Dancing on the Sand

Something ends in your life every day.

2007-09-16T18:19:00.000-07:00

You finish your sandwich, leave your marriage, say goodbye at the end of a MSN Messenger conversation, move house, fall asleep, win a tennis match, bury a pet, pack your bag and board a plane to another country.
Last Saturday I left Brazil after close to six months of setting up a new life in Rio de Janeiro. I still remember the anxiety that would invade me if I tried to buy a pencil in a shop when I arrived there in March or when a Brazilian made a joke with me and laughed and I didn’t understand, but at a point that was almost as imperceptible to me as becoming accustomed to the jungle heat and Biscoito Globo* I began forming questions, exclamations and sentences in Portuguese. I now dream in Portuguese more than I think I did when I was there, probably in an unconscious effort to hold onto what I learnt.
It was more profound than any other new start I’ve had before because it required me to step outside the social rules, customs, manners and idiosyncrasies that were ingrained and naturalised and feel around for a birth in a new language.
The hardest part about being back is that I can’t walk to the newspaper shack and have a chat in Portuguese. You experience a death of a part of yourself when the opportunities to express it no longer exist, and you wonder – like when you finish a sandwich when you’ve been so hungry – if you took the time to taste it.
There have been strange moments when I’ve noticed how deeply Portuguese has penetrated me. The first restaurant I walked into in London I greeted the waiter with ‘Oi, tudo bem?’, I woke up the other day to two women gossiping outside and initially panicked that I didn’t recognise the language, when I want to be affectionate I’m more comfortable doing so in Portuguese and sometimes, in the flow of conversation, I use the word that springs to mind rather than stopping to remember what it is in English. Some of my family and friends have recognised the loss that I’ve felt and so have asked me to speak to them in Portuguese, despite not having a clue what I’m on about.
It’s at points when I’ve done this that I’ve understood part of what I miss – things in England seem easier and calmer. I can read the billboards, understand the lyrics to all the songs on the radio, comprehend what everyone is saying if they are talking over and across one another and so, when English is my soul-mate, I wonder why I ever felt nervous or inhibited here.
What I fear most is the spirit of Rio disappearing ghost-like over the horizon behind me and so I’ve begun to lead a double-life and use the internet to keep me binded to the person I found there, until I return.
In my last week I met with a group of Brazilians set to come to England in October, also as a result of sponsorship by Rotary International, to advise them to pack umbrellas and be prepared to shake hands on meeting rather than kiss. Rotary runs an array of cultural immersion, education and voluntary programmes as a way to foster and develop links between different people of different cultures and places in the hope that the exchange of information in friendship and work will promote international understanding and create a global awareness that will make for a better future and world.
When I gave a talk at one of Rio’s Rotary clubs before I left the members were keen to know what I’d learnt about their country and what I’d say about it in the talks I have to give home here.
I’ve lived in two other places outside of Britain for long stretches that I can compare it to. The first was when I was a volunteer teacher in a Belizean primary school for three months where, despite Spanish being predominantly spoken, lessons were given in English (as a result of the country only ceasing to be a colony in 1981). The second was studying in California for a year. In both I experienced culture shocks but didn’t need to learn a new idiom.
It was by doing this in Brazil that I understood the culture on a deeper level because I was able, as much as is possible, to perceive how Brazilians think. I realised the words one language has that another doesn’t, for example, the word accountability doesn’t exist in Portuguese; I saw how Cariocans use a word that has the same meaning in English more frequently than we do, for example, a Cariocan will often say: “Ele é uma pessoa marvilhoso.” (He’s a marvellous person) or (to quote Jorge Ben Jor) “Seus olhos azuis, com malicia” (Your blue eyes with the ability to vitiate); but it was even more obvious in how Cariocans structure a phrase completely differently, which it would both defeat the object and not do either language any justice to attempt to explicate through translation. Some things end in one place and don’t find a start in another.
Learning the language meant that journalistically I didn’t just have access to the tourist and PR plots in the culture garden. I could talk to my hairdresser about living in Rocinha and how the drug lords that run it know where you live, what time you go to work, who you’re sleeping with and what you had for dinner last night. I could talk to the homeless street children in Lapa and find out there is still fear of Death Squad killings so they sleep in shifts with someone constantly on guard, and I could properly understand Ana’s frustration, as an average Cariocan, at how hard it is to earn a good wage and have the opportunity to travel abroad; she is 41 and didn’t realise that films were shown on planes.
Talking of Ana brings me back to endings and how I feel about them now I’ve been granted honorary Cariocan status by my Cariocan friends. One of the first things I was taught is that Cariocas don’t like to say ‘adeus’ or ‘goodbye’ because it’s too final. Instead they say ‘a gente se vê’: ‘we’ll see each other’. This made it even sadder to say farewell to one of my friends on a metro platform. I was taking the train one way, he the other. I said “I feel sad to say goodbye”, he replied “Mas, a gente pode se vê” (But, we can still see each other).
This morning I drove over the Tamar Bridge with my car brimming with old junk I was set to flog at the Stonehouse Creek car boot sale. When I emerged out of the Saltash tunnel I was engulfed in grey mist and could see a semicircle of sun blazing like a white cut-out in a wet, grey bit of sugar paper. By the time I was halfway across the bridge it had risen and burst a waterfall of light over everything. I never expected to see the most beautiful sunrise I've ever seen while crossing a bridge I've crossed a million times, but it reminded me of how something starts in your life everyday too.
Look out for my new blog 'Culture Shock' which should arrive at http://www.thisisplymouth.co.uk/ in the next couple of weeks.

* http://www.biscoitoglobo.com.br/ These are sold on the beach in two flavours – sweet and salty. When I arrived I thought they were airy and tasteless. After endless banter from Ana that I wasn’t a true Carioca if I didn’t like them I was the one on the beach calling the biscoito guy over.

One of the first things that fell out of my wardrobe when I got back was a Brazilian flag.

2007-09-16T18:10:00.000-07:00

Other than the intense saudades (longing/missing) I felt for Brazil it got me thinking about what one of my teachers said about it.
The green banner with a yellow diamond enclosing a blue star-studded sky (the 27 white stars represent each state in the country and the Federal District and are arranged in the pattern of the night-sky over Rio de Janeiro on November 15, 1889 – the date the republic was proclaimed) is very distinctive. Emblazoned across the sky are the words ‘Ordem e Progresso’, ‘Order and Progress’.
You find the flag everywhere in Rio – on clothes, pasted on walls, hanging in windows, flying proudly on the beach. My teacher said: “It’s really ironic that our flag says order and progress across it when we don’t have either.”
One of the biggest gripes Cariocans have about their country is the insufficient education system and this is where, in the opinion of many Brazilians, some of the worst order and least progress can be found.
In an article for the news analysis magazine Veja journalist Monica Weinberg compared the recent histories of Brazil and Korea and explored the reasons behind the glaring disparity in educational prowess and economic strength. She explains how in 1960 both countries were underdeveloped and had illiteracy rates of 35 per cent but by 2005 the illiteracy rate in Korea was only two per cent and 82 per cent of young people were attending university, while in Brazil illiteracy remained at 13 per cent. Ms Weinberg says brain power has translated to economic power and now Korea’s economy is fierce and capable of trebling its size each decade, leaving Brazil lost in the background.
What’s more, Korea achieved this after suffering a civil war that left one million people dead and an economy in tatters. It has its downsides, however, evident in one of the case studies Ms Weinberg cites of a 14-year-old who made himself ill by studying almost non-stop between 7am and midnight in order to maintain his position at the top of the class. Figures show 80 per cent of Koreans of school age spend 10 hours in front of the blackboard, while Brazilians spend five.
When I observed a lesson with one of my language professors, Willmann Costa, who is also a municipal professor of Literature and Portuguese for Brazilians, I met Cristina Vieira da Rosa, the director of Colégio Estadual Álvaro Alvim a state school in Miguel Pereira, 120km from the centre of Rio. The school has 900 students, aged six to 18, and 150 adult learners who want qualifications to get back into work. The school was nestled in the tops of green mountains in a pleasant, but not rich, town.
Brazilians said to me throughout my six months that their education system was disorganized, patchy and unjust. They said basic primary and secondary education in public schools is ridiculously under funded and so those who can afford to go to the private schools get the better education which then provides a ticket for the limited places in public universities (considered the best and also free). The remainder are then left with having to pay to go to a private university if they want to continue their education, but this is all if their parents encourage them to go to school in the first place when many families need an extra pair of hands to help bring in the doe.
Senhora da Rosa, aged 50, told me: “Some need to work to help their families but the Government gives benefits to keep them in school and families are also more educated about the need to teach their children so they have better opportunities in the future.”
But she added that the system of evaluation of student progress is insufficient and can easily be cheated.
“Teachers are pretending to teach and students are pretending to learn,” she said.
“A teacher gets paid 560 Reais per month (£147) that they can’t afford to live on. As a result we have teachers working four different jobs and travelling to different ends of the state to earn a living. This means they don’t have time to build a relationship with the students and properly analyse, oversee and ensure their progress.”
She added that more value needs to be put in the system of education and more money invested by the Government as an incentive for teachers but also to provide educational materials to keep the students engaged.
There are some people who are born teachers and emanate patience and the want to share information. Willmann is one of them; but, the class he teaches in Colégio Estadual Álvaro Alvim only get to see him once a week, he’s got other work to hold down and lives miles away. It took us three hours to arrive there from the centre of Rio for Will to give a lesson of about an hour-and-a-half.
As we made our way upstairs to his clean, airy and seemingly well-equipped classroom (minus the interactive white board) Willmann was greeted in the corridor by a student eager to carry his briefcase and tell him how much he’s loved. Brazilian culture is very affectionate and Brazilians are very outspoken. At first I wasn’t sure he was going to be able to get the rabble of 16/17-year-olds under control but soon the 11 girls and one boy were focused on answering his questions about semantics.
This willingness to be in school on a hot Friday afternoon is not widespread, however. You’ll find lots of children and teenagers on the beach of an afternoon but also some of the schools are so overcrowded that morning and afternoon shifts operate.
Willmann said: “Teachers need to be stimulated, work less hours and have more time to stay and teach and ask more of the student.”
He echoed that the structure of evaluation needs to be overhauled but also added that systems like bus transport need to be in place to make sure all students are able to get to school.
He was critical of President Lula’s reformation of the benefits system for families who send their kids to school that was created by former President Fernando Enrique Cardoso. He said Lula’s reforms mean students don’t have to register their attendance at school to receive the money anymore and so the scheme has lost part of its ability to oblige parents to send their kids to school.
I observed another of my professors running a seminar for about thirty students on a Friday night at Centro Universitário da Cidade (a private university) and was overwhelmed by the non-stop participation of the students in contrast to my experience at Cardiff University where only certain students were forthcoming. Dani explained that because the seminar was on linguistics it was vital her students participate, to see their subject in action, but added that most of them were mature students paying for a chance to get into the workplace and keen to learn.
In the classes I saw it didn’t seem to me that there was a lack of willingness to learn nor of enthusiasm on the part of the teachers but what was evident was that that potential isn’t being developed.
Ahead of the Government, it seems, football teams have even recognised the power of education and have built academies where they teach their players essential subjects and get them through their Vestibular, which is the end of secondary school exam that is needed to get into university. Brazilian footballers are the butt of many jokes in Rio for their inability to string coherent sentences together or conjugate verbs correctly. Teams have recognised the role models footballers are to youngsters and that they represent the country in the world so have invested in providing schools where they can be educated.
Ms Weinberg said the following lessons, that could be learnt from Korea, may be the stepping stones to that order and progress the country so proudly proclaims it has:

Concentrate investment in teaching younger children at public schools not give all the cash to the universities;
Provide the best students with scholarships and extra-curricular opportunities;
Organise resources to give better salaries to professors;
Attract money from businesses into the universities and produce research to assess the needs of the job market;
Study more; Brazilians dedicate five hours a day to study, half the time Koreans do;
Encourage parents to become involved in the education of their children.

The seven deadly sins. Let those four words hang darkly in the air for a moment...

