It´s a cliché, but Rio (and Brasil) really is a city of contrasts. One minute you will be surrounded by rich suits, and take fourty steps in a specific direction you can trip over someone sleeping on the street, with literally nothing to their name. One minute you can be surrounded by massive polished marble skyscrapers, the next, seeing people living in wooden shacks smaller and more rickety than your garden shed, perches precariously on a hillside, surrounded by jungle. The avocados are the size of melons (I shit you not) but coffees are smaller than even italian espressos.
The most fantastic of these contrasts (more of a contradiction actually) is deep-fried sushi in batter, something that surely should never have existed.
The beaches here are no less part of the city than the metro or the park; lives are lived here, and it is a space that is used for much; vendors walk past sun-worshippers, selling everything; suncream, kites, prawns, fried cheese, drinks, biscuits, jewellery, cloths, clothes, hat s, fruit, etc. They all have their own mantra, stating the sum of their wares, sometimes with such a unique style as to set them apart from their contemporaries; I´m talking about the pineapple man, with a wide, flat basket of abacaxi (pineapple) balances on his head, bright yellow washing up gloves on his hands, who sneaks up on unsuspecting sunbathing ladies and shocks them awake with a yell, brandishing a half pineapple at them, smiling all the while. The beach is used for surfing, bodyboarding, bodysurfing, volleyball, football, futevolei (volleyball with everything but your hands) peteka (think badminton with a feathery ufo and no rackets or net), running, acrobatics, and lazing about. Some homeless guys sleep under palm trees on the beach, pissing behind them, weaving bracelets to sell and collecting empty coke cans to sell for scrap. The beach sustains all walks of life just as sufficiently as any neighborhood, the difference being the lack of buildings.
Capoeira in Rio is hard to find, but not inaccessible– you have to look for it nonetheless, it´s not quite as prominent as I imagined, here at least. Training is held in buildings just on the edges of favelas, just within the boundaries of society, maintaining its history of social periphery. The level of game is higher than the UK, they play closer (in general) than we do, and are more efficient and swift with well-placed kicks and sweeps; it seems that we play to miss slightly, whereas they play to hit, and will only pull their kicks at the last minute, if at all. Training in the heat is hard, but emphasis is placed on music just as much as the game, which is refreshing. My girlfriend and myself have been writing down as many sequences trained as we can remember.
I don´t want to use this blog as a ‘this is what I’ve done´ space, but I have little time to formulate opinions properly, and my time is spent experiencing, assessing levels of safety or otherwise, planning, and most of all, enjoying and relaxing. I’ll try and post some photos up when I get a minute, but they are still on me camera right now.
Much love to you all, be good now,
Xander
This entry was written by , posted on May 1, 2009 at 9:15 pm, filed under Words and tagged brazil, contrast, south america, travel. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
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