich live on the hill, it’s chic. When the poor do, it’s a favela, it's disgraceful” President Lula.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7122250.stm)
getting here...finally
One of those journeys where your anticipation about getting there rages out of control as you are thwarted by a never-ending series of hold-ups…fighting through rush hour London, we ended up shuffling forward in queues all the way to our seats on the plane. Then 13 hours in the sky of (seemingly) waiting for the trolley to get past so that we could go to the loo.
I’m really bad at waiting. My adrenalin rises and I can feel it sloshing uselessly around in my blood. My brain whirrs trying to find ways around the obstacle. I get cross and stressed and sometimes cry. The lovely A is able to take things as they come. She’s missed loads of planes and what’s the worst that can happen? But I don’t want to miss this one so I’m already stamping my feet and almost galloping up the road to the station when we leave the house half an hour later than planned.
One of the aims of this trip is to find a way around that. Ease off, take it as it comes. Let the adrenalin burn off, look out of the window, distract myself with the immediate, something. There's no point fretting about something you can't change, a concept that I understand logically but which is very difficult to implement practically if you're hard-wired as I am.
And then just as we get to landing time, the pilot announces that due to the radar not working at Sao Paulo airport, we would have to fly round in circles for a bit “but don’t worry, we’ve got enough fuel”. Horrid thoughts of lots of uncoordinated, undirected planes buzzing round Sao Paulo airport like drunk flies, dropping out of the sky as their petrol runs out.
So we arrive having kept Juliana waiting nearly three hours, and queue to stamp our passport, and queue to get through customs and endure a baggage hall that resembles a giant lucky dip. But she’s there and after two years of course she's the same as I remember her and we’re so pleased to see each other and we have one of those lovely meeting-at-the-airport arrivals moments.
And then we step out of the airport and we’re greeted by the rain, which hammers down from a hot black sky but which feels joyous after a whole day spent squashed against other people in various metal tubes. And we zoom through the night in a steamy car, re-knitting together the threads of our friendship.
The ring-road in Sao Paulo is called the marginal, which is also the Portuguese word for a criminal. It's half midnight and Sao Paulo is silent, nobody on the wide streets as we swing through them to where Ju lives in a suburb called Lapa.
Falling asleep in a strange bed approximately 5875 miles away from my own little flat, it feels strangely like home because I know Juliana is upstairs, like she used to be, and I have the odd sensation of not having gone anywhere at all.
I’m really bad at waiting. My adrenalin rises and I can feel it sloshing uselessly around in my blood. My brain whirrs trying to find ways around the obstacle. I get cross and stressed and sometimes cry. The lovely A is able to take things as they come. She’s missed loads of planes and what’s the worst that can happen? But I don’t want to miss this one so I’m already stamping my feet and almost galloping up the road to the station when we leave the house half an hour later than planned.
One of the aims of this trip is to find a way around that. Ease off, take it as it comes. Let the adrenalin burn off, look out of the window, distract myself with the immediate, something. There's no point fretting about something you can't change, a concept that I understand logically but which is very difficult to implement practically if you're hard-wired as I am.
And then just as we get to landing time, the pilot announces that due to the radar not working at Sao Paulo airport, we would have to fly round in circles for a bit “but don’t worry, we’ve got enough fuel”. Horrid thoughts of lots of uncoordinated, undirected planes buzzing round Sao Paulo airport like drunk flies, dropping out of the sky as their petrol runs out.
So we arrive having kept Juliana waiting nearly three hours, and queue to stamp our passport, and queue to get through customs and endure a baggage hall that resembles a giant lucky dip. But she’s there and after two years of course she's the same as I remember her and we’re so pleased to see each other and we have one of those lovely meeting-at-the-airport arrivals moments.
And then we step out of the airport and we’re greeted by the rain, which hammers down from a hot black sky but which feels joyous after a whole day spent squashed against other people in various metal tubes. And we zoom through the night in a steamy car, re-knitting together the threads of our friendship.
The ring-road in Sao Paulo is called the marginal, which is also the Portuguese word for a criminal. It's half midnight and Sao Paulo is silent, nobody on the wide streets as we swing through them to where Ju lives in a suburb called Lapa.
Falling asleep in a strange bed approximately 5875 miles away from my own little flat, it feels strangely like home because I know Juliana is upstairs, like she used to be, and I have the odd sensation of not having gone anywhere at all.
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