2007-08-28T18:05:00.000-07:00

The Devil really does get all the best lines.
Perhaps you don’t agree, but I got to thinking about lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride when I found myself being preached to by a pack of Evangelicists on the train last Friday.
I had accompanied a friend, who is researching how the production of language amongst teenagers in Brazil is related to socio-economic class, to Miguel Pereira which is 120km north of the centre of Rio. A two-hour train ride cost about two Reais (50p) and so Cariocans are right when they say it’s generally the poorer people who use the service.
We passed through turnstiles at Central Station, the same that features in the Academy-Award nominated film Central do Brasil, to reach the platforms and board. The flimsy sash windows in the carriage were open to let in the 35 degree air and we sat on a plastic bench facing windows and a plastic bench on the opposite side. The train rattled passed favelas, abandoned stadiums that were built for the Pan-American Games, through suburbs and mountain valleys. I lost half my water composition in the heat. We were surrounded by a myriad of different skin colours, body types and ages and Will told me those who commute by train tend to work in the service industry – many as maids in the Zona Sul apartments and houses. Passengers were nodding off, listening to music, staring into space, drinking beer – just like your average journey by British Rail. It wasn’t until the return journey that it got really interesting.
There is a law against selling goods on trains but vendors board with travel bags and once the train’s in motion reveal their treasures. They pace through the carriages, like they pace along the beach, selling nuts, Biscoito Globo (a puffy type of crisp Ana forces me to eat ‘otherwise I’m not a Carioca’), drinks, chocolates, sweets, crafts… It was Friday night and people were heading for the bright lights. A pierced and tattooed man with a mohawk had juggling sticks and poi in his backpack, mothers held children on their knees, couples kissed, men talked about football. Then suddenly, a herd of men clutching bibles and pubescent boys wearing black suits and bright yellow or purple shirts boarded. They brought with them a flock of women and children and chanting began.
I’m of the God is Dead school of thought and have also had a couple of strange experiences with religious fanatics. One time, on a plane between Denver and Ohio, after I had not slept for more than 24 hours and had drunk unhealthy amounts of Red Bull to keep me awake on the long drive to the airport, a minister’s wife tried to convince me that I would die on my next plane to London if I didn’t mend my sinful ways (including not finding homosexuality a problem) and find God. Another time (I was about 13), I had to escape out of the toilet window of a church hall after my friend tried to persuade me to fall on the floor and spout an odd language like everyone else was doing.
The Evangelicists weren’t long inside the carriage before a greying guy began to shout about God’s light and how everyone has good inside them and a path laid out ahead. I would have lost interest if the rest of the carriage hadn’t begun cheering on the slightly hysterical and bulbous-eyed man. Some were his loyal followers and they rose triumphantly to their feet, held their arms out like wings and said things like ‘I am God’. Will and I exchanged looks. He’s already been threatened after publishing a piece of fiction about a paedophilic Catholic priest.
Other supporters had been on the train before the troop boarded and got sucked into the rituals. One middle-aged woman stood up, closed her eyes in what looked like desperation and sang along to a hymn. Another man closed his eyes in what looked like ecstasy and concentrated on clapping. A young kid looked up bemused. Leaflets saying God loves us all and will forgive all our sins (if we confess them) were passed out and one of the teenagers in suits whispered something in the ears of the children which led them to stand together and chant, some looked happy, some looked brainwashed, others bored. Some women screamed.
Will said: “I think more poor people in Brazil believe in God.”
One of the leaders, who was holding a flat cap, said something about paradise after this life and “he is thinking of you today, and now; open your heart, he is inside your heart”, a woman played the tambourine. A nine, 11- and 13-year-old clustered around Will and I and we found out they were on their way to a weekend religious retreat. I was invited to their church and bought a jewellery box off the mother of the girl sat next to me. When we arrived at Central Station the 13-year-old girl told me even if I didn’t believe in God he was protecting me, the 11-year-old boy shook my hand and said it was nice to meet me, the nine-year-old girl wrapped her arms around me and kissed me on the cheeks.
Brazil is overtly religious; in Rio de Janeiro a gigantic statue of Christ looms over us all and Catholicism is the dominant doctrine throughout the country.
My Cariocan girlfriends and I discussed pregnancy the other day. Abortion is illegal in Brazil – unless in the case of rape or the mother’s life being in danger, but any woman or girl finding herself in this position faces the delay of a judicial process.
In 1998 anti-abortionists attempted to stop a girl of 10 having an abortion after she’d been systematically raped, the courts ruled she could abort.
One of my girlfriends asked what I would do if I found myself pregnant and I responded, without hesitation, that I would have an early abortion because I don’t have the conditions to support a new life. Without denying the mental and physical implications, this is a fairly average response from a woman of my age who lives in a country where abortion is legal. Not only can we have an operation, we can take a pill up to 63 days into the gestation period to induce an abortion.
This was heresy to the ears of my three friends who referred to me – as they often do – as ‘crazy’. One said: “But don’t you know that it’s a sin?”
Pope Benedict XVI said that when he came here for four days in May, along with a few other things that made me want to check his pulse.
Commentators say he was sent to Brazil to reignite a dwindling enthusiasm for Catholicism in the country which has more Roman Catholics than any other in the world (measured at about 126million in 2000, about 74 per cent of the population compared to 89 per cent in 1980). Catholics are divided on the issue of abortion and the maelstrom of controversy around the subject reveals some of the complications and contradictions of the country.
For some Brazilians I’ve spoken to abortion is unacceptable in any way, shape or form; others say while they wouldn’t do it themselves they think religion and politics should be separated and people given the right to choose; others say if it isn’t legalised then there needs to be a concerted effort to educate the public about contraception, another thing the Pope doesn’t like. In 2005 Brazilian rock singer Daniela Mercury was banished from taking part in The Vatican Christmas concert because she had supported a campaign to distribute condoms to help battle AIDS. Brazil is continually complemented on its excellent record for combating AIDS. Earlier this year President Lula broke a patent by American pharmaceutical companies that were charging excessive prices for AIDS drugs. It was partly seen as a goal scored against the commercial exploitation of developing countries.
On abortion, Lula has separated the public from the private. He has said he opposes it personally but thinks the state needs to stand up and be responsible for public health. Current figures from the World Health Organisation estimate that illegal abortions numbered more than one million in Brazil last year alone. At the moment, a woman faces a three-year prison sentence if she’s convicted of having an illegal abortion. Hospital admissions as a result of butcher-job abortions are significant and in turn represent a cost in the street. Basic medical insurance costs about 200 Reais per month and your average girl living in a favela is unlikely to earn even the average salary, which is between 350-80 Reais. Marry this with how prostitution is legal, the education system holey and the culture still patriarchal.
In the 2006 race for senator of Rio the Catholic church sent text messages telling people not to vote for Jandira Feghali because she supported the decriminalisation of abortion, whether for this or not she didn’t win.
Lula is the second youngest of seven children, from a peasant family, and has eight other half-brothers and sisters. He had to drop out of school at 12 to help his family make a living and has also fathered a daughter out of wedlock. This year he got modern and launched a 26million Reais plan to subsidise birth control pills so a month’s supply could cost just 20 cents (five pence), meaning poorer families get the same right as the wealthy to have the number of children they want. This kind of policy-making doesn’t go down well with the Catholic church.
In the build up to the Pope’s arrival the country’s health minister spoke out about the importance of debating the issue of abortion. The response from a spokesman for the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops was: “The job is to be minister of health, not of death.” Cardinal Geraldo Majella Agnelo, the Brazilian church’s senior cleric, said: “This is enticing everyone into promiscuity. This is not respect for life or real love it’s like turning man into an animal.” When the Pope addressed the young people of Brazil in May he told them we are in an age of hedonism dogged with pre-marital sex, drug use, corruption, violence, the temptations of wealth and power.
When Brazil was colonised in 1500 Catholicism was declared the official religion, this didn’t end until it became a Republic in 1889. This meant that Pajelança, the religion of the Brazilian Indians which is still practised in the Amazon, Pará, Piaui and Maranhão and is structured around a worship of the natural world, was prohibited. Then, when slaves were shipped over from Africa they brought their own religion called Candomblé. Again this was prohibited but in order to protect and sustain it it was disguised it in Catholicism. Followers associated their divinities – Orixás – with Catholic saints, so on the outside it looked acceptable but from within there was resistance. This is still evident today. The faith says that each person is born with a male and a female orixá that rule character and enter the human body during rituals. The difference between saints and orixás is that orixás have defects as well as virtues and what finds prominence depends entirely on you. A focus on numerology and chakras are also a part of Candomblé which is widely practised in Bahia, the north-east and the south-east of Brazil generally and in Rio. One of my professors, Danielle Torres (who says she’s agnostic), has been to a number of rituals and said she has seen people take on the bodily forms associated with orixás and, with their eyes closed, approach those they rule (their sons and daughters). She said she’s been told details about her life by leaders of the rituals (Pai de Santos) that she had never met before and she believes couldn’t have known certain things. Those who believe make offerings to the different orixás and at the water’s edge, on the beach, you can often find white flowers and mirrors that have been left as gifts to the goddess of the sea.
Umbanda is the other Afro-Brazilian religion practised in the country and has a strong presence in neighbourhoods in the north of Rio. It is quintessentially Brazilian because it is an amalgamation of different influences; it draws on Catholicism, Pajelança and Candomblé to create a new doctrine. Latest research says that these three faiths are practised by 0.3 per cent of the population.
As women have gained more autonomy in Brazil the Catholic stance on celibacy, contraception and abortion has become anachronistic for many and they’ve looked elsewhere. As the number of those who call themselves Catholic has fallen the number of those who define themselves as ‘without religion’ (agnostic or atheist) has grown from 1.9 per cent to 7.4 per cent (1980-2000) and Evangelism (Protestants who came with the European immigration and Pentecostals who came from the US) has soared, from 6.6 per cent of the population to 15.4 per cent between the same dates. The Pentecostals who talk about being reborn in God have had particular success and it was those I had the pleasure of sharing my train journey with.
Danielle said that from what she’s witnessed Evangelism is stronger in the poorer communities. She said: “Evangelists have gained ground because of the charismatic pastors who are taught how to win people around with their words. I was revolted when I went to a service and saw a pastor ask members of the congregation to pay 20 Reais for their place in heaven. I wasn’t going to stay and listen to that rubbish. There is a lot of brain-washing that preys on people without the education to resist it.”
The lure of charisma has also entered Catholism and Brazil currently has three popular priests that head up the Charismatic Catholic movement and hold televised masses, appear in films and sing. The movement has an emphasis on self-development, much like Espiritismo, which focuses on paying for your sins on Earth and evolving into a better human being. Espiritismo currently accounts for about 1.3 per cent of the population.
Self-help and spiritualist literature doesn’t hide in the corner of bookshops here, it’s boldly in the window displays to catch the eyes of those searching for answers. This cultural passion perhaps explains why Paulo Coelho is considered such a Brazilian hero. I read The Alchemist a few years ago and its moralism had the same affect on me as taking a cold shower, but he did used to be a rebel and now is revered by many. He has been cited as saying ‘all religions are correct’ and says he’s Catholic but his ‘religion has nothing to do with his spirituality’. There is no doubting that he is an international success and he writes a column every week in a magazine that comes with O Globo. One of my favourite examples was the story he told about a friend of his waiting in the queue at a supermarket. This is what happened in Coelho’s fable: His friend was behind an irate customer who was shouting at the stunned cashier, who was wearing a yellow smiley face on her uniform that said ‘in training’, for being stupid and slow. Rather than sinking into the same agitation Coelho’s friend took the time to have a look around, reflect on God and admire the wonder of people going about their daily business. Next thing you know it’s his friend’s turn and the trainee has been relieved by a much more competent cashier. Don’t you just love happy, non-sinful endings?

In case you’re wondering where the other 1.8 per cent or so of the population went they are accounted for by a number of different ‘other religions’ that include Buddism, Judaism, Paganism, Islam, Jehovah Witnesses…

‘Estou aonde nunca fui’ translates to: ‘I am nowhere I have never been before.’

2007-08-16T04:08:00.000-07:00

Simple things please simple minds but I continue to be enraptured by how the meaning of eight words in English can be captured by four Portuguese words.
I took last week off my blog for a specific reason – I wanted to throw my English head in the bin and see how I coped thinking, writing and talking only in Portuguese. I chose last week because I had a wedding to go to in a rural area about an hour-and-a-half away, with about 150 Brazilians from all over the country, but I also consciously cut myself off from my English-speaking friends and resisted checking the BBC headlines online. Strange things have started happening as a result of this experiment...
Yesterday I tried to talk to a new English girl in the corridor at school and stumbled into meaningless spluttering using hybrid words to answer simple questions about my weekend and coming out with silly phrases like ‘it was muito interessante’ and ‘ah sério, eu stayed in Palenque quando I was em Mexico também... I mean... as well...
She was forgiving but I realised that, at the moment, small talk comes more naturally in Portuguese. When I arrived mid-March with a dictionary of about 10 words in my head I thought this was going to be an impossibility. With Jenny I was attempting to translate what I was thinking in Portuguese into English, the trouble was that my manner of speaking and personality in Portuguese is not the same as my manner of speaking and personality in English, and so at the border in my brain where Portuguese and English meet I was encountering a person I didn’t recognise and so couldn’t be.
Before the ‘stop with this hippy nonsense’ or ‘sort yourself out, Hannah’ comments start flying in let me explain a bit more, if I can find the English words to do so...
Ana came out with a hysterical example of how the significance and implications of the use of a word in one language can be contrary in another and create completely the wrong interpretation. She was seeing an Austrian guy once and was shocked when he started to say ‘oh baby, baby’ in bed. She said she thought he had some horrid paedophilic tendency. I quickly explained to her that in English ‘baby’ is often used as a term of endearment between lovers and didn’t represent latent perversions.
There are other times when words in the two languages are so similar that you think you can get away with using it but don’t realise you are saying something else entirely. For example, I described someone’s taste as ‘esquisito’ the other day, which actually means weird.
The verb ficar (to stay) is used in allsorts of contexts here. You ask where a hotel stays, rather than is located; you stay with a lover, rather than sleep with; you stayed impressed, rather than were left impressed. As a result of this I am forming sentences in English like: ‘Where stays that hotel you stayed impressed by?’
The crux of this is that finally I feel like I have escaped the cell of the English language and am running free on a new battlefield. There is a paradox though because at the same time as feeling included, by being able to understand everything that’s being said and respond, I’m simultaneously excluded because my accent marks me as a foreigner. I’m at once inside and outside the culture, belonging and not.
This doesn’t just happen verbally it’s also already begun with body language. I bumped into my American friend and her visting aunt and uncle in Parque do Flamengo the other day. I immediately threw my arms around one of them and kissed them enthusiastically, on the cheeks. The older couple looked a bit taken aback as if to say: ‘hang on a minute, we’re old and you’re young the rules say we don’t interact like this when we meet’. By the time I got to greeting the second person a hand was already held out to shake, a handy blocking technique. If you see me when I get back and I kiss you on both cheeks and give you a massive hug please don’t be offended or take it the wrong way, I’ll be suffering culture shock.
So anyway, what I’m really trying to say is what I realised when I went to the Museu de Arte Moderna the other day. There is currently an exhibition there which is the first of its kind to be devoted to Tropicália as a Brazilian cultural movement. Tropicália was alive between 1967 and 1972 and found expression in art, music, literature, architecture, theatre, film and fashion. It attempted to explore how art and culture shape national identity in a multicultural and developing society, in a country with a rich heritage but in the midst of political turmoil and a repressive dictatorship. The movement adopted Antropofagia, which is a term created by Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade. It’s Postmodern in its leanings and means cultural cannibalism, where artists take influences from all societies and regurgitate them to create something new.
Some of its stars include Hélio Oiticica, Os Mutantes and Brazil’s current Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil (who co-wrote Panis et Circenses (Latin for Bread and Circuses) which I’ve attached to this blog (find Marisa Monte’s version on the stereo to the left) and is about an artist screaming to wake a stagnant and disanimated public up to the fact they are oppressed and there are other possibilites of being to be discovered). Ironically Gil was arrested by the military Government in 1968 for ‘anti-government activity’. He was appointed by President Lula, to his current role, in 2003 and is considered a Brazilian treasure. Tropicália still has resonance among a new generation of national and international artists.
I got particularly distracted by one part of the exhibtion featuring work by Lygia Clark. She made about six different hats that you put on and cover your face, ears and nose. Each is a different colour, has a different smell and contains different materials in the ear and eye pieces that create an array of sound and visual distortions. Wearing one I thought I was walking on a cloud, another like I was just about to jump in the sea, another that I was digging a pit in the middle of the jungle and eating curry. As well as being fun it made obvious the idea that you experience the world through the tools you are given to understand it and the environment you are living in.
One of my Cariocan girlfriends is currently seeing a guy who was married to, and had children with, his cousin. One day his young son was working out the family tree and exclaimed ‘Dad, I’m your cousin.’ This is bizarre and alien to me but I’ve talked to quite a few Brazilians now who tell me it isn’t unusual for cousins to get it on, and to quite a few who have got it on with their cousins. I guess we’re all just one big human family... and your taboos depend on which language your speaking. I’m not trying to suggest all Brazilians are shagging their cousins, but I think it is interesting that it is not a veiled subject.
There was another exhibition at MAM that was a kind of nirvana for me. It was called Instalação Grande Sentão: Veredas (Installation Great Hinterland: Trails) and compiled of words by Brazilian writers. Prose was hanging from the ceiling on sheets of canvas that you could pull down and read, words were drawn on walls in red tread, reflected in water, scrawled across bricks and windows and at points you had to squint and peer through a small metal circle to work out what was written. At the end of this journey through letters, of which you could pick a cornucopia of different routes, was a João Guimarães Rosa quote printed on a wall.
Rosa is a kind of James Joyce of Brazilian literature and considered one of Brazil’s most important twentieth century novelists. He was born in Minas Gerais and died in Rio in 1967 at the age of 57. He was a doctor and diplomat in Europe and Latin America, but get this bit: He spoke Portuguese, German, French, English, Spanish, Italian, Esperanto and Russian; could read Swedish, Dutch, Latin and Greek and also studied Hungarian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Lithuanian, Polish, Tupi, Japanese, Czech, Finnish and Danish.
This is what he said in Portuguese:
“A linguagem e a vida são uma coisa só. Quem não fizer do idioma o espelho de sua personalidade não vive; e como a vida é uma corrente contínua, a linguagem também deve evoluir constantemente. Isto significa que como escritor devo me prestar contas de cada palavra e considerar cada palavra o tempo necessário até ela ser novamente vida. O idioma é a única porta para o infinito, mas infelizmente está oculto sob montanha de cinzas.”
And this is what I think he said in English:
“Language and life are the same and only thing. A person who doesn’t make language the mirror of his or her personality does not live: and since life is a continuous current language must also evolve constantly. Like a writer, a person must account for each word and consider each word for the time necessary for it to come alive. Language is the only door to the infinite, but unfortunately it is hidden under a mountain of ashes.”
If anyone has a different translation I would welcome it being posted. We are in the slippery field of semantics and if we use words there is a danger they will be misinterpreted.

For fun: Some phrases in Portuguese that are different in English but have the same meaning:
Só não deixa a cabeça em casa (She/he leaves everything but her/his head at home) – You’d forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on.
Me achei numa saia justa (I found myself in tight skirt) – I was left in a tight spot
Pão é pão e queijo é queijo (Bread is bread and cheese is cheese) – A spade’s a spade
Estar com dor-de-cotovelo (To be with pain in the elbows) – To be down in the dumps/gutted. The use of elbows comes from the image of a person with their elbows on the table holding their face in their hands.
Cara-de-pau (a face of wood) – a straight face or a poker face.
Ela adora bater papo (She adores hitting the skin under the chin) – She likes a good chin-wag
Farinha do mesmo saco (Rice from the same bag) – Two peas in a pod

Hannah is away this week...

2007-08-08T09:07:00.001-07:00

She'll be back on Thursday, August 16th.

Let me take you on a journey to a baile funk, without guns.

