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S U N D A Y , A P R I L 2
I got up and had lunch with Sheldon of Toronto, at the upstairs deli in the nearby supermarket. We felt a little cheesy about eating there, but it was something that the locals did all the time, and the food — I had a tortilla (something like potato pancake and nothing like the North American flour disk) and empanadas of various kinds — was pretty good.
I ferried back to Montevideo, and strolled through the old part of town on my way to the bus back to the Estevez house.
Jeff and Lee had told me that every Sunday night during the summer there was a festival on the main downtown street, with food and dancing. I called up a lovely Montevidean named Laura, with whom I'd had a date earlier in the week, (and with whom we'd breakfasted before the traffic arrest), and we went downtown.
It was like a relaxed, uncrowded NIOSA: all up and down the street there were clusters of a few hundred people, gathered around an area where there was dancing of various kinds: two or three tango places, several disco places, and folk, salsa, and African music.
We had coffee at a German place whose interior was decorated like a Tyrolean village. I was reminded that the German presence is strong here, because Uruguay was one of the few places Nazis could disappear to after the war. Look through the Montevideo phone book, and you'll see a number of German surnames jump out at you. I even met a guy who (it was explained to me later) was the grandson of a Nazi.
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M O N D A Y , A P R I L 3
On my last day in Montevideo I went down to the shopping center to get flowers for the Estevez family, and to get mates.
A mate is a gourd in which Uruguayans drink a sort of herb tea, also called mate, through a permanent, gilded straw with a flat spoony filter at the end. They come in all shapes and sizes, and some are carved wood or metal.
It's the national drink of Uruguay, but you'd never see it for sale at a restaurant or football game. It's prepared at home, and is seen as a pretty personal thing — they're never shared, except by spouses. So I got two: a large gourd for myself, and a more touristy plated wooden one for guests. You're invited to try some!
I said my goodbyes and cousin Raoul took me to the airport, and I was off to Rio.
On arriving, I immediately went to get some money from a machine — American Express traveler's checks are not well regarded in Uruguay, and I'd been unable to change. The first two machines rejected my card, and the third one ate it! I stood at the machine cursing it until a bank guard came by. I explained as best I could what had happened, and he indicated that he'd go make a call. Several minutes passed, and I banged on the door; he came and impatiently indicated that he was trying. But as we continued to communicate, it became clear that no matter what he did, I'd have to come back the next day anyway to get my card. Fortunately, downstairs there was an open Amex booth and I changed a few traveler's checks.
Still, the feeling of being in a place, notoriously dangerous, where the language was quite foreign, having just lost my mastercard, was a somewhat desolate one.
Time to get to the hostel. A 45 minute drive through crowded Rio, and I was on the beach at Copacabana. Beautiful, even in the dark! I walked the five blocks in to the hostel, and my friends were right: it was in fact perfectly safe. No gangs of marauders, no getting my hand cut off for my watch.
The hostel itself, though not up to the standard of the mansion in Buenos Aires, was serviceable. Like the mansion, it hosted a number of friendly people, whom I joined in a late jaunt to Ipanema.
Rio has several divisions, each of which has its own identity: Copacabana and Ipanema are the two most frequented by tourists, and they're a little nicer and cleaner than some of the other parts of town. Copacabana has the reputation of being friendly and family oriented, and Ipanema has the reputation of being classier and snottier. The beach at Ipanema is populated by beautiful, health clubby people with killer gear, whereas at Copacabana it's kids playing beach soccer and families cooking out.
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T U E S D A Y , A P R I L 4
I spent the entire mid-morning and early afternoon getting my card. Though a bit of trouble, the process itself was smooth. Traveling mercies.
That afternoon, I went shopping at the market and bought cups, water, and sandals, then hit the most famous beach in the world for a swim.
The odd thing about Rio is that it's a big city with huge mountains all over the place. Actually, the word I'd use is "moundains." They're giant humps, oddly shaped and mostly covered in green, that tower up like toasters set on end, surrounded by dense urbia.
Copacabana and Ipanema, for instance, are no more than five or ten blocks deep, and then these steep Brycean monstrosities pop up right in your face. From the beach, I was easily able to see Corcovado ("Hunchback," the large lump with the statue of Jesus on it). Even out in the surf, smaller lumps dotted the view, providing some of the most distinctive scenery I can think of.
Avenida Atlantica, which runs the length of Copacabana beach, swarmed from morning to evening with joggers and brisk walkers, all very dark brown. I saw several versions of the leathery Miami grandma parodied so wonderfully in "There's Something About Mary." Also dotting the avenue were little shacks that sold dollar hamburgers, coconuts (the Brazilian, unhairy kind) chopped off and fitted with straws for drinking, soft drinks, and cooked nuts. Then, on the other side of the avenue, there was a solid wall of hotels (the nicest of which was several hundred a night).
Back at the hostel (less than several hundred a night), I made arrangements for dinner with a couple of new friends: Matt, who made a point of being from Wales though he lived in Dublin, and Andres, a bearish boy-man from Sweden.
The guidebooks had recommended a place that featured Amazonian cuisine, so we thought we'd give it a shot. It was a tiny deli-style room whose kitchen also served a ritzier restaurant around the corner. And indeed the Amazonian cuisine was as exotic as expected. The most provocative sounding item on the menu was "Maniçoba (a poisonous manioc cooked seven nights)." Why it was cooked seven nights rather than seven days, and whether seven nights of cooking took away the poison, we don't know and were unable to ask.
