Rio - Anthea's List

Anthea | April 7, 2023, 2:49 a.m. | Brazil

I'm falling very far behind on writing down impressions and places and things Jordi and I have done while traveling, so here's a quick list of things from my memory:

• Swimming was one of my favorite things to do after studying till late in rio, because the beaches at Arpoadora were well lit even late at night, and people swam sometime till 8, 9, 10 at night. The waves were also a lot of fun, and during carnival we had the most magical time running in and throwing ourselves on these crazy waves that would then drive you up the shore, and there were a bunch of others doing the same thing, all getting knocked around or into each other. One wave literally hit me so hard in the legs that it flipped me, but as often as you'd get kind of beat up or drug on the sand the foam would sort of carry you and completely cushion the fall. We saw a sea turtle swimming nearby one night, and I liked to float on my back at night and you could see the city lights on the mountain nearby and it was particularly beautiful.
• Night runs down the sidewalk from Leblon to the edge of Copacabana at Arpoadora, the big rock at the end where we like to swim at night
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• Sugarloaf and watching this pack of young white tufted marmosets get the zoomies and wrestle in a big pile for literally like 30 minutes

• Carnival -- both the blocos in the neighborhoods (big street parties with food, music, people dressed up, different themes going on, but at all hours of the day)
• bat watching and beach pidgeons
• finding skirts for carnival and a gold top
• street churos and yerba mate in a can versus bear matcha in a bottle
• The sambadrome and the really wild beautiful floats we saw -- truly crazy, one of the wildest things I think I've seen in terms of scale and splendor. Also the music and dancing was obviously amazing. 

• This beautiful graveyard full of air plants and flowery trees and it went on for mile up until almost into the jungle hill area with houses
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• Seleron and the seleron steps
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• Really great to get to meet both Alejandro and Martha, Jordi's cousin through his brother who is a doctor that drove in the Dakar Rally and can fly planes (but not land them) and and her wonderful son who is studying mechatronics (and who can eat a horse!) .
• Also got to see Jordi's brother who visited for carnival
• Unfortunately got my first and only bout of covid so far, and jordi and I had to spend almost two weeks split between two halves of a small apartment quarantined so he wouldn't get sick. There was a potted plant through the window of where I studied every day that was my only friend when I was feeling sorry for myself and very cooped up inside. 
• I also had the bad luck of getting food poisoning pretty severely while in Rio, we never really figured out what from. I went to bed feeling a little bit crappy, then ended up getting up because I felt off in the middle of the night and immediately passing out and smacking my face -- after Jordi found me we did a quick trip to the nearby urgent care because we weren't immediately sure what was wrong until I started puking in the ER about 30 minutes later -- then they gave me some random stuff in an IV and we left, so all in all a bit of a waste of a trip, but we did some blood work and all was eventually fine. 
• Parque Lage is a nearby (about an hour there and back by foot because the metro didn't go straight there) public park with hiking trails and one that goes up to the cristo statue over Rio which we did one day (hot and sweaty, but fun to hike in what feels like a jungle so close in to the city all the way up a hilly/mountain like that. It also just has beautiful plants and greenery everywhere, lots of jack fruit (I think?) all over the ground and monkeys that come down to eat it out of the trees as well. 
• Some food I ate a lot or really liked: zona sul pizza and this one brand of yogurt I really liked, acai and feijoada possibly my favorite, and grilled palm hearts, globos and cheap fruit and coconut while it lasted. We had some great gumbo one day, and even the canned feijoada was pretty good. There was also this very expensive ice cream shop near martha's called momo ice cream that had nutella ice cream that was pretty damn good. After getting sick I didn't do much food experimenting, but there was lots fo great food out there. 
• We eventually came to understand that Portuguese in Portugal pronounces the t's in certain words (leche vs leite), but that in Rio it becomes a "ch" (this is via Alejandro) and that even regionally in nearby areas of Brazil that will completely change. 
• There were also a lot of great artists and music and political figures that I was briefly introduced to and wish I'd had more time and energy to explore and read about, but with classes and contracting work I've not had a ton of mental energy to give. But just to name a few favorites for future reference:
  • There was this one guy who did illustrations over the colonial history books about the treatment of indigenous folks and nature in Brazil: "In Letter to the Old World, Jaider Esbell proposes a kind of counter-narrative walk through what the western and Eurocentric world has defined as art in recent centuries. Aquired by Esbell in a used bookstore in northeastern Brazil, a book with 400 pages of European texts and paintings is the support for the letter in which the artist inserted drawings and texts in Portuguese that denounce centuries of devastating colonization in the Americas and their persistence today."

• Maria Quiteria and Maria Felipa  
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• "Shroud Tear" a super awesome animation about colonialism and the "owl Suindara ... the cry of the bird, which sounds like a cloth being torn, is an omen of death" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12593800/)
• Clara Nunes samba music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-38_POSU1M
• Silvana Mendes collage works
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• These really incredible black mermaids that I think have African and indigenous roots and were in all kinds of different artwork (incredibly cool) and also makes me want to read a bunch of the folklore and stories

Mulambo Maré - “O Mar”