2007-08-03T08:18:00.000-07:00

Don’t expect to see any tourists and don’t expect to like all you’ll see.
Baile funks (funk parties) are the night-time heartbeats of favelas in Rio. They’re raunchy-sticky-loud and they ain’t got nothing to hide. This is partly because the organisers pay the police to stay away.
Renalto is our friend willing to take us. He’s a 29-year-old, heavy-set black Brazilian twice my height. I’ve seen him on the prowl and he’s a fully-qualified player but I feel safe with him, he pats me on the head often and calls me ‘little one’. He told me I should probably wear a hat so I leave my slinky dresses in the wardrobe, remove my jewellery, pull on short trousers, my trusty cowboy boots and an innocuous top, zip up my jacket wishing it wasn’t Paul Smith, tie up my hair and put a scarf on my head.
I’m ready for action when I meet my Californian mate Antonia, 29, at Flamengo metro stop. She’s got a hoody on; the Brazilian wedge heels and scarlet toenails are her Freudian slip.
“So Renalto just called and said this one is without guns,” Antonia said.
“How does he know? Does it say it on the flyers?”
“He said that they only have guns when they are outside but because it’s raining no one wants to be outside so he’s gonna take us to an official place.”
It’s Saturday night and it’s been raining hard all day. The streets are sopping.
“How far away is it?
“He said we have to catch a bus and it’s far.”
“I brought extra money in case we get stranded and need to find a way back.”
Antonia and I swing by a friend’s birthday party in Laranjeiras and leave before we’re chucked out by the restaurant staff for bringing down the tone. Our attire doesn’t go well with the sushi platters, lush red décor, long tables, polished dance floor and stage, where someone’s singing something soulful and jazzy.
It’s approaching 11pm and that’s the time we’ve marked to meet Renalto in Lapa, in front of the salsa club by The Arches. We wait for a bus outside the cinema at Largo do Machado (the frontier between Flamengo, Larenjeiras and Catete) but a Kombi van arrives first. These are white VW Beetle vans that are the most convenient way of transporting people up the hills into the favelas. They cost two reais (25p) a ride, like a bus.
We clamber over people and seats to the back before realising our driver is more than a few beans short of a meal. His eyes suggest blocked memories and a little too much Valium. He pulls close to every stop and plays a recorded message that finishes with a witch’s cackle: “Lapa, Lapa… Ahahahaha! Depois Rodoviária. Lapa, Lapa. Não precisa vai? Não precisa vai? Ahahahahaha!”
Antonia and I look at each other stumped for words, the strangeness has begun…
The Kombi continues through Catete and Glória to the Lapa approach road where prostitutes lean on bonnets, reapply make up and plump their fake breasts. I can’t work out who is male, female, something inbetween, John or pimp. The homeless watch business rock up, guard their dirty blankets and share a bottle of wine out in plastic cups. We jump out in Lapa and share a beer while we wait in the rain for Renalto.
He arrives late, like Cariocas like to, despite having insisted that we, under no circumstances, could be late. We meet his spunky friend Cristiane who makes him hold things for her and gives him a hard time for being tardy. He smiles with something more innocent than cheek, puts an arm round her and says he got caught up in the Pan-American Games volley ball final.
The usual waves of samba, salsa, forró and reggatone spill out of the bars and onto the streets of Lapa. The live sounds break over and swirl round Brazilian students clutching beer cans, older Brazilians dodging the buses and yellow taxis on their way to the classy joints, gringos looking lost and excited and young kids selling chewing gum.
“Have you been out to suburbia yet?” Renalto asks me.
Suburbia here isn’t Wisteria Lane.
“Not yet…”
“Ah, you’re gonna know it tonight. That’s the thing, every foreigner that comes here only knows Zona Sul and that isn’t Rio.”
“Do I need a gun?” I’m thinking it might be a good way to ward off unwanted suitors.
“There’s not gonna be any guns, but I can take you to one with guns next weekend if you want.”
“I’ll think about it…”
Baile Funks are shrouded in mythology, a lot of which there is no proof for. This rhetoric includes problems with girls getting pregnant and not being able to identify the father (a result of short skirts and six hours of gyrating), open cocaine use and men dancing with pistols in hand and firing shots into the air when they approve of a track.
More than 500 happen across Rio every week and in the favelas and poorer parts of the city they are a way of life. They go on into the dawn any day of the week and are more than likely guarded by heavily-armed traffickers. Many say each favela has their own home-grown star of the scene. Some tracks list the names of favelas and drug lords dead and alive, others are incitements for rival gangs to fight and others sound like scripts to Gonzo porn films.
The music is a mix of Miami bass, rap, hip hop and samba beats and MCs, male and female, talk explicitly about sex, drugs and violence. Lots of the recordings sound shoddy because they aren’t set down in recording studios. It’s against the law to promote crime in songs and so a form called Proibidão (highly forbidden) has developed that’s sold on burnt CDs in the chaotic markets.
The four of us pick up a bus from the quiet end of Lapa. The driver has a black sarong hanging behind his head blocking our view of him. It’s close to midnight and all the passengers are quiet and reflective or sleeping. There is a noticeable absence of whites and morenos. We travel for an hour on a two reais fare. Pay-by-the-hour motels with names like ‘Stop Time’ and ‘Motel L’Amour’ line the main roads. All of them have at least part of their neon signs burnt out and garage entrances slowly descend after cars that have whipped in. At these drive-ins all you sexual deviants can pick up a room key without having to come face-to-face with any of the motel staff. Many advertise special promotions on roadside billboards, clearly the place to take a date you wanna impress.
We arrive at Campo Grande, after more than an hour on the bus ride through some dangerous favelas, and rattle to a halt in front of a club which has it’s name – Bigee Fieldee – scrawled above the entrance in lime green neon italics. It’s not quite the makeshift favela venue I was expecting. Campo Grande is considered poor but not a favela.
There are gates for ‘gentlemen’ and gates for ‘ladies’ and entrance costs five reais (not much more than a pound). I get frisked by a woman who looks like she’d like to get me in the corner. Once we’re all inside we meet Renalto’s cousin Ricardo and friends. I’m greeted with two kisses by all and told to feel at home.
Inside the warehouse-like hanger baile funk is blasting from speakers stacked high either side of the stage (I’ve attached a sample for you of a mainstream funk tune you may already have heard, find ´Gasolonia on the stereo to the left) and everyone’s dancing from their groins. Women wear tight jeans with sequins embroidering the pockets, tops hug breasts and most of the men have got an earring or some other bling. I watch the start of a train/spooning dance and am marvelling at how low they can go in unison when I decide I’ll take off my Dartmoor rambling gear and get into the groove. An outfit is on stage and MCs are saying things like ‘I’ll kiss you on the other mouth’ and ‘hands up if you’ve got a shaved…’ This is high culture at its best.
Renalto’s first priority is to get some tickets for Caipirinhas and beers at a booth and find the bar. The Caipirinha bar (that makes it sounds so much more glamorous than it was) is on the other side of the massive venue and we twist our way through the sweaty crowd which has its eyes fixed on the stage. Antonia and I are the only gringas in the vicinity but no one really gives a toss. This isn’t like the street in Lapa where some Brazilians go to pick up a new tourist each week. By now, Antonia and I are more than little bit sick of the attempts at what we’ve dubbed ‘the Lapa rape kiss’, which is a major problem come ‘witching hour’.
This baile funk isn’t for a tourist, it’s a natural part of the social life in this part of the city and it has a zero tolerance policy against boringness. If you don’t know how to dance funkee all you’ll get here is sympathy.
The bar doesn’t have cachaça (the essential ingredient for Caipirinha) which is a blasphemy. Only vodka, which I’ll grin and bear, and cognac which Antonia is prepared to stomach with a bit of lime and sugar. To ease our visible disappointment at the drink selection the barmaid gives us double helpings. Bang go the English inhibitions.
Back inside I look up at the second floor balcony that skirts the entire building. There’s more room up there and a bit of posturing. It’s the VIP section, as much as paying an extra five reais for a wristband makes you a VIP.
I stay on the ground floor which is flooded with rain and melted ice from the buckets of bulk-buy cans of beer groups of friends are dancing around. It’s now I meet Patrícia, a 43-year-old dyed blonde who’s here with her sweet-faced and friendly daughter Fernanda, 18, and 21-year-old son Bruno who’s wearing a beanie and seems to have marked me. According to mum we would make a lovely couple and I should ‘take advantage of the situation’…
Cristiane is already getting down with Ricardo, they’re friends who kiss according to Renalto. Renalto has already got his tongue down the throat of Fernanda, in front of her mum and it’s starting to feel like a high school disco. I let myself get distracted by the onstage performances.
A camp presenter wearing leather trousers, a tight white top, spangly belt and a head band to keep his long tight curls off his face is strutting about directing the action. Men and women are jumping up on stage to take part in a funkee dance contest. The men rip off their tops, swagger into a complicated limbo movement, then grind against one another and the floor while the presenter runs around pulling down the backs of trousers.
The women, of all shapes and sizes, concentrate hard on pouting, keeping the booty high in the air, the hands on knees and the centre of gravity low. They’re wearing something smaller than a mini skirt and no underwear from where I’m standing, though I’m sure it must’ve been there.
Antonia comments to Renalto that it’s the kind of thing you get paid to do in a booth but he replies they just love the competition. Antonia and I continue to dance in an upright position until the mum and daughter will have no more of it and give us lessons to stop us showing them up. This ain’t an archetypal club dance; don’t go to a baile funk unless you’re in shape. There’s no time to relax with this art form and your thighs will hurt like hell the day after. I’ve demonstrated some of my newfound skills to my teachers this week and raised a few eyebrows. I don’t think I’ll be cracking it out at dinner parties when I get home. The secret is to lose your self consciousness, then it’s nothing but liberating.
So it’s not long before Renalto is trying to hit on both Antonia and I with the same chat up lines and the inability to understand that he’s our friend and we also don’t want to kiss someone we’ve witnessed kissing ten other girls in the time we’ve known him. I can’t help but admire his cheek. He’s neither trying to prove or hide anything and is simply out for what he can get.
By this point the mum’s plan for Bruno and me to live happily ever after isn’t coming to fruition and she turns and says something to Antonia which prompts Antonia to turn to me wide-eyed and say: “The mum wants to kiss me.”
This has come after she’s said: “If you want to go to the toilet let me know,” which we both read as a metaphor.
In fact, the mum said she’s off for a wander round to find someone to ‘kiss on the mouth’ and wants to take Antonia with her. Before they take off, mum asks me if I want to stay with Bruno. When I reply no she says something like: “Yeah, he ain’t much good is he we’ll go and find you someone else.”
Match-make mum actually turns out to be a bit of a secret weapon for me keeping guys at bay with a cold stare. The scene is predominantly black male so Antonia and I are surprised by the overwhelming homoerotic energy and their keenness to dance with one another rather than the girls.
The staged is graced by a few DJs, more funk MCs and their dancers and a double-act woman in PVC and man in tight pants who each pull audience members on stage to dance. There are lazers and strobes, I only witness security chucking out a few aggressive drunk people and we dance lasciviously in this hedonistic heaven. By 5am we end up the novelty gringas drinking ‘cho-cho-to’ cocktails and joking about with the other bar dwellers before everyone reunites, is kicked out onto the street and confronted by the international language of post-club desire: a line of burger stalls. While people eat and shelter under the parapets I join some of the locals in a crab dance on the street. This YouTube moment delights all the Brazilians who get their camera phones out.
Eventually, our bodies just can’t take anymore fun and Marcelo, a friend we’ve made during the night, offers to take us back to our homes in the centre of the city. We’re waved off with cries from match-make mum that we have to come back for lunch on a Sunday and that we can all stay in her home.
Somehow, despite being by a long way the smallest, I end up in the front seat with the other four, Renalto, Antonia, Ricardo and Cristiane, laid over one another in the back.
Renalto hasn’t yet desisted from trying to kiss Antonia, despite the fact he’s close to dropping off, and Ricardo subtlety rubs her feet. The night is beautifully topped off, as we sweep astrally back home and the familiar Rio landmarks wake up in the dawn sun, by Cristiane throwing up in a plastic bag. Somethings are the same the world over.

Here I am, a white outsider, living in a city I’ve never been to before for six months.

2007-07-26T16:31:00.000-07:00

I’m a privileged person talking about a culture I can’t hope to understand fully. I have opportunities that others don’t get access to. I could write the satire myself now, but that would feel like giving up.
At my school of Brazilian teachers and international students, on the Rio streets and with the Brazilian family that has opened its home to me there is a constant hunger to learn about our cultural and individual stories.
The differences in experiences are extreme and they are subtle, they exist and they don’t, they are unjust and they are fightable, they are bound by power relations and they are liberating in their contrast. We are different because we’ve haven’t had the same lives but we are the same because we want to learn.
Brazil is a vital mixture of influences that includes indigenous, African, Portuguese, Italian, German, Japanese, Hispanic and Arabic. Rio, as its cultural capital, is a reflection of this and everyone talks to everyone. This is one of the reasons I love it.
Unlike when I lived in Berkeley – the self-professed leftist heartland of America – people in Rio pride themselves on not segregating visibly along racial lines. In the States, students at UC Berkeley overwhelmingly socialise within their own races so you get sects of Afro-Americans, Asian-Americans, Italian-Americans… let’s not get into fraternities and sororities…
On Saturday night I was talking to two Cariocan friends who had just come from the same dance class. They both have the same openness, similar manners, one is black and a lifeguard and one is moreno and works in an internet cafe. They both live in the same neighbourhood – Botofogo – but there is a glaring gulf in their experiences. The black man lives in a favela. For them this is considered normal and there was no outspoken anger about the inequality, it exists but it’s not really talked about.
Brazil is a country where it is a national attribute to celebrate its rich miscegenation. Some say that as a legacy of military dictatorship everyone is Brazilian first and whichever race second. In fact, during military rule the discussion of race was prohibited and in 1970 the question of race was eliminated from the census.
On Sunday, Brazilian medal winners in the Pan American Games gathered on the stage at the Praça das Medalhas on Copacabana beach and the crowd filled the air with the football chant “I am Brazilian, with a lot of pride and a lot of love”.
Brazil’s census takers have before asked people to describe their skin colour and Brazilians have responded with 134 different terms, they include ‘coffee with milk’, ‘white with pink highlights’ and ‘toasted’...
This interracial melting pot is obvious to the eye and I often ask Brazilians what race they consider themselves, what race they consider the people around them and if they think racism is an issue here. The answers are as varied as the heritages.
Take Willmann Costa, one of my teachers; his mother is white, his father of mixed black and indigenous heritage. Others say he’s a moreno, with a kind of ‘he’s alright ‘cos he just slips into that category’ look; he says he’s ‘quase-negro’ (almost black) and that his grandmother is a racist and ostracises him because he looks ‘more black’ than his siblings. He says he loves seeing mixed raced couples walking hand in hand and their offspring are “gorgeous”.
In the 2000 census 30 per cent of Brazilian households were recorded as headed by couples of different backgrounds. In any one household it is not unusual to find an array of different skin colours. Another of my teachers is black and married to a white man, she says her daughter looks white but calls herself black.
It turns out that there is a massive difficulty in deciding who the hell is what.
Take identical twins Alex and Alan Teixeira da Cunha who recently both applied to the University of Brasilia under its quota system, which requires a percentile of freshman entrants according to race. Alan was accepted as black, Alex rejected as not black. The university determines race on the basis of photographs of the candidates. Confused yet?
Sérgio Danilo Pena, of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, took a genetic sample of 300 Brazilians and found that 90 per cent of the paternal genes were of European origin and 60 per cent of the maternal genes were Amerindian and African. Those colonisers didn’t bring their wives with them.
The result, Sérgio says, is: “The colour, in this country, has little to do with the origin of the person. Close to two-thirds of the sample group of people in colour white were not of European origin.”
Ideal then, so maybe Brazil is this ‘racial democracy’ that was established as an idea here in the early twentieth century?
Outside Africa Brazil has the largest black population in the world, estimated at about 90million of the 190million population; but why, in Rio, does it seem that most non-whites are worse off economically, socially and educationally than most whites?
I don’t see any black people on the TV, a part from the maids in the telenovelas (soaps)…
I don’t see any black people on the advertising billboards…
Whenever I’ve been romantically involved with a black guy I’ve noticed more of an effort by non-black men to attract me away than if I was with ‘one of them’…
If I ride my bike from the rich areas of Jardim Botânico and Leblon towards Centro and the north of the city there is a gradual darkening of skin colour…
I was told by the director of my school not to go on the buses at night because they are dangerous and when I do go on them I find that it’s mostly black people who are the other passengers.
Today Ana’s sister Denise arrived in town from the north of Brazil, which is blacker than Rio and than the south of the country, where there is the influence of German immigrants. Those two, me and another Brazilian called Ana (Ana2 for ease), who lives with us during the week and does beauty treatments in peoples’ homes, talked about race.
Ana2 says she’s white if she hasn’t got a suntan and that she wouldn’t want to date a black man. She says that many of the criminals in Rio are black and so she has fear, but also says that turning to crime might be a result of lack of access to other opportunities. She is from a farm in Minas Gerais and adds that her father told her as a child that if she bought a black boyfriend home she would be kicked out.
Ana1 says she’s moreno, her sister Denise says the family has a strong black heritage and so they could be considered black. Ana1 says: “No, I’m moreno.”
Ana1 and Ana2 say a mixed race friend of ours from Florida is white, I disagree and both say “what because of her hair?” (which is an afro).
Ana1 then says: “My skin is moreno but if you look at my hair I could be considered black.”
Both Anas linked being black to being poor and argued that it’s not about racism but about class. This is the case with some of my teachers too and many say it is much harder for black people to get jobs.
That’s true according to Government agency the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics which has found white Brazilians earn 53 per cent more than black Brazilians working in the same field.
And that blacks are more likely to be arrested and to be convicted of crimes and half as likely as whites to have running water or a working toilet in their homes.
Another of my teachers, Vera Bradford, has told me how the daughter of her black maid is really bright but can only get a job at MacDonalds. The overwhelming majority of people working in the service industry in Rio are black or women.
Another teacher, Val Bettini, is moreno according to some people, black according to others. She says she has lost count of the amount of times the ‘racist police force’ has stopped her while she’s driving and held a gun to her head. She says she detests the abuse of power that she perceives but doesn’t do or say anything in case it results in a bullet in her head.
Critics say the media frame deaths at the hands of police (of which there are many) as clashes with drug traffickers. April 2005 figures I got from the International Relations Centre show the majority of those in prison are black men and that one in three black men don’t make it past 19.
Val lives near a favela in the north of the city and says the people inside the favelas don’t talk to the police or to the media partly because of the perceived racism. She says a favela operates its own system of justice and there are areas where no crimes are allowed to happen. She adds that if a woman is being beaten by her husband she can go to the favela boss and the husband will be kicked out and not welcome back.
Brazil was the last country in the western hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888 and some say it’s a country still feeling the effects of this history.
After the end of slavery society shunned blacks, employers and the Government sponsored European immigration and laws kept blacks in low-wage positions. As a result black communities built on the Quilombros, which were communities escaped slaves had set up, and had to find a way to survive outside the system. The favelas in Rio are partly a result of this.
The UN Human Development Index which measures health, income and other factors says white Brazilians are ranked 44th on the scale and blacks and pardos 105th.
Something tells me the question of class is a handy way to wash our hands of our ancestors’ responsibility for creating inequalities.
President Lula, the former metal worker and trade unionist who has somehow become very rich, has taken some steps towards racial equality. In 2003 he created the Department for the Promotion of Racial Equality and appointed the first black Supreme Court judge, he also appointed four black ministers and has encouraged the teaching of Afro-Brazilian history in primary schools.
In 1988 the constitution was rewritten to criminalize racism but people say they don’t see many people punished for race crime. A recent famous case was of a black man who sued a white woman who ordered him to use the other elevator in a building in Copacabana ‘because he was black’. Most apartment blocks here have two elevators, one at the back for the maids and work staff. He won his case and the woman was ordered to do community service.
At the moment two affirmative action bills are being debated which would open the way for more blacks into educational institutes and Government payrolls. One bill would make it law to admit 40 per cent black freshman in the public universities each year. This is already operating in some universities and has created a storm of controversy.
Dario, I don’t know if he considers himself moreno or white, is set to study medicine in August and is angry that black people with worse grades get in at the expense of white people with good grades.
There is also a situation where black people get no credit for getting high grades and white people are declaring themselves black on the application forms.
Jose Carlos Miranda, the coordinator of Brazil's Black Socialist Movement, says passing the bills could aggravate racism.
But Sen Paulo Paim, author of one of the affirmative action bills, said: “The Brazilian elite say this is not a racist country, but if you look at what ever social indicator you’ll say exclusion is endemic.
“We want to open up to more Brazilians the legitimate spaces they deserve.”
Denise, Ana’s sister, says to move the culture the Government needs to invest more in the education of every person from a very young age.
As a white English woman I sometimes I get the stereotypes too. They are small-fry in comparison but still annoying and generally that I must be rich and conservative. Only one of those is desirable to me, but not if it’s at the expense of someone else.

