Snippets of Rio

A few snippets, and a few pictures, until I have time for a more proper update.

• I toddle and trip over a mile of mosaic cobblestone sidewalks to my metro stop,  then climb aboard the women-only car, which is painted pink.  On the other side I end up exiting the metro from a different exit from the one I know.  As I fumble my way through an unfamiliar city, searching for the Praia de Botafogo, I hear a rooster crow from somewhere in the forest of high-rises.  A second rooster answers it.
• One day we see a little black Scottie dog, running back and forth, back and forth across his second story concrete patio, protected from the street by wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling chicken wire.
• There is a man on the corner of the Flamengo Metro station, begging, and we pass him, and his child, stretched out and wearing only a diaper, looking blank both of them, curly-headed and blank.
• Sushi on the Rua de Torero, sitting at the balconi (bar).  The wasabi is spicy.  The lager is weak but cold.  Steve eats with his hands, protesting it is proper, and we laugh and our chopsticks click in the night, four Americans eating Japanese food in Brazil.
• In Rio I took three showers a day.  It is hot, and nowhere has air conditioning, not my room, not most rooms of the university.  I ran out of underwear, had to wash my delicate underthings with shampoo in the bathroom sink at 1am, hanging them out to dry beneath the ceiling fan.
• No wireless anywhere, I was disconnected for days.  It takes a frighteningly long time to dim the impulse to check the phone for messages.
• Dirt and rubbish everywhere.  Crumbling streets, soaring mountains, trash trash trash.  Even Copacabana and Ipanema, the famous beaches, are brilliant hot sand and frigid clear cold water and trash, trash everywhere.
• Sleeping bodies are piled up everywhere, boldly along the sidewalk.  Dark-skinned, all of them.
• I have lunch at Buzo, around the corner from the University.  We pay by weight.  I eat Waldorf salad.  In the pasta, the shrimps are unpeeled, and I’m not sure whether to peel them or not, so I leave them.
• Nao falo Portugues.  Quando Metro?  He speaks Portuguese to us when he answers, but slowly.  I do not understand even slow Portuguese.  He gestures.  It is clear, and we find it.  Later I learn that Quando means why, not where.
• The rescue at the praia (beach) of Ipanema.  The currents are strong, and we are just watching the swimmers and suddenly three lifeguards converge – we can’t even really see why. They are trim, dark, astonishingly beautiful men, and they bound through the water like puppies in grass, pulling forward with dizzying speed, rescuing three swimmers being pulled out by currents before any of us watching even could tell they were in trouble.  The lifeguards, in tiny red Brazilian trunks, reach the swimmers and pull them in.  The swimmers giggle, dash off.  The lifeguards shake the water from their hair, mutter as they trudge back to wherever they came from.  Our jaws hang open for a full minute after.
• At the university one morning I ask for coffee, and am brought to a room where a woman is swishing hot water in a bowl full of grinds.  She pours it through a burlap-looking coffee filter into a pot, and then swishes it again and then pours.  After several swishes and filters, she lifts the pot over a coffee pump/canister and then turns it, offers it to me.  I ask for a cup, and she points to a bunch of plastic Dixie cups hung in a dispenser on the wall. Plastic??  Tiny??  I fill the Dixie cup to the brim (too full, I now know), and sip it.  Strong, bitter, black.  It is so hot, it takes a while to swallow it all down.  It burns my fingers, my throat.  As the days go by, I notice that people drink these little plastic Dixie cup shots all through the day.
• There are nights alone, blissfully alone, on the bed.  No clock, no phone, no internet – no demanding children.  I wash my feet.  The fan blows so quickly, and it is so hot, and I lay on the bed without clothes and try to read, try to sleep.  By morning, it will be cooler.  I will have pulled up a sheet, shivered.  But as night draws in, a comfortable chill seems impossible.  I read about cold Sweden (a Stieg Larsson novel) and lie very still and will my body to wake up at the proper time in the morning, without an alarm (I have no alarm).
• The favela, on the hill, sprouts out of the niches in the rocks like something organic growing out of a cave towards the sunlight.  In one area there is a mind-bogglingly large exterior elevator to join the city proper with the huddling shacks on the hill.  It is blue, and glass, and sparkles in the sun.  One hundred can ride at a time.  Has the elevator ever seen itself filled to the brim with the poor, riding up and up to their slum close to heaven?
• Impressions: dirty.  Chaotic.  Wide disparity between rich and poor.  Palms.  Dramatic, sheer cliffs, on all sides – buildings nestled up to them.  Tarnished beauty.