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Around 5.30 am on the 13th of June I woke up, after quite an uncomfortable night on the 20 hours long bus ride between Ilheus in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, just in time to see the sun going up as we were driving over the bridge between Rio de Janeiro and Niterói. It was one of these magic moments when everything around you is quiet, apart from the humming sound from the engine of the bus, and you have the feeling of being the only person experiencing the city taking it’s first few breaths of the new day. Watching the silhouettes of Rio, the mountain peaks, the sea, the buildings, the beaches, and the forests I think I fell in love at once.
For an active person like myself I had of course ended up in paradise. How many places on earth can there be where you can get up, around 7 am in the morning, and head off to do a 100-300 meters long multi-pitch climb on Pão de Acuar or any of the other mountains located no further away than 20 minutes by local bus and afterwards get back home for a shower and a bit off
chilling out on the beach. After lunch you might want to consider a lesson in samba or forró or why not head of to Pedra Bonita to go hang gliding looking down at the city from yet a different perspective. In the evening there’s of course time for capoeira followed by a few ice-cold beers and maybe a bit of dancing of one of the many samba clubs.
This might sound like an ad in a travel magazine, but it’s actually how most of my days in Rio looked like. With a few exceptions. The first one was “the nasty Brazilian winter”. Not only did the temperature the last of my three weeks in Rio drop down to a freezing 20-25 degrees, but at about the same time did clouds appear. Yes, you know these white fluffy things in the sky. No rain or anything but clouds. When I called my climbing partner Jayme to ask him why he didn’t show up in the morning as usual, his told me that the weather had looked “strange” in the morning. Hmmm, in Sweden we do at least call them clouds and they’re actually quite harmless.
The second exception to
my daily routines was of course football. As you might have noticed there’s a world cup in football going on in Germany as we speak. In Brazil it is absolutely impossible to avoid noticing that this championship is going on. I arrived in Rio the very same day that Brazil played its first game in the cup. Heading towards Flamengo, where I was invited to watch the game in the apartment of a friend’s friend, the bus kept getting stuck in the traffic jams created by all the people on their way from work to some churrasco (barbeque), bar or other place where they would watch the game. The days that Brazil played at 4 o’clock in the afternoon most people working in the offices in the centre, left work around 1 o’clock in order to make it home or to wherever they were going to watch the game, safe in time before kick off. And of course, nobody went back after the game. One of the games, was however played at 12 o’clock, and my friend Emily, working at a humans rights NGO in the centre, and the other people in her office had been ordered to come back
after the game. To watch the game they all went to have lunch and a few drinks at a nearby bar. After Brazil had crushed Japan with 4-1 nobody was very motivated to head back to work, least of all the boss, that liberated everyone from work for the rest of the day and the party continued in the bar.
Anyway, on my first day in Rio I wasn’t yet quite aware of the full scale of the impact these football games had on the society. Arriving in Flamengo about 40 minutes before kick off I had huge problems in finding an open shop to by some beers. It’s of course not just the offices that closes during the games, but also all shops, including supermarkets, pharmacies etc. A few weeks later I was heading over to another friend’s house in Ipanema to watch another game. I was however a bit late and the game was just starting when I was walking through the usually lively streets of Ipanema, that this time were completely deserted. Even though the streets were deserted there was no doubt that there was a party going on. Already a few hours before kick off
the noise on the streets was worse than around midnight at new years eve in Sweden, with rockets, fire crackers, hunking horns etc., after every goal Brazil scored the city sort of exploded in a joint chorus of all possible types of noises.
As we all know by now not quite all games had the same lucky end. Since Brazil hasn’t missed a final in the world cup since 1990, I don’t think it really occurred to the Brazilians that they could get eliminated before that. Therefore the first reactions after the loss to France seemed to be just as much surprise as sadness. This just wasn’t according the plans. The people had already been calculating on how they would continue their way towards winning the championship by beating first England and then Germany in the finals. It definitely wasn’t according to my plans either. It was my last night in Rio and the plan was to, after the game, meet up with all my friends and continue the party. When most people after the defeat instead did head back home, I stayed out with a few friends and a whole lot of drunken lunatics that wandered past the
bars on the streets in Lapa, accusing me for being French.
Anyway, to conclude and move on from the crazy world of football I’d like to cite my friend Sergi that made some interesting reflections on the impact that football has in a wider perspective. He said that if we could figure out a way of making all countries win the world cup, the world would probably be a much nicer, more peaceful and in general happier place. I think he’s right. Just look at the Brazilians, famous for the “alegria” (happiness) and “festas” (parties). It really is amazing what football can do to a country. Can you think of any other phenomenon, that make a whole nation stop for two hours. I can’t. I can only imagine what the impact on world politics would be, if the same attention would be given to for example the elections in Israel, student demonstrations in China, land occupation in Brazil or the spread of HIV in southern Africa. By coincidence I was reading a book by Noam Chomsky during my stay in Rio, where one of the more interesting conspiracy theories took up just the relation between sports and world politics.
Since the base for his theories is the US the example he used for his speculations was baseball instead of football. In short he was fascinated by the huge knowledge people demonstrated in baseball and other sports, and the commitment they showed by for example calling radio stations to in detail discuss yesterday’s game and what the coach should have done differently. According to Chomsky, this shows that more or less any person in the US (just like in the rest of the world) has the analytical and intellectual capacity to analyse and come to conclusions regarding a specific event. In his mind world politics are not really more complex than sports, it’s just that people choose to devote their energy and commitment to the later. The reason for this is, according to Chomsky, a very conscious strategy by the US government to lead away the attention of the American people from interfering in world politics to something much more harmless, such as sports. By doing this the US government can in peace and quiet continue with giving support to illegal military interventions, coupes and wars and crimes towards the human rights all over the world, without anyone giving it
much attention. True or not it’s interesting and fascinating to think and reflect upon the enormous power and impact that a field of grass with 22 people chasing a ball can have on the world.
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Johannalo
Johanna Löfvenius
Climbing fotos
And as usual I have added quite a few fotos rfom the climbing in Rio to my Gallery. Check them out!