Caveat: The names in this blog have been changed to protect the identities of those involved.

2007-07-18T07:44:00.000-07:00

Last week my mate Minnie, who is currently in Asia, wrote me an email and this is a part of it:

“A couple of days ago I did one of the most liberating things I have done in a long time. Jose went off rock climbing and I walked to one of the huge local waterfalls and ended up talking to this fantastic, big-hearted and amazing Israeli girl and her Mum and their Spanish friend...
“Well, we all went to this small collection of waterfalls and pools and we all took our clothes off, very naturally, all totally naked but as if the whole thing was an everyday occurrence, we all four of us sat around chatting and it felt fantastic! ...With these strangers!
“We need to all do more things like this.”

Before you get too excited, let me tell you that I didn’t rush to the nearest rua and tear of my clothes screaming: ‘I’m free, I’m free, I’m free’ nor have I opened a commune in Santa Teresa, where I’m certain it’d go down a treat…
But, after I’d recovered from falling off my chair with laughter, I was left only with a sense of how vital and unconstrained Minnie is. So, I resolved to change how I do things and go at the world with a new vigour.
My first resolution was of a feminist nature.
There have been many occasions now when Ana and I have been out and about and she has said to me: “Look! Look! For the love of God in the sky, look at him Hannah!” And I’ve been, first, too red-faced shy to make eye contact and, second, too accustomed to dodging the gaze. This makes me a dissident in Rio where strangers constantly strike up conversations, swap mobile numbers and hang out like old friends.
I like to show respect for any culture that I’m living in and so now, instead of keeping my head down at the supermarket, I take my time over the papayas and have a good look round.
Oh, the power of subjectivity… what a world of possibility I have been missing out on. I don’t know what I’m gonna do when I get back to England and can’t find a date in the pasta aisle at Morrisons…
However, for any other single girl in her 20s looking to come to Rio this happy news comes with a warning. Cariocan men, no matter how ugly, how old, or how much they are dribbling, think if a woman so much as glances at them it is an invite to come over and talk.
This might be bearable if they had something intelligent to say other than ‘you’re beautiful and I want to be with you’ or if they didn’t try to hide their wedding ring or instantly plunge into a sympathy-seeking diatribe about how ‘they aren’t happy with their wife’ or ‘only married because of the kids’. Spare me, please.
The sexism runs deep in Brazil. It’s disapproved of and thought strange if women leave their parents home before getting married and I’ve met very few independent, career-orientated and powerful females.
It doesn’t do to generalise but in a city where walking along the beach can feel like running the gauntlet it says something about the esteem and respect for women. Cariocan girlfriends continually tell me how tired they are of the hissing, leery looks and intimate suggestions and I am adept at blocking out my daily barrage…
But then one day you and your mate are walking along chatting and some random pulls at your arm and says: “What’s the matter you two tasties? Oooh, I could, yummie. Haven’t come in a while?”
Then you have to drop your bags, square up, stare the seedy reprobate straight in the eyes and say: “Why do you think you can treat me like I don’t matter? I am a person not a slave to your will or an object in existence for your aesthetic pleasure or visual judgement. Stop being an animal, stop using words that suggest I’m something you can eat and maybe then we can be friends.”
Before I lose all my Cariocan male friends, I should add that the vast majority of these sexists are able to hide behind the veil of anonymity and modern Cariocan men don’t think women are naturally less smart or dress in nice clothes purely for them, though I do know a few that say it’s ok for guys to use the word ‘mate/dude’ in their chat but it’s ugly if a girl uses it…
Rio de Janeiro is the host of the 15th Pan-American Games and the opening ceremony was on Friday night. Cariocas brimmed with pride for their ‘Cidade Marvilhosa’, fireworks turned the night sky red above the Maracana stadium, hundreds of musicians filled the air with samba, the spectacle was one of the most inspiring and astonishing things I have ever seen, and I also learnt some new things about Brazilians on mass.
President Lula was booed (because of the endless corruption scandals associated with his Government), so much so that he didn’t end up addressing the public, the Cuban team was given massive cheers, the Venezuelans a mixed reaction and the Americans booed grandly.
The pièce de résistance was a carefully choreographed dance of thousands which enacted a scene in a rainforest and then a scene at the beach, with dancers as the sea, the swell, tropical plants and people playing on the sand. There were trampoline Victoria Regias (giant water lilies), enormous butterflies and swans, a crocodile the size of a cruise liner and a snake the size of a train. All this was set to a Games theme tune that repeats the words ‘share this energy’ and is appearing all over the city at the moment. Rio is bursting with the force of human dream, ability, physical power and the race for medals.
One of my teachers watched the opening on the TV and told me, with the innate cynicism of a Carioca about things organised by the Government, how she was surprised to see an expression of the city that was so organised and dazzling.
Then she added how pleased she was not to see women performing with their breasts and bums hanging out, like they do during carnival and the way the world often sees them.
So, while on one side of the world it’s been liberating for my English friend to lose her clothes, on this side it’s liberating for Brazilian women to keep them on.

7/7/07: Copacabana Beach, Brazil: somewhere between 8 and 9pm local time.

2007-07-11T09:44:00.001-07:00

The sun has melted behind the open arms of Cristo Redentor, which has just been crowned one of The New Seven Wonders of the World. The sky is alive with stars, boats twinkle close to the shore and 400,000 people are dancing on the sand.

One powerful black woman is on stage doing what is vital and natural to her - singing. It is the gravely soulful voice of Macy Gray; her dress is stamped with political messages and she is talking about sexual revolution.

Now there is a new revolution in the air, and tonight the cause is triumphant. It flies like a rebel flag in cities around the world and celebrates a common humanity.

This is Live Earth Rio de Janeiro and we are here to answer the call.

People are wearing recycled-cotton bandanas - on their heads, tied round their necks or arms - and they say: The climate has got hotter and is angry with you. Use public transport, energy-efficient light bulbs and recycled paper.

My bag is stuffed with biodegradable plastic bags that say 'the world needs you'. Volunteers are handing them out and signing everyone up for news lists to receive information on how to go green.

It has been a glorious winter's day which someone tells me peaked at 33 degrees, one of the hottest on record. Yet another symptom of climate crisis.

Kids are playing football, workers are collecting cans for recycling, teenagers are spinning poi, people are cooling off in the ocean and everyone is talking about the environment. No longer is this the preserve of the hippie or the chattering class who can afford organic produce, and no longer can it be ignored.

There is a noble sense of purpose, there are real objectives and there are things we know we can change if we want to stop the destruction of the planet.

Every international and Brazilian star that comes on stage has eco-friendly advice that gets cheered, but the crowd is left silent when we are shown footage of melting ice caps, suffering polar bears and a projection of a future Great Barrier Reef - dead.

Technical hitches abound but that's small fry; people are dying in floods and in heat waves and we're losing species and natural wonders that are beautiful and essential for our survival.

There is no excuse for not seeing the elephant in the room.

On July 5, a judge overturned a preliminary order issued by another judge that had suspended the Rio show, amid concerns that the police were overstretched because of clashes with drug traffickers and final preparations for the Pan American Games, which start on the 13^th.

Last year a mass riot broke out at a free Rolling Stones concert held at the same venue, but Live Earth Rio brought a joint imperative instead of violence.

There is a long, long way to go in a country where many are too preoccupied with how to put food on the table to be able to think about how to separate their rubbish, but a new spirit stirred this weekend and now the momentum needs to be maintained.

President Lula is internationally outspoken about the need use biofuels for both a sustainable future and to lessen the gap between rich and poor nations, but I can't find recycling bins in the street.

The concert made me heady - like my first love - for living with more purity and now I can't handle the guilt if I've done something wasteful. I measure the water I boil for coffee in the morning by the cupful I will drink, I turn the tap off while I'm brushing my teeth, I'm typing this in the darkness of my bedroom, no adaptors or chargers are plugged into the wall. I use candles instead of lights, wear something lighter rather than turn on the fan, walk or ride a bike. Tomorrow I'll shower as quickly as possible, take old plastic bags to the supermarket and buy a recycled paper pad.

Live Earth Rio joined New York in bringing the curtain down on the 24-hours of music and now it's time for Governments to make it even easier for us to reduce our environmental footprints. There are electorates across the globe who want to see them capture the energy we produce during a gym work out, legislate and propagate.

Organisers Save Our Selves (SOS) say Live Earth marks the beginning of a multi-year campaign, led by the Alliance for Climate Protection and other international NGOS, to move individuals, corporations and governments to take action to solve global warming.

They admit that by using renewable energy sources and offsetting the travel by artists they probably only used 20-25 per cent less energy than the average concert, but at least it's a start.

It is necessary to be cynical in the media, but I wonder what we could power if we harnessed all the energy wasted on vacuous words about whether or not Madonna knows enough about global warming to have a platform to talk about it.

Let's face it, we all need to learn more.

Live Earth Rio

2007-07-09T05:31:00.000-07:00

Preparations for Live Earth Rio

2007-07-06T05:29:00.000-07:00

It’s hard being a journalist in Brazil sometimes.

2007-07-06T05:07:00.000-07:00

You know, like when you have to walk the whole banana-shaped, 4km stretch of Copacabana beach to bring some photos to your beloved readers.
But I got through it, for you, and if my web editor and me got it right somewhere on this page is a picture album with shots of the preparations for Rio de Janeiro’s Live Earth concert.
There has been a kerfuffle today with some saying it may be cancelled ‘for security reasons’ but the consenus remains that this will happen, because it has to.
I was begining to feel fully left out of the English summer festival vibe after all the emails from my friends about how legendary Glastonbury was and how they couldn’t wait for Bestival and thought that new eco-friendly Two Thousand Trees Festival sounded ace, twothousandtreesfestival.co.uk.
I am easily excited by big music events and so am very pleased Rio has Live Earth to shout about. And waking up and hearing that call is just what it’s all about.
It’s an infectious idea that on Saturday in Rio, in London, in New York, in Johannesburg, in Shanghai, in Tokyo, in Sydney, in Hamburg and in living rooms the world over people will be brought together for one monumental cause – to combat climate crisis.
I’ve always been a bit of a green-bean, tree-hugging, hippy-kinda girl but have only just watched An Inconvenient Truth, the Al Gore film which says, in no uncertain terms, that global warming is the biggest moral challenge facing our global civilization and we have less than 10 years, but all the tools, to sort it out.
What the former US Vice President and chair of the Alliance for Climate Protection said, with the clear and powerful evidence of science, hit me full-frontal in the chest.
And when he quoted Winston Churchill saying: “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences” there was a tectonic shift in my mind and a sudden sense of our responsibility for the future of Earth.
I wrote a story for The Herald in 2005 about scientists predicting that Plymouth would be ‘drowned’ unless more is done to halt carbon emissions and stall the greenhouse effect and so prevent three major ice sheets melting entirely. Someone rang me in the newsroom and laughed saying it was sensationalist nonsense.
It doesn’t seem that way when you turn on BBC World and see homes in England have, this summer, been ravaged by floods, or that lives are being lost as a result of devastating floods in Pakistan and when you remember the horrors of Hurricane Katrina.
The message is clear: We need to act now against global warming or we will lose large swathes of land and people under water, other areas will suffer drought, heat waves will kill more people, species will die out, new infectious disease will develop and some of our most majestic and overwhelming natural features will disappear.
It sounds grandiose, but do we want our children to look up at us and say: “What were you doing? Why didn’t you do the things to save the planet when there was a chance?”
So, I got myself straight onto http://www.blogger.com/www.climatechange.net to learn how to reduce my environmental footprint and do something to stop polar bears dying and coral reefs bleaching. I keep banging into things because I’m not turning the lights on as much, but that’s a minor sacrifice.
In some senses Brazil is a savvy environmentalist. Political measures are taken to prevent the deforestation of the Amazon and the country is a leading producer of Ethanol, a biofuel made from sugar and starch that is a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels.
Yet, at every juice stall they try to wrap your plastic cup in two separate bags for takeaway. It’s like plastic bag Russian dolls and I shudder every time I see it happening. It’s for things like this that there needs to be political and economic will put behind a movement to save the planet.
These blogs have often featured the violence that dogs this city and the terrorist threat is on the tips of everyone’s tongues again, with the events of the past week.
The fact Live Earth falls on the second anniversary of the 7/7 bombings in London only serves to emphasize how much human energy goes into destructive causes.
But there can be no fighting if there isn’t a planet to do it on in the first place and fighting climate crisis, in a technological age where many of us can communicate 24/7 with ease, is surely the one cause that could unite us all in a struggle to save ourselves.
Uniquely, Rio is hosting the only Live Earth concert of the set that is free. When everyone floods the beach on Saturday, just before 4pm, they will see Sugar Loaf mountain, parts of the Tijuca Forest, the largest urban jungle in the world, and they will be standing on a magnificent stretch of white sand that despite its appearance of strength is being gradually diminished by our wasteful actions. I hope there are non of the feared security issues. That would entirely miss the point.
http://www.liveearth.org/

There is a word in Brazilian Portuguese- cafuné - that means stroking someone's head to help them get to sleep.

2007-07-02T05:06:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty certain we don't have a word for this act in English and it's just one example of how integral the ability to care is to the Brazilian spirit.
A war broke out in Rio this week and there is a tangible fear and nervousness on the streets, people are debating it in metro carriages. The police have launched a major operation to 'clean up' the city before it hosts one of the Live Earth rock concerts on July 7 and the Pan American Games start on July 13, bringing 5,500 athletes and 800,000 tourists.
On Wednesday afternoon I was working at a friend's apartment in Ipanema - or Calvin Klein's old pad, as I like to call it - when a tremendous racket surged outside that made me think the apocalypse was arriving.
I went out onto the seventh floor balcony overlooking Ipanema beach, two police helicopters were hovering over the sea. The surfers catching clean breakers beneath them tried to ignore the violent noise of the propellers and engines. People continued to walk their dogs, sunbath, play futevolley but there was a distinct sense that something serious was happening. They aren't used to this is Ipanema, where the streets are clean, there are coffee shops selling croissants and life is safe.
I went up onto the roof of the building and looked back towards the favela on the hill; about 10 tiny white kites were drawing squiggly paths in the sky above it. Kites are launched when a favela is being invaded and act as a signal for the 'soldiers' to come out onto the streets with their guns and fight the invaders, ultimately to protect the favela boss.
I was nervous about being in the open but, in fact, it was a favela in the north of the city known as 'the German complex' that was being invaded by 1,350 police officers. This is the area of the city, beneath the Penha church, where innocent people have been dying, with terrifying regularity, at the hands of bala perdidas, as police fight drug traffickers.
Police first surrounded the slum on May 2 and since then more than 30 people are known to have died and 80 or so have been injured. Nineteen died in Wednesday's assault, which was the largest to date and saw guns, grenades, snipers and helicopters employed. Oil slicks and barricades were used as a means to slow police and boys of 13, 14 and 16 have been identified as some of the dead who had formed a protection line in front of the drug lord. Many of the corpses pictured in the press look young and there is an abundance of images of families running for shelter that I have become used to seeing in the past two months.
The authorities say that all those killed were suspected drug dealers but the community has been critical and one man was killed at a petrol station by a shot that was fired from 2km away.
Police are pictured in today's papers (Friday) triumphantly smoking cigars. State public security secretary Jose Mariano Beltrame has said this is the start of a larger plan to invade other problematic favelas.
He said: "We must retake control of the slums and instil public order. The goal is to put an end to the traffickers' arsenals."
Cariocas praise the new governor of the state of Rio de Janerio, Sergio Cabral Filho, who came to power in January and has vowed to take out the traffickers, but they also remain cynical. Ana told me she doesn't believe it is possible when criminal gangs have the money to buy off the poorly paid police and keep potential informants quiet, with money for medicines and to improve their own quality of life because the government isn't doing it for them.
It is easy for the horrors that are happening in some of the favelas to overshadow what the people in this city are really like and for the language of war to drown out that of care. But amidst the pessimism and in the face of the seemingly never-ending violence I am continually captivated by the resilience of the Brazilian ability to care for one another.
The verb cuidar which means 'to take care of' is very important in the Cariocan vocabulary, a fact that reflects the warmth of the people. I was ill this week and had to take a day off school and when I returned every one of my teachers threw their arms around me, kissed me and asked if I was ok. The federal policeman I went to see about my fine this week held my hand and kissed my cheeks when we said goodbye. I don't think you get that kind of service at Charles Cross nick.
No one here is ever in too much of a rush to not be nice to you and this is fundamentally rooted in the logistics of the language. A friend of mine, who is in Brazil to make a documentary, told me yesterday she felt like her personality was more open when she spoke Portuguese than when she spoke English.
I think the way the language is structured - its verb conjugations are much more complicated than English and there is an entirely separate form to express something you hope or desire for someone - makes people naturally more embracing, the English language is more objective.
Aproveitar which means 'to take advantage of' is the other verb that I'm noticing is used all the time. There are restaurants, called 'kilo restaurants', all over this city where you are confronted with an array of different foods, from meats and sushi to fruits and pastas, and Cariocans pile a mixture of all onto a plate and then pay by the kilo. This concept sums up brilliantly the Brazilian quality of taking advantage of, and being open to, everything, in the face of severe social inequalities and suffering.
These words that I read in a Radical Chic cartoon in the Rio Show magazine express the complexities of this cultural trait perfectly:

Character one (a young black woman): Aproveitei esses dias que precedem o carnaval para refletir sobre a importancia desta festa em nossas vidas... Num pais como o nosso, com tantas mazelas, tantas problemas, um povo sofrido, uma classe politica discutivel... E curioso perceber a dedicacao deste povo em querer transformer a dura realidade em festa a nao em outra realidade mais justa. E e por isso, entao, que eu decide do fundo da minha consciencia critica? Cair a gandaia ate quarta-feira!!

