"Just a quick mishmash of the experience so far. Way intense and rich here. Son Aaron (aka Leo) and girlfriend Vivi have been high;y educated, bi-lingual hosts. They have two apartments side by side. Claire and I have had the run of one. Situated atop a honeycomb of structures that make up this Rio Vermelho neighborhood, on a hill, we look down at the Atlantic ocean and across to the apartments of the uber riche. Down below is a sea of sound, of pulsating life. Always there is sound, and always the unexpected happens in a din. Who needs TV when you can just look out the window? And in those windows blows a nice breeze of the Atlantic, providing a cool breeze to attenuate the tropical heat. We awake in the protection of our little hole, then venture out into the intensity that is urban Brazil. We return, take a shower (several a day), then nap.
Time here is not like home or even North America. It is stretched out longer. This is not Germany, where pedestrians tend to walk fast to get from A to B. This is Brazil in the tropics. More like you go from A, but get to K, with all these letters in between to experience. So much to draw one out from simply getting lost in one's own head and have the days go by like a quick shuffle of cards.
Brazil is SO not-me. OCD-like analness seems to have been bred mostly out of these people (exception: shopping mall things that imply wealth). Thus constitutes an ideal vacation environment. The contrasts here is very high. A slum next to walled unobtanium apartments. Dogs sleeping among trash next to the public urinal - a wall, while the well-dressed stroll by without a thought for the trash, dogs, or urine. Live and let live. And everywhere people hang out, socialize, sometimes with song and dance. My tendency to want to fix things is here washed over by a tsunami of imperfection. It doesn't bother the Brazilians so much, so I take the hint and relax. Manhole cover off? Not to worry. The kids and granny will just step around it after missing the dog turds.
Brazil economically is protectionist. If it's imported it's way expensive. If it's made here despite low labor costs, it's still expensive. The upper level of society here makes money to an extent hard to imagine. The shopping mall we visited was packed full of people greedily paying way too much for every item. That photo of the shoe store only shows the edge of the crowd! I've never seen crowd like that on an ordinary day in a US shopping mall. There is a lot of money flowing around here, yet by proportion there isn't a broad middle class. Brazilians just breed too fast for the availability of resources to catch up. Despite being generally poor, Brazilians are among the most content people I've experienced. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Jesse Jackson could stand on street corners all day ranting and raving, and they'd be ignored as just art of freak show of life. Very hard to make these people go to war over anything.
Back to economics. The photo of fuel prices at a fuel station shows centavos (cents), so move decimal places two places left to convert to their currency, Reis (pronounced hay-ice). One Reis is 0.59 dollars, thus premium gasoline here is R2.82/liter or $1.62/liter. That's about 6 bucks a gallon. Lots of fuel choices here too. I think the ethanol option may be pure ethanol (haven't confirmed that yet), and the gasoline - premium, might not have any ethanol. Buses and many small trucks use diesel, and the taxis get their fuel, compressed natural gas or CNG somewhere other than the typical fuel stations.
Speaking of buses, every time you step on a bus, no matter how far you go, it's R2.50 for the body-jossling bus and R3.00 for air conditioning and a little less abuse. Ride the bus 10 times in a day and you've knocked off R250! The buses are very fast and jerky. If you stand up and don't hold on firmly, you will be tossed to the opposite side without forewarning. The drivers barrel through intersections. Whatever gets in the way is simply injured or dead, and that happens a lot here. Be on guard or die, simple as that. Yet many Brazilians I saw had really no thought for what they turn their backs on. A fellow might be leaning against a car window talking animatedly to a friend with his butt hung way out in the street. A barreling bus will miss his ass by a centimeter, yet he'll not notice. Perhaps this comes with a high breeding rate? Some genetic trigger goes off that says, "There will always be more Brazilians - I'll not worry so much about staying alive."
The vast majority of motorcycles are 125-250cc and whisper quiet (stock exhausts). All are gasoline and 4 strokes. The dominant format is practical: standard or dual sport. I have yet to see one obnoxiously loud Harley, or even a quiet one. Probably because it would cost $125,000. The only cruiser I saw was a VW Beetle converted to a trike.
Leo used to have one of these 250s, until too many personal near-death experiences and observing many motorcyclists turned road pizza. Last night as we were walking back from a night on the city, we saw one down, flat on his back, unconscious and staring up. The ambulance had turn the wrong way and headed away from the accident scene. At least he was in one piece. I want to stay and rubber neck, but Vivi didn't want to hand around because her brother had recently gotten attacked by a delivery truck, after it had cut off and he took off his helmet to bash the mirror off.
I did see sport bikes (crotch rockets). Very few however as they cost ten times more than in the US. You have to have a serious case of hyper testosterone to get one of these. Sometimes groups of them will go out at night to race around on the emptier streets.
More economics: The running shoes I buy for $65 and repeatedly wear out sell for $500 here! A run-of-mill boom box we can buy at a garage sale for $25? How about $1,000 at the shopping mall here. Brazilians get the most out of them though. They'll run the volume up to where the speakers move around. As a result of the high prices, goods afforded by the masses, from faucets to fans tend to be rather cheaply built. Our apartment front door would pass for a shower door in the US. A thin aluminum and single-pan glass thing you can hear everything through.
I have been amazed about the buildings here. Masonry and concrete, but very lightly constructed. They have no seismic history and thus not much in the way of codes. A big earthquake here would would result in fatalities rates worse than Port au Prince Haiti. They build the same way for the 1st story as the 5th. Spindly columns of concrete with four 10mm bars, thin cast concrete floors (look at the thickness of the stairs in the photo), then back fill with 4X6X10" hollow fire brick. The poor neighborhoods are a honeycomb structure of this stuff, like a giant buzzing hive. They might begin with one story with spindly 10mm steel bar steel reinforcement sticking out for many years in anticipation of the second story. If one of the kids trips and gets skewered... well, that's just life. Decades later it'll be 4 stories, with access, walkways, balconies, stairways, and doors as somewhat an afterthought. The roof might get finished off with a covering, or it might remain open, with no edge. Fall off and that's all she wrote. It's scary and entirely wonderful be visiting a society free from safety phobias and tort lawyers. Dogs wander everywhere, yet I have yet to see any of them end up as road pizza. The dumb ones here aren't protected from their owners or laws. They just get taken out of the gene pool.
There is a prosthetics and orthotics shop just down the hill from the apartment. I plan to bumble through a visit with Leo the translator. There is an O&P market here. Is superior technology could be brought in at what is to them a reasonable price, the volume of business could be substantial.
This is a very religious place. Lots of various forms of evangelical Christanity, some quite in your face (like the sign on the path up to the apartment you see in the photo). I see many churches,and lots of missions. So far I have not seen a dynamic Catholicism, though it was long established (since 1501). Catholic churches everywhere, so I suspect I'll see more than just tourists about. Jehova's Witnesses have a strong presence here. African paganism is very active. People dress in white, sacrifice chickens, beat drums, and party at all hours with fireworks to honor various gods. Right now the sea god is being honored. Last night late in religious zeal someone lit exploding rockets that shot up from the house below and blew up right outside our bedroom window. We almost soiled the bed.
I've been starved for good beer here. Everything is piss lager that is even weaker than in the US, amazingly. You can drink several beers and nothing happens. Refreshing when hot and good for business. Probably a good thing as the generally skinny folk here with little beer bellies, should they have something more powerful, would be engaged in even more mayhem.
We aim to survive this and be all the richer in experiences.
Well that's all my brain can handle at present.
-Chris"
1 comment:
Wow, Leo, you definitely come by your writing honestly and genetically :)
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