Advertisement
Published: April 13th 2006
Missed Photo Opportunity #1
"Welcome to Rio de Janeiro!" You see this kinda thing all the time in Rio. But they're too stealthy to ever be photographed. I'm speaking of course about Volkswagon Beetles.We discovered the
bonde station closed upon our arrival. Bewildering! Later we would learn that the conductors of the trolley to Santa Teresa were on strike. But today, just outside the locked gate, sat we and a small handful of equally bewildered tourists. One woman was crying. She was German, which I could tell both from my innate sense of heritage and from the accent in her weeps. I thought,
It is only a trolley, lady. As it turns out, she and her husband had been robbed at knifepoint, in broad daylight, mere moments earlier and mere meters nearby. That the station was closed, bewildering as I have already discussed it was, only added insult to their injuries. A couple of overweight American empty-nesters were trying to console the Germans, but it didn't seem to be working. "Maybe you could call the police" was the advice they were offering. To seperate myself from the empty overweighters, I admitted to being Canadian, then promptly admitted to lying about that. This maneuver was useful in alienating everybody, which in turn was useful in getting myself the hell out of there.
Because I was hungry! And the only thing that was going
A Feast Fit for a Slave
When in Brasil, make sure to stop into the restaurant next to Atelie Odeon and order yourself up a bucket of beans and feet (ask for Babs and tell her I sent ya). to bring me closer to my overweight American culture was a big ol' plate of Brazil's traditional
feijoada. Available most places only on Saturday, feijoada was historically the leftovers from the masters' dinners as served to slaves, but today it's more commonly known as "just a big assload of food." Criminey, I was not prepared for it - if only because I haven't attended a Super Bowl Party in years. The server basically set down a ten-liter bucket of beans and cow hooves on our table, scooped it onto our plates, and then proceeded to smother our portions with rice, oranges, fries, farofa (small chunks of eggs covered in roasted flour), and hot sauce. He left the remainder of the
bucket de legumes and feet with us, apparently because he thought we were totally freaking out of our minds to eat that whole thing.
I tried. I did. I tried to go out of my mind enough to finish it all, but I'm a pansy. (Photos forthcoming.)
Later, the woman with whom we are staying lectured us about ordering feijoada at the wrong restaurant. I guess the fries were incorract and should have actually been some kind of
Missed Photo Opportunity #2
In case you've never been, this is what it's like to get robbed. You're sitting there on the beach, minding your own business, when suddenly you become an exaggerated line drawing and some cartoons come and rob you. sauteed leaf, which by my calculation would have increased the odds of my finishing every morsel by precisely "not anything at all."
At some point during the day I saw a small shirtless boy standing on a curb, facing the street, pissing into traffic.
The rest of the afternoon was spent at Copacabana Beach. As darkness began to cover
Praia de Copacabana, so did roving bands of thieves and other ne'er-do-wells. From what I understand, they can be expected there at 6pm sharp as reliably as the Timex Expedition they stole from me. In retrospect, perhaps Eden left it in the sand. At any rate, I wasn't getting my act together fast enough and the third troupe to approach us wasn't as clever as the ones before it - they simply brandished a sharpened butter knife and forced me to hand over everything I had on me: Six
reais, which was about three dollars, and my paperback copy of
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For whatever reason, they let me keep the book. It's a really good book, I tried to tell them, but they would have none of it. The whole non-harrowing experience lasted a total of ten seconds, and I felt a newfound kinship with my German brethren whom I'd abandoned earlier in the day. Everybody wins!
We'll try alternate modes of transportation to Santa Teresa later...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.06s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 6; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0236s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb
Sean
non-member comment
THE watch?
I'm going to go ahead and assume this was the same Timex Expedition that I used to say "Oh, I used to have that watch" and you'd say, "Oh... I hate this watch!"