Character two (an old black man): Chega de papo e vamos logo, minha nega, que o samba nao espera.

One icy winter my mum slipped, like Bambi,

2007-06-21T05:05:00.000-07:00

on a drain cover in the centre of the Cornish moor land town where I grew up. I was outraged, at 13, that no one rushed to help her and announced as much in the street, almost forgetting she was still in shock on the deck.
No such thing would happen in Rio de Janeiro, they say.
Allegedly, your neighbourly Cariocan would've instantly thrown his or her hand out to aid my dazed mum to her wobbly feet before insisting on buying her a recovery beer at the nearest barzinho. This is according to a study by American psychology professor Robert Levine, anyway.
He sent 23 researchers to 23 large cities where their orders were to drop pens or pretend to be blind at a crossing - and count how many people helped them. The survey said: Rio de Janeiro is the most helpful city in the world and Kuala Lumpur the least, closely chased by New York. No comment.
When Federal Police fined me on coming back into Rio from Buenos Aires on Sunday night the affable and generous Cariocan spirit clearly wasn't at the forefront of the mind of my military dictator-style customs 'supervisor'. He stamped my passport with a fat pink stamp that said FINE like he was ramming a stake through the heart of a vampire. The seats in the reception area shuddered with the force of the action.
I should have registered my six-month student visa with the federal police within 30 days of entering the country - it said so in small print behind another bit of paper that had been stapled into my passport. Now I have to pay £131, but I'm not bitter.
Firstly, I'm sure the money will go straight to where it's needed most and, secondly, the same bored uniforms tried to keep the Pope out of the Brazil last month because he didn't have a passport. If this had happened on my way into England I would've accepted my culpability and moved on in a dignified manner.
Instead I've been dwelling on ways to get out of paying it and the fact that the uptight supervisor probably hasn't had a good sh*g for a couple of months. How can this possibly happen in Rio where there is ALWAYS a way round everything...?
Rio is ruled by the culture of the 'jeitinho' (the 'little way round things'). It is second nature to every Carioca and needs to be learned - fast - by your polite English girl who shamefully blushed and quivered in the face of authority (which equals strip search) and so got no credit for effort.
Any smart Carioca would have first created a friendly relationship with the supervisor by knocking out a couple of self-depreciating jokes or flirtations and talking about Flamengo's latest footballing fortunes, while still signalling respect for his position of authority by referring to him as Senhor. Then she would have dramatically explained why she hadn't yet registered with the authorities using lots of hand gestures, possibly touching him on the forearm, and taking at least four minutes, dwelling in particular on how well hidden the instructions were in her passport.
Once the supervisor was laughing and nodding along, she'd've pulled out the innocent face and sweetly asked him to "da um jeitinho" (i.e. make an exception), before waltzing into duty free to triumphantly spend those quids just saved.
There is a lot of truth to what Levine found. There isn't much money in Rio so people get things with a little give and take and a large portion of friendliness. I was woken up to this anew by experiencing the stark contrast between Rio and Buenos Aires; stepping off the plane the cold that wrapped around me wasn't just about the climate. It's not that the people in the Argentinian capital are unfriendly but it is - without doubt - more European in its priorities. I felt like I was in Paris.
Brazilians have a phrase: 'to leave like the French', which is most often used when someone exits a party without saying bye. This is fundamentally unBrazilian; Brazilians kiss, hug and shout goodbye to everyone. The spirit of carnival, the pre-Lent party when Brazilians stop work, dispense of rules and make love in the streets (some partners don't see one another throughout the whole experience) permeates every pore of Rio's way of life. There is something messy, spontaneous and haphazard about Brazilian life that was absent on the elegant and sophisticated streets of Buenos Aires.
For a start Argentines do fashion - they have styled haircuts, wear tailored clothes and accessorise. I had to leave my Pilgrim jewellery and Diesel watch at home because accessories that draw attention get swiped in Rio. As a result Rio has very few boutiques; I was tripping over designer shops in Buenos Aires.
The difference is obvious in the national dances; Tango is crisp, dramatic and film noirish, Samba is sweaty, colourful and libertarian. Apparently Argentines aren't far behind Americans in their love of shrinks and psychoanalysis, a clear sign that many can afford to be preoccupied with analysis rather than the practicalities of putting food on the table. Parts of Rio are chic but chic like a Dell laptop. Buenos Aires is chic like an Apple Mac. You can imagine Eyes Wide Shut being filmed in Buenos Aires; Rio isn't repressed enough for that.
You would never in Rio get the Faena Hotel + Universe. The decadent creation of Argentine fashion designer Alan Faena and French designer Philippe Starck, where you are appointed an 'experience manager' when checking in. There you have etched crystal mirrors, electro music pumped throughout the industrial structure and red-eyed unicorn heads on the walls of one of the restaurants. Hunter S Thompson would have had a field day.
These luxuries are clearly the product of an organised societal structure that is, for many in Rio, frustratingly absent - all because of the 'jeitinho'. Businessmen moan that they can't get anything off the ground and O Globo ran a feature piece yesterday on how figures show the number of crimes escalating and the number of investigations falling - criminals rely on the incapacity of police to be able to bring cases to justice because of the sheer excess. An economics professor claimed it was also because the jeitinho undermines all institutions, in other words you can buy or talk your way out of anything - especially if you're rich and white.
This lack of faith in the system isn't unusual and one actress here (Mar?lia Pera) has said it breeds both a fear of authority and a sense among young people that they can get away with anything.
So why in this seemingly unreliable organisation of humanity, where people can't count on another, did Levine find the friendliest people? Why would there have been a competition to pick my mum up off the floor? Why does the lady I buy coffee from talk to me at close quarters and ask probing questions about my love life?
This culture of care for one another isn't merely informal, on the metro there are preferential seats for the elderly, pregnant and infirm (the whole carriage will turn on anyone who doesn't give their seat up in these circumstances) and a whole carriage is supposed to be strictly for the use of women during rush hours (though I'm affronted by the sexism).
I wonder if it is because capitalism isn't advanced enough here for people to realise that in order for one person to be rich another needs to be poor? I wonder if the friendliness is actually entirely superficial? After all, when a Cariocan says - as a matter of routine when bidding another farewell - "turn up at my place whenever", it's an unwritten rule that you never do. I also wonder if the friendlier laugh more than the successful? and whether or not my federal policeman will get a feather in his cap for spotting my administrative error.

It’s hard to be a 21st century Cariocan woman…

2007-06-13T05:04:00.000-07:00

Never mind kids with guns, death-wish bus drivers or drug lords ordering ritual slayings, nothing compares to the vulnerability I felt for exactly 20 minutes last week.
I timed it.
Call me naïve, call me frivolous, call me whatever the hell you like but see how you feel when you’ve got your underwear around your ankles and find yourself staring up at an unsympathetic woman in a white coat brandishing red hot wax like she’s slapping it on a wall.
Yet, how can you be a woman living in Brazil and not have the famous ‘Brazilian’?
The line of ten cubicles at ‘Pelo Zero’ – the local waxing joint around the corner – are clinical and functional. There’s no water feature or pan-pipe music to calm the nerves, no fluffy pink towels or essential oils. Nope, this is a no-nonsense procedure for Brazilian women – a little like giving the bathroom a scrub.
It all started when I held my hands up to Ana and said I’d never, at the grand age of 26, had a bikini wax. She looked at me disapprovingly and declared it was ‘fundamental’ and ‘hygienic’ and her daughter had been going since she was 14. To the contrary, I remember my mum pleading with me not to shave my legs despite my tactful childhood friend calling me ‘a gorilla’ in Maths class.
Then Dario told me he used to get his stubble waxed because a previous girlfriend didn’t like it. Then our class had a discussion about the ‘cult of hair removal’ here in Rio and it emerged that visits to the casa de depilação are like trips to the supermarket. Everyone – that’s ‘everyone’ – does it. Wasn’t it obvious that a culture structured around the beach and preoccupied with image (more of that later) would do this?
Claro…
Suddenly it was like I’d woken up in an anti-body hair Orwellian future, billboards everywhere propagating that beauty was synonymous with depilação. I was beginning to feel inadequate.
I know one straight man at home who gets his back waxed; but it’s a necessity here, as are procedures that would bring tears to the eyes of your average red-blooded male and that I’m far too polite to write down.
I think that I speak for most of my English girlfriends out there if I say that a Ladyshave is generally thought sufficient. For my Brazilian girlfriends this is heresy. Lizza, another Rotary scholar, says prejudice and repulsion is visible on the faces of Cariocas when she has armpit hair.
So, one quiet Thursday afternoon I sat on the edge of my bed and thought to myself ‘if they can do it I can do it’.
Before I knew it I was staring at a list of options mesmerised by all the possibilities – some of which I hadn’t considered feasible, let alone desirable. There were allsorts of facial hair removal procedures that had me assessing whether or not I had a beard and a host of ‘fun templates’ to shape your pubic hair. I did a quick search on the internet and found the price of a Brazilian bikini wax in Norwich costs £22. Here it’s £2.50.
So, I took a deep breath and explained what I wanted to the receptionist. I didn’t have time to sit down and build courage before my matronly hair-removal expert emerged from the back. When she flung open the door I could hear what sounded like duct tape being torn off skin. She hurried me into a cubicle, pulled on a pair of plastic gloves, switched on the fan over the bench and patted a piece of gloomy-coloured sugar paper I was to sit on. I hoped she wasn’t a sadist and tried to joke to encourage affection for me. Ploughing ahead she said: “So we’re getting rid of everything?”“No, no, no, no, no… this is my first time,” I explained in panic Portuguese, “be gentle with me.”
Ignoring my attempts to stall, she then tried to settle my nerves with light-hearted banter. Try conversing in your shaky second language whilst hair is being roughly ripped from your pores. I closed my eyes, clenched my teeth, held my head in my hands, heard the word ‘calma’ a lot and ended up glad I’d survived.
Shell-shocked I put myself back together, wiped the sweat from my brow, checked my vital organs hadn’t been removed and made my way back to the reception. I wanted a sticker, like those I used to get after a dental appointment.
Paulistas (people from Sao Paulo) and Cariocas generally don’t like one another. Their rivalry is like Liverpool vs. Everton, Oasis vs. Blur, The Sun vs. The Mirror. Paulistas say Cariocas are superficial, lazy and hedonistic, Cariocas say Paulistas are boring, ugly and work-obsessed.
Without doubt there is an obsession with appearance here, akin to LA. Women and men alike brazenly check out their butts and smooth their hair in the windows of metro trains. Women wear figure-hugging outfits with wedge heels, and all seem to have French manicures. Men trim their chest hair and work out on gym bars on the beach. On the weekends one side of the road in front of all the beaches gets closed and filled with runners, skaters and biker riders of all generations.
Modern women, and a growing number of men, are familiar with the pressures to be thin. The Western world over they starve themselves, count calories, take diet pills, develop exercise obsessions, throw away two-thirds of a chocolate bar, feel guilty if they eat a large dinner and draw up weekly menus in the quest for beauty. Balancing the pleasures of the desserts from a country that produces sugarcane against the enduring image of the Garota de Ipanema is a continual battle, let me tell you.
‘Beauty’ is a highly-valued commodity here – it means power and money at the same time as objectification. Famous women here are proud to have made the cover of Playboy. Prostitution is legal for ‘consenting adults over the age of 18’ and I had the dubious pleasure of visiting Copacabana’s infamous Help nightclub last week where the sex trade is big business.
I was on the dance floor and turned full circle to find I was surrounded by at least 10 attractive women selling their beauty. I was an obvious target being a foreigner and therefore perceived to be rich.
I’ve spoken already of my ‘exoticism’ and it gets me great things like free handgliding flights, despite the fact my pilot attempted to take advantage of my adrenalin on landing and kiss me (ten points for effort and cheek), but it also gets men in the street making sounds like they would if they were trying to get the attention of an animal.
One of the world’s most famous plastic surgeons, Ivo Pitanguy, has a house in the Gávea hills and average Cariocan women discuss what work they want, or have had done, like they are discussing what film they are off to see tomorrow. It’s odd that in a city where natural beauty is so breathtaking (there are no real architectural wonders worth writing home about) that there is a beauty myth structured around the unnatural.

Cleverly got myself lost in Brazil's largest favela at the weekend...