We did, however, have a brilliant dinner that included warmed cheese and, for me, a wild duck soup with various plants in it. I also had a tall glass of fruit juice the color of thick Coke, and with a taste I simply have no description of. What an odd experience, to taste a new kind of fruit, like seeing a new color. A simple reminder that there is more to heaven and earth than is dreamed of in our philosophy.
Realizing we needed bread, Matt (who should have been a character on "The Young Ones") hazarded a question to the waitress. Her reaction prompted Andres to speculate that he'd said the wrong word and asked for something absurd, and sure enough: a helpful cook who had overheard explained that when the Portuguese word paõ is pronounced "ponh," it means bread, but when pronounced "paonh," it refers to the male genitalia. Matt had asked her if she had a penis. The cooks had a good laugh.
Later, we gathered in the common room and met two Californian guys who were making their way back from a season of work in Antarctica, and were full of remarkable tales. Also there was an English girl from Hampton named Catherine. She'd arrived in Rio after bicycling across the entire continent, and was also full of remarkable tales. She was raising money for environmental charities at home, and her goal was to use no fossil fuel at all the whole trip. She'd succeeded pretty well, only cheating a few times, and part of her success was that to get from England to Peru she'd yachted.
All this came out a bit reluctantly through being interviewed by Matt and me. Her interaction with Matt was interesting to observe, because of the obvious class issues going on: she was distinctly upper-class, in the fox hunting sort of way — ruddy-complected and down to earth, with the combination of good-natured sturdiness and exquisite manners and speech that built the British Empire (I felt I was meeting Anna Leonowens) — while he was a playfully resentful mid-lower class bloke. The overall tone, though, was of incredible hilarity, and the several of us filled the tile hall with laughter.
About 10 of us (including an Austrian guy named Helmut who shared a room with me — he himself had biked around the entire rim of Africa, and was beginning a 2 year trip through South America) went out along the beach and sat around at one of the hotel restaurants there, then proceeded to a place called Cervantes, which had the reputation of being a central social-and-news-of-the-day hangout for the locals. The house specialty was a delicious, small sausage and pineapple sandwich.
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W E D N E S D A Y , A P R I L 5
My last day on the continent. I decided I'd rather not rush, so I made a choice: Cristo Redentor, the colossal statue of Jesus that stands atop Corcovado. You reach it either by hiking up, which is exhausting and somewhat perilous, or by taking what must be the steepest train on the planet.
I'd been confusing this statue with the Christ of the Andes, the 19th-century figure of Christ that stands on the border of Argentina and Chile, with one hand on a staff and the other hellenistically reaching outward. Cristo Redentor, on the other hand, was built in the 1930s and is unmistakably Art Deco, with ruler-straight drapings and smoothed out lines.
The mark of a good statue is its multivalence: depending on the time of day and where you're standing, it has very different meanings. Do the outreached arms mirror or prefigure the cross? Or do they reach out in an all-loving embrace? Or do they summon all to come and bow? From well out in front, it looks like he's presiding over his splendid creation, the dazzling natural beauty of Brazil; from the side or behind, it's easy to have a "Jerusalem, Jerusalem" moment — he seems to be gazing out on the squalid, flesh-worshipping city and crying for them to repent; standing there on the mountain right at his feet, it's just you and him.
This is why we say that the best artists are theologians also. Take a look.
I came down from the mountaintop and lunched at a great restaurant that served food by the kilo. You just picked it up buffet-style, and they weighed it. I got a huge, colorful plateful of remarkable food, and ate it with pleasure: Brazilian food is as varied as Uruguayan and Argentinean food is monolithic, which is what you'd expect from the land of rainforests; the biodiversity here is perhaps what leads to the palpable ethic of diversity in Brazilian culture.
I couldn't leave Rio without a stroll along the beach at Ipanema. Sure enough, the song got it right.
The few people on the beach (I was constantly reminded that it was fall now, and summer and Carnaval were over) were beautiful and toned specimens of human beauty — both the men and the women. The beach itself was lovely, too, but not too great for swimming. In fact, the name Ipanema refers to the danger of the water here, swirling treacherously around large rocks in the shallows.
I found myself thinking there's a connection between this beach's unsuitability for swimming and its reputation for profiling. The more conventionally fabulous beach at Copacabana, on the other hand, is an even sweep of sand with tall Atlantic waves to provide just enough excitement for body surfers and beach sport enthusiasts.
A final clean-up, and I set out for home, walking down to Avenida Atlantica to catch the bus at 5:15, actually getting one at 6:30, and arriving at the airport at 7:50 for my 8 pm flight.
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What a journey! I must, must, must go back there, and really spend some time. Thanks to all who helped me have such a great trip, especially my brother Paul, who arranged the tickets, and Jeff and Lee, who generously treated me to things I couldn't have afforded; the Estevez family for going above and beyond in making a stranger feel welcome and helping me to find my way around; Paola and Cristian and family for doing likewise in Argentina; and all the new friends I met along the way. An old professor at Baylor said that travel is as important as a PhD, and if he was right, I'll consider myself a pretty educated man.
