Ciao Rio

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Reflections on Rio

I’ve spent my last week in Brazil lunching, beaching and generally pottering around. I’ve been shopping, drunk juices, whiled away long afternoons in pubs eating pastries, lay on the beach doing nothing, drunk juice, negotiated the postal system and generally spent a bit of time observing the cariocas at play. I’ve also drunk a fair bit of juice.

I’m now on my way to Argentina and I’m really, really, really excited. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve had a wonderful time in Brazil. It is a beautiful city, full of very patient and generous people but after a month here, I’m ready to move to the next stop. I’ll be staying in an area of Buenos Aires called Palermo. It’s a very safe (yes Dad, safe)area with a lot of restaurants, cafes and shopping. It’s about a 40 minute bus ride (apparently) from my school, but I figure it’s worth it to be staying insuch a nice area. I might be regretting that decision next week... I start school on Monday and will have classes between 9-1 for two weeks before I decide whether I want to continue or move on to the next place. Hopefully, while I’m here I’ll have a chance to visit Iguaçu falls. I’d also like to have a really expensive luxurious meal, with a big juicy steak while here…I’m a little over fruit and juices (I never thought I’d say that!) and craving some veg and protein…

As I fly out of Rio (literally, I’m sitting on the plane right now) I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on some of my observations of Rio, and its cariocas. But before I get into things, I’d like to take a moment to make three points:


• I am the only one in my row on the plane….why does this ONLY happen on short flights when I don’t want to sleep???
• What’s the point of the hot towel at the beginning of the flight? Wouldn’t it just remove the natural oils from your skin, dehydrating you further???
• Also, it drives me crazy when people are sick on planes and make no effort to cover their mouth when they cough and sneeze. Keep your diseases to yourself people! Anyways, back into it…

S.P.E.E.D

The biggest thing I noticed here, (well, there), is that cariocas move SLOWLY.

The supermarket- a case study

At supermarkets, the customer queues were horrendous. However, the tellers seemed to be in no rush to serve people quickly. Customers too, dawdled up to the front. This drove me CRAZY. We would be lining up for half an hour, and people would get to the front, the teller would put all their groceries through, THEN start to bag everything up, THEN communicate the price (which had been on display the entire bag packing time) to the customer. The customer would just stand there, watching all this unfold and only when everything was complete, and the teller standing there ready to accept payment, would they start to look through their bag for their wallet and card. I was like GET YOUR CARDS OUT READY PEOPLE….LETS MOVE THINGS ALONG! Also, I found myself standing at counters frequently waiting for people to finish their conversations to serve me, not sure if its because I’m a foreigner but I expect its more of this slowly, slowly, behaviour.

Now, I don’t know if I am reading into things too much here…but I also noticed that the elevators I went into didn’t have a ‘close door’ button, only an ‘open door button’. While I’m sure this has absolutely nothing to do with anything, a small part of me wonders if its because Brazilians seem to be so patient to get to where they need to go… and just happy to wait patiently in the lift while the Australian would be impatiently pressing the button in their hurry to get to wherever it was they wanted to be.

Can you believe that this was actually something I think I struggled with the most in Rio. This, was my culture shock. I think that says something about the western in me, the multi –tasking rusher always trying to do things faster and more efficiently, and consequently dying of a stress induced heart attack at an early age…

Willingness to help

Another thing I noticed here, and it might be related to the relaxed speed at which carioca’s seem to move, was that 99%!o(MISSING)f people went out of their way to help me. I had people actually staying behind after their appointments to translate for me. I don’t think that would be common in Australia, but it happened a couple of times here in Rio. When asking for directions, I had a majority of people go out of their way to walk me to where I needed to go, also not something the rushing Australian would bother with I fear. I am obviously over-generalising here and I’m sure that a lot of Australians would be very helpful to foreigners in their country (just look at our compassionate treatment of Refugees for example) but it’s just an observation I noticed and its my blog so I get to say what I want.

English

A comment made to me by a number of fellow travellers, and something I noticed myself, was just how uncommon it
was for people to speak English in Rio. For such a major, cosmopolitan, international city I was really surprised by how few people spoke English. Google translate is a wonderful thing.

- In other news – Ms Cough-a-lot has stopped coughing to my right (dead?) and Sneezy McSneezeter has just started up on my left. Should I bother sending a tissue over, or would that be too rude?? -

Costs

The Brazilian government is one money-making machine and place a lot of taxes on the goods sold in Brazil. Unfortunately the benefits of this don’t seem to flow to the Brazilian people. Politicians in Brazil (as with many countries outside Australia) are a very wealthy percentage of the population – Australian politicians don’t actually make that much money. Taxes put
on goods in Brazil are absolutely astronomical. My MacBook Air, which cost me $1100 back home, costs double here, just from taxes. Its not just electronic items but clothes, skin care and other products are all very expensive and often I found
I was paying the same prices(if not more) I would expected to pay in Australia….

Innovation

Despite the number of very poor people in Brazil, begging was not as common as I would have expected for such a large city. When living in Melbourne, I had people approaching me a few times a day for money but it happened only three times in the
five weeks I was in Brazil. I find this even more surprising given I’m so obviously a tourist (and therefore incorrectly assumed to be cashed up). I noticed a number of very innovative Brazilian businesses though, from people renting out chairs and umbrellas on the beach, to those walking up and down the beach all days hawking drinks, refreshments, sarongs and bikinis to the food carts situated all over the city….

Travelling alone

Something I noticed about travelling alone. I last about 3 days of being on my lonesome before I start to feel really lonely, like really really lonely. When those three days pass, its time to do a tour or go out and meet some people. Although I’ve been speaking with Ben, Caitlin and Mum daily you just can’t beat sitting down and having a good ole face-to-face chin wag. Yesterday, at the beach, I was lying by myself and heard an Australian accent, I looked over and struck up conversation with
the person next to me (it was weird how both Aussies had sat next to each other out of all places to sit along Copacabana beach). The first thing she said was ‘thank god, you speak English, I haven’t had a proper conversation in three days – no one speaks English here’. We then took turns speaking at each other for a good half an hour before we could settle into a
conversation…it took 30minutes of us essentially monologing at each other for us to get our talking fix and actually begin to converse.

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Above all, my favourite times on this trip so far (apart from socialising with the beautiful Andreia, Mimi and Maxine of course) were spent outside the city. Maua, Illa Grande and Paraty were simply stunning places to see and so very worth the traffic jams we had to endure to see them. Ilha Grande filled the calm, quiet, small island fix; Maua gave me the camping in the
mountain fix and of course, the Colonial city of Paraty was just stunning. Brazil truly is a beautiful place, full of beautiful, hardworking, late-eating people.

It’s really dawned on me just how ridiculously easy we have it in Australia. And how lazy and privileged I truly am. If I have one regret, it was not making it to the North of Brazil to the Amazon jungles of Manaus. This is something I hope to achieve in Ecuador/Peru however.

Anyway, I’m sure everyone has had enough of my yapping. I will post further in BA.

xx

L



















































































































































xx

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