2007-06-06T05:02:00.000-07:00

There I was in the centre of a Sunday street market in Rocinha, staring at a pile of raw bulls' testicles and wondering how they are cooked, when it dawned on me I hadn't seen my guide and the rest of the gringo group for about half an hour...
Attempting to mask any outward expression that City of God (or other of the flattering portrayals of domestic favela life that make the screen in the 'outside world') were replaying in my mind, I slowly surveyed the area in a bid to spot that skinny American, with the walking boots and oversized camera, and the aged English hippy, with the bright pink headscarf, that had been in the white mini-van with me.
Hmm, no sign...
What had Martha (the slightly fraught Favela Tour guide) said again? "Saturday is a big night for sniffing drugs and you may see sniffing, or guns, but do not feel scared because they respect me and will respect you because you are with me."
How on earth had I managed to get lost within the 800-yard stretch Martha had outlined as safe to walk?
Safe, she'd said, as long as I didn't take pictures up the street or down the alleys - in case my travel snapshot became a 'non-negotiable' and 'prohibited' picture of a 'drug-dealing point'. The only thing she'd certified that I must remember was to turn right at the T-junction.
I was sure I'd done that.
Being the shy and retiring type I often find it easy to blend into the crowd, but how was I to do this with my lime green and pink umbrella, blonde hair and tweed-effect, silk-lined, Billabong jacket?
And so you find me: it is 11am and pouring with rain - which is evaporating as soon as it hits the muddy and meandering rubble road, creating a pleasant sauna-effect...
Me and my classic favela attire are surrounded - high and wide - by a clutter of clay, blue, yellow and white shanty houses tumbling over one another, piles of garbage at roadside drop-off points and a community - moreno, mulatto and black - sharing large bottles of beer in the bars and buying nuts and bolts for fixing the house.
I can hear the salacious beats and lyrics of favela funk music, the swish and dead pound of a butcher's cleaver chopping up bloody limbs and just make out the faint, slippery chatter of pincers coming from a cluster of live crabs tied to a pole.
I can smell swollen melons and papayas, sacks full of herbs and spices and hot pastels: a fried or baked pastry filled with shrimp, meat or cheese and sold on every street corner in Rio.
There's no gunfire - that's good; no grenades - even better; and no fireworks, which are the signal of an invading drug gang and prompt the 'soldiers' of the drug lord (the favela boss) to hit the streets with their Uzis.
In fact, nobody is even attempting to strike up a conversation with me. This is strange? Very strange in Rio where small talk is an accomplished art. Men are looking straight through me, as if I left half my breakfast on my face or forgot the mascara today. They are averting their eyes as if they've been warned not to look, but they may be bored of the likes of me trundling through their worlds every day.
Rocinha rests up and down a mountain like a spilled pack of cards. The mountain overlooks the mansions of Gavea, where quality of life is highest in Rio. Martha, whose father grew up in a favela in the north of the city, tells us Rocinha's quality of life is measured at 121, on a worldwide scale where level 126 equals the poorest.
"Ninety-eight per cent of the population is hard-working, only two per cent is criminality, and you will be extremely welcome," she said on the way there.
"You are much safer inside favelas than outside. In reality, the drug lords do not accept criminality besides drugs. Nobody gets robbed, raped or murdered without his allowance. As long as nobody here is in trouble with him we'll be fine."
I only feel a little bit uncomfortable as life whirls on around me, as unarmed kids bump into me and older ladies smile at me. There is a bank in the street, indicating some favelados have savings, but still it's like a third world city inside a world metropolis - a long way from the glitzy revolving doors of the castle-like Copacabana Palace, where the bus picked me up.
The third wave of 'favelaisation' happened 1930-40 when families, if you had 19 kids it was a small family, from the north of Brazil migrated to find work constructing the tourist empire around the Palace hotel, but I'm not going to tell you what you can find at Wikipedia...
So, just as I was starting to enjoy it and chat to the man selling cheap dresses and T-shirts about Friday's painful football draw between England and Brazil, Martha emerged from the crowd ahead like an unexpected text message. Looking a little off-colour, but doing her best to hide it, she led me through the crowds back to the mini-van. The eight other tourites were already inside. They had clearly hung to Martha's coattails and thought I'd been kidnapped by the drug lord...
I approached the Favela Tour a little like I approached the Harry Potter book series: with irrevocable cynicism, sure it was going to be a voyeuristic, luke-warm, mainstream consumer package.
Mother-of-two Martha Vasconcellos, 38, lives in middle-class and artsy Botofogo. She speaks four languages and used to be the South America assistant manager of a company that did research for French companies on investment opportunities in the continent. She says she got sick of working in an office and went back to university to study Brazilian history and everything else she needed to know to become a tour guide. She is known in Rocinha because she has taken food, clothes and toys to 'the miserable people', those who live in huts made of garbage, cardboard and corrugated iron. She also does community work attempting to reduce teenage pregnancies, but this is all outside her Favela Tour employment. I had the sense that being with her was like wearing one of those Sonic the Hedgehog protective force-fields.
She is freelance but has worked for Favela Tour for four years. Favela Tour was founded by Marcelo Armstrong in 1992. It is able to run not because he has struck a deal with the latest drug lord (what would he do when a new lord comes to power?) but because his company invests in favela services that the Government forgot.
Government 'Favela-Bairro' projects commenced in 1993 and brought investment in services, like sewage systems and public transport, but Marcelo still donates profit. Martha wouldn't talk about drugs outside the mini-van but said cocaine and marijuana were the big business in Rocinha.
"Drug lords only care about drugs and the tours do nothing for or against him. It helps the community but he does not care about that. If we respect their rules they will respect us," she said.
Rochina, which right now has an estimated 170,000 inhabitants, has one tiny police station. We passed it in the mini-van and saw the three officers, who come in and out by bus, watching the TV and reading newspapers. I saw no police on the streets in Rochina and Martha said they aren't permitted to leave the station.
In Rio there are three main criminal organisations: the Comando Vermelho (Red Command), Amigos Dos Amigos (Friends of Friends) and Terceiro Comando Puro (Pure Third Command). ADA runs Rocinha and the drug lord is a smart 28-year-old who Martha said 'wears designer labels and doesn't take drugs'. She said he never leaves the favela because he would lose his crown and the only way he is unseated is by being killed. In this light I didn't quite buy the idea that we couldn't photograph one wall when we entered the favela because it was 'the drug headquarters'. I don't think the lord would sleep easy that close to the edge of the favela...
In the 70s the military dictatorship put criminals in prison with communists who they learned military techniques from that made them 'super-criminals' and, now, far superior to a poorly trained police force, Martha said.
Her rough guide to the criminal operation inside Rocinha was as follows: dealers start at aged eight, their favour won through clothes and food. They are useful because their size makes it easy for them to run and disappear. By eleven they become 'masks' and ferry the drugs in backpacks to the dealing points. At 18, 19 and 20 they are 'soldiers', have guns and guard the drop points. 'Hawks' reside atop the favela watching everyone who comes in and out and are always ready to send message if anything kicks off. Rocinha is sprawling so this is an intricate operation. Most of the crime in the favelas is caused by gang competition and one gang attempting to overthrow another. The police only step in if the violence is getting out of hand.
So why can't the Government tackle the drugs issue in the favelas? I ask.
Martha's response is that if the politicians turn on the favelas the criminal element turn on tourists, blowing up buses and assaulting people on the street. Tourism is Rio's main income and doing this would harm the economy of the city and the country. It seems there is an agreement, 'don't touch us and we won't touch you'.
So what do the dealers do with all the dirty cash they have then?
Making clear that it was only her opinion, Martha said: "What I think they really like is the adrenalin of the business itself. Sometimes they will give money for medical treatment if someone in the favela approaches them and really needs it.
"You have to remember that for Brazilians money is not as important as it is for communities in the northern hemisphere. I do not think about a fancy car or big apartment, as long as I've got enough money to drink beers with friends I'm happy."
Rocinha has four public schools - two old, two new - and a vocation centre where people learn languages and are taught how to work in hotels and restaurants. Like the other favelas there is health care and specialists - dentists, plastic surgeons -volunteer their time for free, charging only for equipment. But in a grave situation you need to find your way to a public hospital, like the one I went to the other week.
After Rocinha, Martha took us to nearby Vila Canoas, a favela of 2,500 inhabitants where drug dealing is non-existent. We started in the education centre ParaTi, a non-government organisation, founded by a rich Italian family, and kept alive with grants, including from Rotary International. It provides a space for children to continue learning outside of school.
Martha explained the education system in Rio the exact same way it has come off the tongues of every other Brazilian I know. It is law that kids 7-14 must be at school, but there are too many kids for the public schools, so half go in the morning half in the afternoon. The rich kids can pay to go to private school all day. Between 16 and 18 they take the Vestibular which grants them passage to the free public universities where all the best lecturers are. Trouble is it's the private school kids that are better educated and will likely win the places. The others will have to miss out or pay to go to the worse private universities. Positive discrimination is attempting to turn the tide but it remains a contentious issue.
However, kids in Vila Canoas, with the help of grants from families in American and Italy primarily, have been getting to university. We did a whistle-stop tour of Vila Canoas that felt a little bit like going to a War Museum, when you get to peek in reconstructions of peoples' front rooms. Some had one room for a family of four, others two floors. Some had windows looking out on an open drain. No one had much privacy.
Rio's current population is about 6.5million and 20 per cent live in favelas. Rio has 750 favelas, though the 2000 census formally recognised 600.
As I jumped out of the mini-van in Copacabana, Martha left me with a final thought, the motto of the favelas is: "Shut up your mouth and do not say anything."
It makes me wonder how we can really know what happens inside some of them. They are shrouded in mythology and somewhat impenetrable. What I learned on a tour, and what other journalists learn when they are granted passage, is always conscribed. They remain a forbidden zone for me.
Dario says he'll take me to a Baile Funk (favela funk party) in the next few weeks and Ana informs me that I'll probably witness the 'danca do tremzinho', which sees men and women dancing in a train and having sex at the same time. Now, there are many things I will do for an authentic story, but...

My daily routine...

2007-05-30T05:00:00.000-07:00

which is getting easier now I understand exactly what the man at the newspaper shack is saying to me and funnier now I realise the dear old man holding my hand and singing to me in the middle of a metro carriage is actually requesting a bedroom date - can never feel normal in a city this spontaneous.
I saw a white pigeon on Tuesday when I was stood on a Flamengo pavement putting credit on my mobile phone, which I've flipped to instruct me in Portuguese and so is requiring concentration to navigate.
The dove-like air rat was with another bog standard grey pigeon and both swooped from behind so I dropped my Vivo phone card thinking I was under attack. Its arrival came like a message from above telling me Rio de Janeiro is always unpredictable and surprising in its detail.
My street, Rua Paissandu, is lined with old, tall palm trees and apartment blocks nestle behind grand painted iron gates which porters (Rio's gossip fountains) operate. The white pigeon landed in slow motion between my feet and those of a popcorn seller, who sits on a stall like a wooden puppet and is always vending from a Victorian-looking contraption. She is surrounded by the day-to-day of the middle class - open-air juice bars, pirate DVD vendors, fruit sellers, local crafters trading earrings and the light-bulb shop, as well as people walking to the cinema or supermarket, home from the gym or work.
In Rio the term 'working class' doesn't exist in language as a definition. To translate literally, there is the 'upper/high class', the 'upper middle class', the 'middle class', the 'under/beneath class', the 'poverty line' and the 'below poverty line'.
Flamengo is in the south zone of the city (Botofogo, Ipanema, Leblon and Jardim Botanico are some other parts of it). It runs along beach fronts and is generally thought middle-class and upwards. At 8am in the morning, when I walk to the metro, which is sleeker, cleaner and cooler than the Tube, I sometimes forget where I am. But a city this raw doesn't allow that for long.
First, there are the things that blindside you:

Two weeks ago a federal policeman, dressed like a Reservoir Dog, ran down the road in front of my school holding a gun aloft. I went out to investigate but, from my vantage point behind a pillar, couldn't see who he was chasing.
One friend saw an elderly man robbed on the street last week. He said: "A young guy approached the old man who handed everything in his pockets over with a look that said 'son of a bitch'."
Another friend was on a busy bus at midday when a hand reached in one of the windows and ripped a phone from the hand of a woman who was talking on it.
Another knows someone who was stuck in commuter traffic in a tunnel on the way to Barra da Tijuca, to the west, when bandits on a motorbike swept through using a hammer to break windscreens and demand possessions.
I was having a coffee with a contact in Copacabana on Tuesday when a prostitute approached, sat down at the table, ordered a 'really strong' Caipirinha and offered me her mobile number.
Six hours later the roads around the same restaurant, in the 'generally safe south zone', were closed while a gang from one favela invaded another favela in Leme (the quiet neighbour of Copacabana) over drugs. There were guns and explosions and Wednesday's newspaper report said the police stayed out of it. The final sentence was: "Nobody was arrested."

Second, there are the things you notice when you look twice:

The newspaper report didn't contain photos, only a cartoon reconstruction. Reporters can't walk straight into a breaking news story like they can at home.
Since I first wrote about the Rio body count website, three weeks ago, recorded deaths have risen from 874 to 1004, those injured have climbed from 514 to 638, as of today.
There are about 10 teachers at my school that my class is rotated between, they live in different parts of the city, have different accents and different sensibilities. They are cultured, well-educated and dress a lot like the average Westerner (maybe a little more figure-hugging...). The majority have to work three jobs to make a living.
Yesterday morning I counted 10 homeless bodies, mostly black, in a 100-yard stretch in Centro, the downtown metropolitan area where banks, big business and high-rise buildings rub against colour-drenched markets, and the air is filled with the fog of exhaust fumes, from clattering buses, and the faint whiff of urine.
When I caught a bus out of Rio two weekends ago there was a woman in front who had to show the driver a letter from her husband granting her permission to leave the city with their children. Apparently, husbands have to do the same.
Brazil emerged from military rule in 1985 and when I asked my school coordinator what she thought of the current state of democracy she said: "We have all the systems of democracy but in its reality it doesn't work because not everyone has the same opportunities."

Ana, my housemate, believes the Government doesn't invest in its people and as a result she can't afford to study and travel. Yesterday's front page O Globo headline for the lead political story was 'Corruption without end'.

Despite this, it doesn't exist in the Cariocan heart to wallow in self-pity.

The news always features those that steal from and batter others without thinking twice about the consequences but there are more of those that, perhaps because they know life here is fragile, treat everyone as if they are their best friend.

It starts with the greeting which is always an enthusiastic and laid back ooooiiiii, tuuddooo beeeemm? This is accompanied by a double-cheeked kiss, stroking of the upper arm, squeezing of hands and patting of cheeks, though two men generally handshake and link arms.

Even if you're a social incompetent and freeze at the slightest indication someone is about to ask you the time, a Cariocan will plough ahead without thinking twice. They are never short of words or jokes and will maintain eye-contact and be sure to touch you every other word. If I greeted strangers in Plymouth like I'm learning to greet them here I'd probably be hauled before a judge.

The English stiff upper lip couldn't be further from this way of life. The common goodbye in person or on the phone is to say 'beijos' or 'um beijo', which mean 'kisses' or 'a kiss' and men often shout after each other 'an embrace'.

I found it strange at first, and still am a little bit thrown when I'm beijo-ed by my teachers, but I'd have self-combust by now if I'd continued to think about things in the same way we do in England. For instance, if you've arranged to meet someone at 8pm, don't turn up until at least 8.30pm because you'll only be twiddling your thumbs. I was trying to hurry Ana up the other day so we could go and meet friends and she said: "Calma! Calma! No one in Rio is ever on time."

She was right; we were 25 minutes late and still arrived before them. At the local Casa do Pao de Queijo (which sells the delicious Brazilian speciality: melted cheese bread) staff are too busy chatting with the newly arrived friend (customer) to worry about taking your payment. If anyone impatiently waves their money at them, they get a 'life's too short" look.

Another essential rule is: if someone bangs there head, like I did on a sash window the other day, you must erupt into fits of laughter before you rush to caress them.

A Cariocan born in the city is known as a 'Carioca da gema', the gema being an egg yoke. The term encapsulates the pride they have in their identity and it is my aim to dive head first into the yoke. Before I could string coherent sentences together in Portuguese Ana and I had a very theatrical relationship. I once was trying to find out the word for lost so took Ana's keys and threw them in the corner. Her response was 'floor!' Other times she would point dramatically at the powdered milk and say, loudly and deliberately: "QUER LEITE?" Even then it would take me about five seconds to compute.

But this week, I have been able to ask a question in Portuguese, hear the answer and write it in English shorthand. The incorporation of the language into my body became apparent at the weekend when I was speaking English to another English girl and kept using Portuguese words by accident.

Ana even commented yesterday that I'm developing a Cariocan accent. This essentially means I'm pronouncing my 'r' like an 'h' (as in Hio) and rolling it (rrr) when it follows a consonant (as in Brrrasil) or is the first letter of a syllable, except the first syllable. Whenever there is an 's' I'm drawing it out as a 'shhhh' sound, whenever there is a 't' I'm saying 'tche' and when a 'd' proceeds an 'i' or an 'e' I'm saying 'gee'. Ironically, the correct pronunciation of goodbye, tchau, is 'chow', sound familiar?

Ate logo, beijos!

Ever pictured your life as a shiny, silver globe you are playing in a pinball machine?

2007-05-23T04:59:00.000-07:00

You've got a number of 'flippers', 'buttons' and 'levers' you can choose to press and not to press, which will catapult you in uncharted directions.
You've got some elusive corners where you have 'spinners' and 'saucers' and can win the most points and random prizes, but you have to concentrate to get there and it can take a lot of practise.
You achieve some surprising reactions when you bound off some 'kickers' and 'slingshots' and get deflected in an unpredictable manner.
Some 'targets' have points emblazoned across their chests, other 'ramps' suddenly light up like fantastic neon rockets in the sky when you climb over them.
Sometimes you reverberate almost immeasurably in the same nook (a 'dead bumper') and find you want to rip the machine from the wall and tip it upside down to free yourself. Through it all your pinball holds the memory of each part of the machine it has touched and most of all you want to be a Pinball Wizard, break the record score and avoid slipping into that dark cavern at the base of the machine and rolling off into the inaudible distance somewhere in the pit of its stomach where you can't be retrieved.
I escaped to Ilha Grande this weekend with three friends - two air force pilots (Maverick and Goose) and an engineer - who I have been studying Portuguese with for the past four weeks. One is Puerto Rican, the other two are from different states in America - Georgia and California. They have their own pinball machines but each has been a new object in mine for the past month while we have bounced around Rio together.
At first the pilots were so secretive (Goose, the Puerto Rican pilot, said there can be a bad reaction in Brazil to US military men) I was convinced they were spies.
In the time we have spent together each of us has learnt how to Samba; some scoring a little higher than others.
I thought I had natural rhythm. I was wrong. It was not until after four intense lessons that my body stopped feeling like a cumbersome steam train and began moving like a gymnastic fighter plane. Ahem.
The Samba (when danced alone) is essentially the repetition of six simple steps: right foot back then two shuffles forward, left foot back then two shuffles forward, accompanied by butt wiggling, gentle arm movements side to side and a still and dignified torso. It isn't as easy as it sounds, I swear.
Effectively, the bottom half of your body grinds like the working classes, the top half glides like the aristocracy. There are also a few fey ballet-like steps that it was a pleasure to watch a manly American pilot perform while he took a rest from mastering the hard steps.
Samba is the soul of life in Rio and streets dance with its sound. Samba clubs are to Brazil what pubs are to England and you can find live samba bands playing in a corner of the city every night of the week.
Samba was first performed in the Rio Carnaval in 1917 and its central instrument is the Surdo. The Surdo drum beat dictates the pace, which can sometimes feels like being put on fast forward. Our teacher Danielle didn't ever break a sweat, but we all emerged from class looking like we'd just been caught in a downpour before we proceeded to crawl to the nearest street bar like we'd been a day in the desert without water.
To get to car-less Ilha Grande, we caught a bus from the seedy Rio bus station (actually a lot like Bretonside) to Mangaratiba. There we jumped on a ferry to the island for a weekend that was a mesh of white sand beaches, surfing (wiping out more), spotting dolphins, getting caught in stormy rain at a floating restaurant, drinking Caipirinhas, eating seafood and waking to the gentle sound of waves. Yep, definitely paradise if there had been a little more sun.
We amused ourselves on the hour-and-a-half-long bus journey by looking out the window and glancing in on lives in motion in the buildings, churches, bars and roadside garages we passed. Some were at night class, some were embracing, some playing basketball, some sweeping dust from their rooms, others singing - each playing their own game of pinball.
Maverick told me the same romantic story he tells his kids of imagining you are sat on the moon and suddenly swoop down into a place you have been before and experience the noise and bustle and then get sucked back up to the moon and swoop down again to another place you have been and experience the sights, sounds and tastes again.
It is an obvious but unsurpassable pleasure of travelling that you cross paths with people from entirely different backgrounds and with totally different sensibilities who each impact on, and sometimes change, your path in the pinball machine as you slip in and out of each others lives.
On Sunday, Maverick and I were walking through some of the island's lush forest when we bumped into a Brazilian composer who decided he didn't want to walk on with only a bare acknowledgement and instead struck up a conversation with us.
In the now familiar and dramatic way many Brazilians animatedly talk he asked us a barrage of questions about where we were from and looked skyward, shaking his hands in the air, before saying "this is not a coincidence, I was meant to meet you two because I'm trying to decide right now whether to go to Berkeley, the University of California, or the University of East Anglia, in Norwich to do my masters".
I studied at Berkeley for the final year of my undergraduate degree and Maverick was born in San Jose, really close to Berkeley. We both told him Berkeley. He thanked us and told us that was where he would go, before he disappeared into the jungle green. I hope we flipped him towards a 'kicker' rather than a 'dead bumper'.
My friends take off for their respective homes at the weekend and I already have 'saudades' for them. I actually don't know if I will ever see any of the threesome again, but I'll keep playing pinball.

