http://miapogeo.com/main/content/view/1124/4659/
| My First Impressions of Rio de Janeiro | | |
| Lifestyle - Travel | |
| Written by RosaMaria Pegueros | |
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I went to Brazil for the first time last month, when my professional conference, the Latin American Studies Association, met in Rio de Janeiro. It was surprisingly different from what I expected. I had my first surprise when I arrived at the hotel. Weary from a long flight we entered our room and the porter explained that our key card had to be in a special slot that connected to the electrical system. If you took the card out, you would have a two minute grace period, and then everything in the room, except the mini-refrigerator would be turned off. Keeping the air conditioning on required the card. The toilets in the hotel were the low-flow type that conserved water, and of course, there was a note in the bathroom asking that we hang up towels that we could use again to save water by only laundering linens that needed to be changed. These people are serious about energy conservation.
The worldwide economic crisis seems not to be affecting Brazil. It has a well-managed economy conducted by President “Lula” da Silva, a former union chief and socialist, that does not seem to have tanked, as ours has. When Lula won the election, the American press reflected our government’s usual panic over having a socialist in charge of anything within our sphere of influence. But all of the Brazilians I spoke with expressed support for him and his administration.
Much of what I had read about Brazil, as well as the movies I’ve seen, featured the poverty there: favelas or urban shantytowns; street children; violence by police particularly against the street children. The first movie I saw about Brazil was Pixote, a 1981 film about a child’s life on the streets which imprinted itself on my brain; the 2002 film, City of God, simply updated the situation.
 I had expected to see poor, dirty children selling Chiclets or shining shoes; poor women carrying a baby and trailed by two or three filthy children as one sees in Mexico and Central America. There were no children downtown neither when we went on a walking tour nor when I spent an afternoon poking around Central Rio on my own. I realized after a few days that the only children I had seen in Brazil were well-supervised by their parents. This is not to say that poverty has been eliminated in Brazil. The favelas are still there and visible from the nicest areas. Some of the vendors who approached us on the beach were barefoot. I wondered where the middle class and working class lives.
Rio boasts one of the most spectacularly beautiful bays I have ever seen, and I was born in San Francisco. I took a ferry trip in Guanabara Bay to visit Ilha Fiscal, an island which had been used by Portuguese royalty for dances and parties when they maintained a government in exile in Brazil during Napoleon’s conquest of Europe. I found myself to be the sole non-Brazilian on the ferry on a Sunday afternoon with many Brazilian families, some of whom had very small children. I was struck by how well-behaved the children were. I anticipated that some of the young children would be bored during the tour, but they were quiet.
Spoken Portuguese is considerably different from Spanish and I had not had the time to brush up on my grad school Portuguese. It has a musical quality and a sensuality that is unique to it. I found that I could communicate with most people with my "portunhol."
Rio is the second largest city in Brazil, after Sao Paulo. The amazing thing is how non-commercial it is, much more like Paris or Florence than the big cities in the United States. The hotel did not have a shop; finding toothpaste or other toiletries required a walk of a few blocks to a store. Only in a couple of places did we find the kind of tourist store full of souvenirs one finds in American airports, and tourist spots like San Francisco, where these stores are elbow to elbow in endless ribbons. While our hotel was located in the Beverly Hills of Rio, where there are very pricey and fashionable stores, one did not have the sense that the whole culture is anywhere near as consumerist as ours is. But neither is Brazil a Third World country.
I was standing in front of a jewelry store, looking with some confusion up and down the street, for a CD store, when one of the sales people came out to ask me if she could help. I explained what I had been looking for and she went back into her store, looked up CD stores, and wrote down two addresses for me that were within walking distance. It was a generous gesture that I found to be typical of Brazilians during my brief visit there. This is not to say that there are no problems for tourists in Brazil. Everyone warns you to wear no jewelry at all—no rings, no watches—unless you are prepared to part with them. We were told not display our cameras, especially if alone. There are pickpockets everywhere; while I was there, one of the men on our tours had had his camera stolen from his pocket. Another man was crossing a street when he felt a hand in his pocket. He said he slammed his fist down on his leg and the hand withdrew, but it all happened so fast, he never saw who was trying to rob him. The anxiety of being super-vigilant does spoil things a bit, but even the Garden of Eden had a snake.
Rio de Janeiro is an incredibly beautiful place. I will remember with pleasure sitting in the shadow of Pao de Acucar (Sugarloaf Mountain) watching the sun set behind Corcovado, where the giant Christ statue stands over the city. It was one of those rare moments when our senses are overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of a place. I plan to go back. | |
