Rio de Janeiro: one more time...

this is the view from Ipanema beach
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Hi all,

I am just starting to realise how ambitous it is to travel and to write a journal at the same time...finally I managed to sit down in an Internet cafe in Campo Grande to upload my photos and share some thoughts about the country.

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This is Copacabana, a nice curvy beach, one of the symbols of Rio
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My second trip to Rio was quite different from the carnival experience, but it confirmed that this place is just great.

Rio is a place of contrasts: beach next to hills, favellas next to rich condominia, sun and heavy rain (when I arrived I was greated with London-like grey sky and rain)...you have it all in one place.

I landed on a presidential election sunday morning....went straight to my hostel in Copacabana to get some sleep and wait for the rain to finish. I woke up into a sunny day. I was sharing my room with a German guy from Cologne, Thomas, who of course happened to know all people that I know from my studies in Cologne...the theory that everyone is linked throuh a chain of less than 7 people was confirmed.

I wish I could upload the fruit juices that can make from those fruits...
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A visit of Rio cannot start with anything else than a walk on the beach to taste the water and admire the locals (:- followed by lunch in a corner shop selling empanadas and hundreds of fresh juices from fruits I have never heard about...Late afternoon I went to Ipanema to visit the Sunday market...

In the evening I met with Cleusa, a Brazilian friend of mine, who took me to Santha Teresa, a very old part of the city wiht loads of small boutiques, bars, restaurants... a very Bohemian atmosphere...I really enjoyed it. In order to get there, you need to take an old train that goes at an average speed of 1km/hour (yes, almost slower than the Circle line in London) and people jump on the train while it is going up, if you don´t sit and hang from the side, you don´t have to pay !

the statute of the Christ seen from the Pao de Acucar
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Day 2 in Rio was dedicated to really touristy things: I went to Pao de Acucar hill in the morning and to Christ Corcovado for the sunset (or at least this was the intention). This was my second attempt to go and see the Christ and it finished the same way as the first one: after a very sunny day, couple of clouds appeared in the sky, but it all looked fine. However, when we arrive to the Christ we were in the cloud !!!! visibilty of around 3 meters so not only I could not see the sunset, the city but I could not see the statue of the Christ either !!! I have one more chance when I return to Rio at the end of my stay...

general view of the favela, with luxury hotels located just behind
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In order to get around Rio, the best option is to take a bus: and it is a great skill to be mastered. There are not many bus stops, and people just stand in key locations and wave on the bus to stop. It sounds simple but you need to know where to stand.... The other little complication is that not all buses can be stopped at any place....as I have learned after 30 minutes of unsuccesfull attempts. Once on the bus, there is a very impressive bus riding etiquette: women and older people are offered seat and if you stand with a lugguage, people offer to take it on their knees so that you don´t have to hold it.

a view of the city and Copacabana beach from Pao de Acucar
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In the evening, I stayed in the hostel and participated in a pub quizz... I was lucky to have in my team a girl who had been staying in the hostel for the last 2 months and knew all the questions and answers...I won a free BBQ (-:

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In the last day in Rio, I went on a favella tour...and this was one of the highlights of my stay ! A favella is outside of the normal rule of law: people can just decide to build their house, where there is a free piece of land. However, the government now started registering the houses and their owners. In most favelas, their is no space left, so people build houses on top of other people´s houses. The business model is quite simple: you can buy a roof to build on for about 3000 USD, probably borrowing from a drug lord, and then you sell your own roof to pay it back. You can imagine that the builing standards are not very high and with the buildings getting higher and higer, they often fall down, especially in the rainy season. People accept that and just build it again. Most houses in favelas have electricity but people do not pay (we saw many metere installed in 1985 showing 0 kWh consumption with cables going around).

the electricity instalation in the favela can be quite complicated
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Most people in favelas work in the city of Rio de Janeiro, as waiters, builders, taxi driver ... and most kids go to school. The dream of most kids is to become a football player or a drug lord, the only two ways they have seen to become rich.

The drug traffic is one of the major activities of favelas, we could not see any drug sales during our visit but we saw people with guns, who were described to us as drug lords making millons of dollars. They were very friendly by the way. We also saw the 'line of death', a poin beyond which drug mafia starts to shoot the police if they dare to come. "Fortunately", most of the time police does not come as they recieve a share of the profit.

kids in the favela
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Our visit finished by a tour of a day care center for poor kids financed by the money from the favela tours for tourist.

I really enjoyed my 3 days in Rio ! On Wednesday morning 1st november I flew to Campo Grande via Sao Paulo....a nice trip if it had not been for the chaos in the Brazilian sky due to highten security after a plane crash that happened couple of weeks ago...I was lucky to arrive only 3 hours late.

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