I found myself in hospital at 7am on Sunday, my hands and legs covered in blood.

2007-05-16T04:58:00.000-07:00

As I walked through the back doors of one of Rio's irreputable public hospitals, Hospital da Lagoa, it brought to mind school history lessons on the four humours and blood-letting, or what a back street abortion shop might look like. A doctor ushered me into a small consultation room and wiped a former patient's dried blood and puss off the bed with not much more than a Wet Wipe. I held my friend's hand and we sang to The Smiths: Bigmouth Strikes Again, which blared from his mobile phone, while he had a savage gash in his head stitched up.
We had been at a Hip Hop club in Lapa with three others when it reached 4am and we decided to leave. As I turned for the door, I felt his hand slip from my grasp and a commotion commence behind me.
All I remember is seeing him curled in a foetal ball on the floor, clutching his head. I bent down to him, a part of me wondering if he was performing some footballer-esque drama, and when I rose to my feet again my hands looked like they had been dipped in red paint.
The shabby and basic club has three floors and an atrium so people on each floor can look down to the ground floor dance floor. We were on the ground floor when a wise guy on the third floor thought it was a good idea to drop his skateboard into the crowd below. It hit Dario on the head knocking him out instantly and leaving his blood ingrained in one front edge of the board.
He quickly regained consciousness and with adrenalin surging 'went on the rampage'.
He first pulled me towards the large beer cooler, opened it up and plunged his head in the icy water. He then washed my hands off, slammed the fridge lid down and jumped on top of it. A lot like The Hulk, he ripped his shirt off - sweat and water splaying around him - and demanded to come face to face with 'the coward' who had thrown the board.
The hoards of hot and sticky clubbers surged backwards, like the sea retreating from the shore, and watched aghast as Dario stomped up and down the freezer, which also acts as a bar top, with blood dripping off his forehead and looking like he'd emerged from a massacre.
The responsible staff then proceeded to chuck us out and tell him it was 'his problem'. No one called an ambulance, no one called the police and the skateboard culprit remained inside.
By this time tears were rolling from Dario's eyes and he was seething with a lust for revenge while we were struggling to contain him. He described to me afterwards how a mad and powerful darkness came over him and all he wanted was for the culprit to pay for what he had done.
He wouldn't get in a taxi with us to the hospital until he had confronted him, so one of the burly black security guards went back inside and fished the man from the crowd. He was short, scrawny and approached with dread in his eyes.
At that point Dario fought competing urges. He asked him 'if he was man enough to offer his face to be punched'. The reply was 'no' He asked him to give the skateboard to a homeless child in the street. The reply was 'no'.
He told me later, when I unfurled the bandage and washed the wound, that he was desperate for the man to be punished and feel regret, but the police in Rio weren't going to do that. He see-sawed between saying he wished he'd punched him and saying he felt 'clean' because he had done what he knew was right. He told me he had known 'he wanted to be able to continue to look the world straight in the eye' but he couldn't stand the fact that the guy could be laughing with his friends about 'how he threw a skateboard at a stupid guy in a club and the guy didn't even do anything'.
I told him a quote I learnt from the lead singer of emerging band Vibration White Finger and said 'that guy's conscience is probably like a butcher's slab'.
Strangely, the image of the butcher's slab brings me right back the public hospital. The X-Ray room was like a dystopian tin can, the machinery in the wards looked like it was made out of scrap metal, wounded bodies riled and screamed in pain in the corridors and when we left it didn't look like anyone was going to mop up the pool of Dario's blood that had collected on the floor and in a bin the doctor had manoeuvred to catch the drips.
Now I know he's ok, it's safe to say I secretly enjoyed the drama, but not in a Cronenberg Crash-type way before you get the wrong idea...

As you fly into Rio on a clear day

2007-05-09T04:56:00.000-07:00

you can see Penha church standing strong and proud on a hillside surveying the Vila Cruzeiro favela below it.
It is in the north zone of the city, the part not touched on by my guidebook.
A friend went to visit it last Wednesday and as she meandered past the shanty frontier of Vila Cruzeiro got caught in gunfire between police and bandits.
"I just ran non-stop for about 20 seconds, everyone was running," Georgina said.
"Try running and ducking at the same time."
Georgina lives in Copacabana and her apartment backs onto a favela. She says she is used to the short and hard sound of gunfire but usually knows she is safe inside a building. That day she jumped on the first passing bus to wherever it was going.
There was nothing inflammatory about Georgina's language as she recounted the experience to me. Exactly as there was no 'sexing up' when Lizza told me a month ago that she'd gone to see a mate DJ at a favela party and ended up hiding in the toilet for three hours whilst police fought drug lords and a helicopter circled above.
Cariocas say journalists here talk too much of crime and when I told my flatmate Ana what I was going to write about this week she was disappointed and asked me not to publicise bad things. Unfortunately, it is inescapable.
My reality is that I carry 'rob money'with me every day. This is a sum of 20-30 Reais I will hand over without question or resistance if I'm asked to. This is because I know people who have been robbed at gun and knife point and it happens indiscriminately, day and night. One was standing in the street at midday next to her husband, another was stopped in her car at traffic lights another was getting off a bus. I have been lucky so far.
"Never be complacent," I was told on Friday.
"I've grown up here and I know this city," he said.
On the front page of O Globo yesterday was news that four more innocent people had been injured by balas perdidas (stray bullets) in the Penha neighbourhood. The fighting has been going on for a week now. As of this morning, 31 people had been hit by balas perdidas. That exceeds the total for the whole month of January in the whole of Rio state, which stands at 28.
Public security is a grave problem, nearby schools are closed. A 13-year-old was shot after she picked her two-year-old brother up from his creche, a 50-year-old woman was hit in the head, bullets fly through the homes caught in the crossfire. Yesterday's article about the troubles took up a page in the broadsheet yesterday but at no point gave a death toll. I had to go online to work this out.
On February 1 this year two Cariocas, a cartoonist and a systems analyst, went live with the website www.riobodycount.co.br 'to wake the population up to how many of its citizens are dying'. It was inspired by the Iraq body count website. Have a look at the site and see how information from all media in the city is collated and the stark facts of each known death and injury calmly recorded. At 3pm yesterday afternoon it showed 871 dead, 509 injured, since the site's inauguration. Today it shows 874 dead, 514 injured. Yesterday I counted that five people have died in the current Penha crisis, but my Portuguese is still not great.
The nearby hospital is struggling to cope with the wounded. Innocent Brazilians, according to a report published by Amnesty International in 2005, are continually the victims of:

A poorly trained police force which is outwitted by gun-totting, drug lord armies and unable to gather intelligence from silenced communities.
Neglect, so that areas become lawless. No policy that focuses adequately on the causes of violence and on social inclusion.
A failing prison system.

The current deaths are not an unusual occurrence in Vila Cruzeiro where criminal gangs and police vie for territory and income. In 2002 the journalist Tim Lopes was hacked up with a samurai sword and buried in a shallow grave for filming nearby the favela.
Another journalist died in Brazil this weekend. On Saturday night, Luiz Carlos Barbon Filho, aged 37, was sat outside a bar in Porto Ferreira, 142 miles outside Sao Paulo, drinking with a friend when two masked and hooded figures on a motorbike approached him. The one on the back jumped off and shot him in the leg and abdomen. He died in hospital. Barbon's widow has spoken out on national TV to say he was receiving death threats. The police have no suspects but are investigating if the murder is connected to his 'line of work'.
Barbon was a renowned investigative journalist working for two papers and radio but forced to shut down his own paper Realidade (Reality). He was also nominated for an Esso Prize, Brazil's journalism Oscar. In 2003 he was responsible for uncovering an organised paedophile ring involving five councillors and businessmen where underage girls were being drugged, taken to country houses and sold for sex. Incredibly one of the councillors convicted and jailed was voted in for another term while behind bars. Sometimes it is hard to know who is good and who is bad.
One Norwegian tourist, who stayed in a hostel my friend runs, started a relationship with a black Brazilian woman and was kissing her on the beach when police swooped, told him his public displays of affection were illegal and forced him to pay them about $1,000 in cash so she wouldn't be held in custody.
My new partner in crime (only metaphorically) is a Cariocan poet who has just written a piece which, very broadly speaking (before I get told off for over simplifying), is about the universe striving towards chaos and humanity being part of a breakdown. Cariocas witness breakdown every day there is news that someone has hurt someone else. The poem talks about how in a tiny human corner of the room of the universe there is a desperate search to impose order on a baffling and sometimes unreasoned larger force.
My British friend Rosie has just fallen in love with a Brazilian man and told me they are going to get married, so sometimes there is hope in the smaller details. I hope.

When my brother, Tom, and I were kids we’d always hunt out the wishbone in the roast chicken.

2007-05-02T04:55:00.000-07:00

Together we’d close our eyes tight, each grasp a leg of the Y-shaped bone, pour our mental energy into our wish and pull. Whoever was left with the larger part of the bone would have their wish granted, we believed.
Maybe it’s that the downpours in the last week have washed the gloss off or just that I’m getting to know this city better, but I have discovered that there are two ways you can live your life here when you’re a short-term visitor.
In one you get the broken redundant bit of the wishbone, in the other you get something tougher and more potent.
At my school, I am far and away the one studying for the longest. Others stay on average for one or two months. New students and friends swing in and out of my life every week. They are from all corners of the world and are volunteering in favelas, wanting to pick up the language to travel further through the country, about the start UN projects, have Brazilian boyfriends or girlfriends, or are just on vacation.
There is always a debate about where to go on a Friday night. The split is generally Lapa vs. Leblon. They lie on opposite sides of the city and bring to mind Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Leblon is the playground of the rich. It’s chic, it’s clean and it’s expensive. It’s as seductive as an executive, wearing a Ted Baker suit and sipping a cocktail. Lapa is the playground of those with nothing to lose. It’s raw, it’s messy, it’s honest and as seductive as a rock star, wearing a battered leather jacket and swigging from a whiskey bottle. In Leblon there are candles in the bars and trees dotting the pavements. In Lapa there are transvestite prostitutes on the corners and a party in the street. In Melt (the haunt of the celebs according to Lonely Planet) they play cheesy hip-hop worthy of View 2. In Democraticus there is live Samba.
It is easy for a western tourist to float around in the bubble of Leblon and probably live a life pretty much akin to what they have at home. I’ve heard some say ‘don’t they have a great view from the favelas’, which are hunched on the mountains. Never mind the sanitation then. In Leblon, on Friday night, a drunken man started pulling on my arm. I shrugged him off and rolled my eyes at my friend, who the charming tanked up man, wearing some designer label, then pushed, punched and spat at.
In Lapa, on Saturday night, a skinny and barely dressed boy, no more than five, tugged on my top and offered me chewing gum. I bought a packet for one Reais (25p) and said obrigada. My friend stroked his head and said something affectionate in Portuguese. The boy looked up at him with eyes like wells and couldn’t break a smile. We knew he’d be sleeping in the street.
These stark contrasts are a way of life in Rio. On any of the beaches, between the lithe bronzed bodies, men, women and children drag bin bags up and down the sand and collect empty drinks cans because they can take them to a compound were they will get paid by the kilo. Many riffle through the bins.
While some play beach volleyball and swim others earn their living selling refreshments and accessories. In Barra de Tijuca (sometimes referred to as the Miami of Brazil) exists Cidade de Deus, the favela with a distinct reputation for violence and made famous by the 2002 film City of God. Every morning I walk to school in Centro alongside bankers, professors and buisnessmen. Each morning we pass homeless bodies lying in the shade on the pavements. Leblon, with its playgirls and villas, reclines right next door to Vidigel, with its mafia and drug gangs. The reality of the haves and have-nots living side-by-side only serves to intensify the sense of injustice.
Rio is most certainly a city of extremes, but despite this it doesn’t do to glamorise the poverty or simplify the contrasts. Community life is strong in some favelas, which have fierce idealists, internet cafes, shops and lives some in the middle-classes might envy. A Carioca told me on the metro the other morning that she had no faith in justice here because a drug lord can climb into the back of a cop car, ask how much the cop earns and offer ten times that figure to secure his freedom.
In the past few weeks a corruption scandal has erupted involving allegations that judges and politicians are skimming the cream off public funds. The news is greeted with no surprise by the population.
When I think of this and of that little boy in Lapa, like so many others here, it makes me think of the wishbone in a different way. Sometimes I’d pull as hard as Tom on the wishbone and he’d win. Some times I’d need my wish granted more and he’d still win. Sometimes it just isn’t fair and some of us are lucky.

In Rio de Janeiro the rule is: there is any excuse for a party and the party never stops, I swear.

2007-04-25T04:54:00.000-07:00

Monday was St. George’s Day and a citywide holiday – nobody else in Brazil had a day off work, only Cariocas. I searched high and low, far and wide, to be able to tell you what importance the patron saint of England has to Rio.
I asked my teachers and friends, scoured the internet and got a headache trying to read the local press. I even, like a truly conscience journalist, took to the streets and vox-poped random people, prefixing my question with “please speak slowly and use simple words”.
The overwhelming consensus was: “I don’t know; we really don’t care as long as it’s a day off and we do not have to go to work and can go to the beach it doesn’t matter.”
That’ll be the Caparinhas then…
I did establish that it’s a relatively new municipal holiday. Some people think it’s been going for 10 years, some six years, others three years.
One person said: “Some politician liked that saint and decided to pass a law to say it’s a holiday”. That politician was a Rio councillor called Jorge Babu.
One person told me it is because Saint George is a Christian martyr and a protector of people, another that it was because he was a brave and gallant warrior. I was disappointed no one specifically mentioned slaying a dragon and saving a princess. The closest I got to comprehension was that Saint George is important to Afro-Brazilian religions known, in slang, as Macumba, which have a strong presence here and in Salvador, a city in the north east. I understood that during colonisation and slavery, when the Portuguese were attempting to impose their ways of life on Brazilian natives, Saint George became a heroic figure for Afro-Brazilians because he had stood up for those who were persecuted for their religious beliefs.
I’m sure a lot was lost in translation, but I think the holiday was declared so that those religions had a chance to celebrate and worship with processions in the street. A good excuse.
According to O Globo yesterday morning, about 5,000 people flocked to Copacabana beach on Monday night where musicians and dancers – all called Jorge (honestly) – took them through the night. While this happened, I was in a back street Fórro bar in Laranjeiras, a bohemian neighbourhood a 10-minute walk from my apartment, seeking solace after the all-day party on Saturday, when the international Red Bull Airrace 2007 came to town.
This city is easily led and whipped up its unique Cariocan spirit. Despite the clouds, a one million person-strong crowd danced about on the sand as it watched British pilot Paul Bonhomme blaze to glory by twisting through an assault course in a high speed jet in Botofogo bay. www.redbullairrace.com
My search for the calm after the storm was in vain, for you can run but you just can’t hide from a party in Rio.
I had heard traditional Fórro music before but not danced to it. There are several stories about the origins of its name. One is that it is derived from the word forrobodó, which means ‘great party or commotion.’ Another is that it developed in the early 1900s in the north east of Brazil and is a corruption of ‘for all’, from when English engineers building the Great Western Railway held balls that they declared ‘for all’.
It has the same rootsy, country feel of folk music. To come close to understanding what Fórro is like, imagine you are in a Dartmoor pub drinking ale when Seth Lakeman spontaneously picks up his violin and jams with his family and friends. Or that you’re at a Mad Dog Mcrea gig in Mutley Plain and people are swinging each other round on the dance floor.
Some here say it is ‘party music for people who have been through hard times’ or ‘music by the common people for the common people’. Its lyrics tell stories of farmers in the north east struggling in droughts and migrating to make money, as well as of love, romance, passion, jealously and saudades, which is a uniquely Brazilian expression of longing and nostalgia for a past lover or time. Its primary instruments are the acordian, zabumba (a type of bass drum) and the triangle.
The dance goes something like… the man’s left hand holds the woman’s right hand, his right arm goes around her back and her left arm around his neck. The man’s right leg stays in between the woman’s legs, following the African tradition of a close pelvis. Then there’s some fast footwork and spinning and throwing around of bodies.
When first I walked into the bar, Severyna, I thought it was a lesbian haunt because it was filled mostly with dancing pairs of girls. It looked a lot like that scene in Dirty Dancing when Baby enters the staff quarters after carrying the watermelons across the bridge.
But I quickly learnt this was no more than the ‘one for all and all for one’ spirit of Fórro. There was no use me leaning against the wall trying to avoid eye contact, Brazilians don’t stand for that modest English rubbish, my fate was sealed: it was to be the night I would learn how to Fórro.
One time I was dancing around the Treasury like a fool someone told me I wouldn’t be able to find a spare inch on any dance floor in Brazil. He was right.
I thought I was alright at dancing but I felt like a Ford Ka in the arms of a Ferrari. Around me relaxed Brazilians got lost in the moment and moved about with enviable ease. Every time I tried to concentrate on the beat and look at my feet my helpful dance partner swung me around. I stood on his toes a lot and soon learnt that the best way to dance is not to think. I am sure that there isn’t anywhere else in the world is as good as Rio is at dancing like nobody is watching.

I have never, ever, in my life considered myself exotic.

2007-04-18T04:52:00.000-07:00

In fact, the whole idea that a Cornish girl as vertically challenged as me should become the 'alluring foreign other' (moving delicately in soft-focus slow-motion through the Amazon jungle amidst enormous luminous butterflies) would make my best mates splutter over their Weetabix. But - eat your hearts out girls - that's exactly what I am.
It's hilarious, but you'd be proud of me because I'm exploiting it to its full potential - within reason.
Being blonde and blue-eyed in the UK tends to conjure stereotypes in the minds of my suitors of a cute, angelic, wholesome, slightly naive and whimsical girl.
Not so in Rio, baby.
Despite the dodgy racist undertones of stereotyping foreignness, I can easily put up with being thought a 'mysterious, opulent, curious, glamorous and extraordinary' woman for the next five months.
Add to this the fact Rio is a very open city, it is not unusual to see couples passionately kissing in the street and a section of Ipanema beach is proudly gay, and the result is - interesting. The rules of relationships, dating and flirtation here are very different from in Plymouth...
For a start, there is a famously on-off relationship with fidelity and a fluidity of sexuality.
Then, there are about ten different words for being involved with someone that are openly used in conversation. They include a person being your 'flirt' (which means more than just flirtation) another being your 'casual' and another your 'affair'.
Here it's not unusual to kiss someone within minutes of meeting them, even when sober. I was out in Lapa on Friday night and confronted with this vaguely terrifying reality.
Lapa is historically the haunt of scoundrels, gamblers and fallen women and retains all of this charm. It's the place to go out if you want to dance to traditional Brazilian music (samba and forro spill out of old colonial buildings) and it has non of the pomposity of Ipanema or Leblon.
Anyway, a rather dashing Brazilian man began talking to me and said he wanted to kiss me. I might be a sparkling conversationalist but I'm sure he couldn't have been won over in 30 seconds...
So, I told him that in England we wait a little bit longer to get to know someone before we kiss them. He replied: "But you're in Brazil now."
The next morning some friends and I caught the 'surf bus' to Prainha, a secluded beach about an hour west of Rio (the journey cost 70p). There I was frolicking in the sea when I spotted a Baywatch-like 'hunk' wearing tight red swim trucks and gazing broodingly out to sea.
Not long after I had returned to our circle of sarongs the said Adonis approached and asked if I would keep an eye on his shorts and cellphone while he went in the sea. I think he had just gone and fetched the items from his locked car because this is a well-known pulling tactic on the beach.
I thought he might have injured himself swimming because when he came out of the water he started doing some elaborate stretches on the sand. When I suggested this was the case to my friend Lizza, who has lived in Rio for nine months already, she burst into laughter and whispered that this was a known tactic Brazilian men used show off their wares, bit like a peacock and his feathers.
As it all dawned on me I turned to Lizza and said: "He is hot, isn't he?"
He looked up and smiled.
Yikes, I had spoken too loudly and he'd understood what I said. Next minute he was over having a chat and inviting me to a beach party.
In this free-love tangle it's easy to picture life in Rio as sexually liberated, but there are some paradoxes. Women, and lots of men, don't leave their parents homes until they are married. As a result there are 'motels' all over the city, which are not to be mistaken for hotels. In a motel you pay by the hour and I'm told some have vibra-beds and mirrors overhead. They are a Brazilian institution and don't have the seedy connotations we are more used to.
Despite the nonchalance with which Brazilians treat motels abortion is illegal here, unless of incest, rape or a woman's life being in danger by giving birth, and the Pro-life (or anti-choice) movement is very strong. This was something I was surprised to learn and didn't accord with the familiar stereotypes of Brazilian life.
There is a terrible soft rock song by Adriana Calcanhoto called Cariocas I was listening to the other day. It defines Cariocas (Brazilians born in Rio) as sexy, smart, attentive, modern and direct and got me thinking about the assumptions Cariocas may make about me when I say I'm English. So I asked my flatmate Ana. After about five minutes of bantering me and being generally rude she came up with English people as being: reserved, polite, funny, rich and explorers. Adding as an afterthought: "Oh and you English drink tea and eat scones and jam at 3pm in the afternoon everyday."
I wonder if these characteristics were in the forefront of the minds of the Brazilian men who have tried to chat me up so far? Something tells me it's more the lure of the unfamiliar, the differences in physique, mannerisms and attitude despite the fact Brazilian society is miscegenetic.
Roughly half of the 183million population is of African descent and, broadly, the other racial categories are: European, Amerindian, Asian (mostly Japanese), and mixed race (called Pardo).
Being blonde and blue-eyed is not an unusual phenomenon in the south of the country where there is strong German heritage; but, in Rio it's a bit of a tourist attraction. This is a double-edged sword. There is all the fun of what I have already told you about and I'm not offended by the calls of 'linda' or 'bonita' as I walk the street, but last Wednesday night as I came out of the blaze of the Maracan football stadium one man grabbed at my hair and said something about gold, but it was probably just the stupidity of one man and his overwhelming desire for the unknown.

Imagine you have two lovers.

2007-04-11T04:51:00.000-07:00

One is your Achilles heel – you always ‘booty call’ him and you know him inside out; the other is new on the scene and a minefield of unknowns. You want to start a relationship but you can’t decide which one to be with…
Right now, at the beginning of my forth week in Rio, this is how I feel about alternatively speaking English and Portuguese. My relationship with Mr English is meaningful, nuanced and complicated; with Mr Portuguese it’s shallow, punctuated with misinterpretation and supplemented with lots of body language.
Mr English is a safe haven but I’m kinda bored of him, Mr Portuguese is all I can think about but I just can’t work him out. It’s a little like having my thoughts on a torture rack.
I was running on Flamengo beach on Monday and trying to get past the pain barrier to the ‘Zen stage’ Herald columnist Martin Freeman once told me about but my brain was a swirl of Portuguese words prompted by the things I was seeing around me – bikes, the sand, a kid diving into the sea, Sugar Loaf, a person eating cashew nuts, another fishing. I couldn’t even form a coherent thought in plain English without it being bombarded with fractured Portuguese phrases. People are even starting to talk to me in Portuguese in my dreams; thankfully I rarely understand my dreams anyway.
Languages weren’t exactly my forte at school so this is all a new frontier for me. Yesterday afternoon I went to a lecture on Brazilian literature. I studied literature at university so it’s fair to say I was really looking forward to it. Little did I know it was gonna be interactive…
Cue: blind panic as the amiable professor looked encouragingly at me to tell him all about Post-structuralism and the political implications of defining texts as ‘high culture’ or ‘low culture’. Suffice to say I gave him a Heat magazine definition.
Whether it is because I have problems with my hearing or because my life is saturated with the written word, at this stage, I find it much easier to understand Portuguese when it is written down. When I try to speak it words get stuck on my tongue.
Some days I have a number of epiphanies and find myself conversing in Portuguese like I’m wading through a bog, but a fun one that’s part of an assault course. Other days I feel like I’m staring at a blank page in a dictionary.
In the lecture, I was fighting for a way to explain in Portuguese why I like Don Delillo but English words kept tapping me on the shoulder. This is starting to become very annoying. Sometimes Cariocas try to speak to me in English to help me out but I have to reply that I don’t understand English, and sometimes I wish I didn’t.
One such occasion was when I made my pilgrimage to Cristo Redentor, which towers at an altitude of 710m atop Corcovado. I didn’t think this through at all well and made my way there after class last Wednesday. The panoramic of Rio was breathtaking – the hills and mountains are like the limbs of a sleeping mammoth with the city dancing on its back – but being squashed into a small headland surrounded by the prattle of flabby American tourists and the sight of women tossing their hair for the obligatory Rio-backdrop shot entirely ruined it. I was about ready to do an Icarus on their asses.
I didn’t take any photos, but I will when I go back early one morning. Instead, I amused myself by wondering how many peoples’ photos I would be in and where in the world images of my back or the top of my head would end up.
I hope that next time I go up I won’t see this beautiful city through the picture postcard of my own language and, instead, when I look down into each neighbourhood I will connect it to a newly learnt Brazilian experience and see something original in Portuguese words that aren’t directly translatable.
And so, back to Mr English and Mr Portuguese… It is very easy and very tempting to run away from scary Mr Portuguese back into the open arms of Mr English, for more of the same, but something tells me Mr Portuguese has got a lot of things to show me I don’t know about yet.

I have succumbed.

2007-04-04T04:49:00.000-07:00

It didn’t take long but there is just no other way to integrate into a new culture but to do as the locals do. As a result, I am now the proud owner of a trademark Rio de Janeiro bikini.
Now, don’t be too impressed by my ability to quickly morph from a modest English Rose into a body-liberated Brazilian, the famous filo dental that I told you about last week, which is basically some string and three tiny triangles, was one small step too far. Despite this, my new bikini is a tenth of the size of the one I brought with me. I have to accept this, fat or thin it is de rigueur on Copacabana and Ipanema.
My very helpful shopkeeper had to knock on the door of the changing room after I had spent at least 15 minutes staring aghast in the mirror and putting it to the test of every possible scenario. I’m a little bit concerned about what will happen when I wipe out surfing strong waves.
Scandalous is the only way I can describe it; but, you’ll love this, scandalous here is to go topless and tan lines are a widely-approved of turn-on, no matter how minute they are.
Another interesting cultural difference is that many Cariocas are scared of the sea, despite the fact it is a part of the rhythm of all of their lives. Oral legend has it that this is linked to the Portuguese ancestry and the fact many Portuguese sailors lost their lives at sea as they travelled to colonise the country.
I am assured that in my new bikini I will no longer stick out like a sore foreign thumb; however, before my next trip to the beach, I’m planning a swig of the deadly national drink Caipirinha (Cachaça cocktail: treat with respect) and a dip in the Rio Carioca river, which indigenous Tamoio Indians believed was sacred and had the power to endow women with beauty.
In honesty, I’m hoping the bikini will have the reverse affect here than it might if I reclined on a rock on the Hoe in it. I certainly don’t need the attention.
I haven’t noticed the overt sexism I have experienced in Northern Africa, Cuba or Central America but Brazilian men have absolutely no concept of personal space. The word boundary is just not in the dictionary.
I was sat on The Metro minding my own business Monday night with empty seats throughout the carriage when some old fella plonked himself down right next to me and struck up a conversation. If this happened on The Tube I’d most likely think the chap was a crazy, but the lack of insularity and the forthright friendliness is just one of the things that make Rio more enchanting for me every day.
Perhaps less enchanting is the fact that, as my American friend who has already been here nine months puts it well: “Every male friend you have here will try to make out with you, it’s just the way it is.”
Men and women being unable to have entirely platonic relationships is not a new concept to us Brits, but there is a reserve that often kicks in – another word not in the dictionary here.
I walk the world considering myself pretty open-minded, I’m certainly no prude and don’t shy from public displays of affection but in the next six months I’ve really gotta learn how not to blush.
One of my professors matter-of-factly told my class yesterday: “Sex just comes naturally to Brazilians.”
“Uh huh, no kidding,” was the communal response.
I jest about life on the beach in Rio, but there is a serious flipside to all this frivolity. The beach is integral to being a Carioca and most spare time is spent there because it is free. The average wage in Rio is about 350 Reais, currently the equivalent of £87. The beach is also an imposing natural resource too far beyond the control of the Government and many Cariocas turn to it in an effort to forget why other resources, like health care and education, are substandard. I am told corruption is rife in Rio politics and Cariocas never cease to wonder where the money put into the system mysteriously disappears to. Perhaps to the same abyss swimsuit material goes?

Learning Portuguese from scratch is like becoming a child again.

2007-03-28T04:48:00.000-07:00

One of my friends made me a goodbye card with a silhouette of a gorilla against a sunset and I keep looking at it and thinking 'I'm that gorilla right now' - primitive and a bit simple.
When I went to the bakery near my metro stop the other morning, I thought I was asking for bread (pão). In fact, I asked for a part of the male anatomy (pau). Apparently, the pronunciation is slightly different… The bakery staff were very obliging, though there wasn't enough bread to abate my hunger...
But back to the innocence of non-Freudian childhood…
In my class at school there is a French, a Turkish and an American guy, a Japanese and an Australian woman. We speak Portuguese like we’re drowning in a paddling pool. Sometimes the teacher looks at me all hopeful and I gaze up desperately trying to understand. Other times, I understand but the words get stuck on my tongue and googol-gaga comes to mind. My efforts – “Where.. I.. (hang on)be.. (um)go.. bus station” – prompt a lot of laughter from my flatmate Ana and I have stuck post-it notes to all the items of furniture in my bedroom.
But, slowly, I can feel a new person growing out of a new accent, set of words, idioms and idiosyncrasies. I just hope Janner, ‘ere bey, choo and ’rite maid are easily translatable. I don’t wanna forget my roots. In fact, I went to a party on Sunday to watch the football. It was a big match in Rio’s Maracanã (the largest football stadium in the world) – Flamengo (my new team) versus Vasco de Gama (the team of my new friend), and an opportunity for Romário to score his 1,000 goal. I’m told Pelé is the only other player to do this. Romário scored his 999th but narrowly missed out on his 1000th. It was front page news and I nearly switched allegiances.
But I lose my point, which is that there were about 30 Brazilians gathered around the TV in someone’s backyard in a neighbourhood called Urca and five of them had heard of Plymouth Argyle. We’re on the map!
We should learn from these ‘futebol festas’: cervejas were flowing, bbq meats were piled high, Brazilian funk (parental guidance) was blaring and, even after defeat, the losing supporters were dancing. My dad definitely wasn’t doing this when Argyle got knocked out of the FA Cup.
To make my initiation into Rio culture as full as possible, I have taken some small steps towards becoming a Carioca. I’ve ditched my Californian ‘Rainbow’ flip-flops and donned a pair of white ‘Havaianas’, with a Brazilian flag on them. Now, I know what you’re thinking… she’s fallen into the first available tourist trap, but bide with me. There is one thing instantly recognisable about Cariocas; they are burdened by severe social inequalities but incredibly proud of their country and culture.
Everyone in Rio wears Havaianas. They are one of Brazil’s leading exports and come in all colours and designs. They sell for $100 in LA and I got mine for $6.50. They also, like cats, have many lives. I thought my right one had broken yesterday afternoon when I was scrambling down a forest cliff from a waterfall (cue: groans from my colleagues in the newsroom…). The top, usually uncomfortable rubber bit, had severed from the flip-flop bit, but it was easy to push back into place, no adhesive needed. No wonder Brazilians are proud of them.
Another sign of the unbridled patriotism comes when I lay my Brazilian flag sarong out on Ipanema beach. This beach accessory is not just for green gringos like me, Leblon’s richest and favela families all have them. The beach in Rio is like the pub in Plymouth. It’s a place to socialise and, as I have learnt much to my chagrin, a place to strut your booty.
Another famous Brazilian export you may be familiar with is the fio dental (dental floss bikini) a la Giselle. I nearly dropped my coconut water when I spotted my first tall, taut and tanned teenager gliding across the sand wearing a total of about 10sq inches of swimsuit.
I’m currently being bullied to get one of these, but I’m more used to a wetsuit and my 5ft 3” and English-wintered body ain’t ready to be cracked out in such dramatic fashion just yet.

What’s that they say about best laid plans…?

2007-03-21T04:45:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I was feeling that when in surprising style I checked in at Heathrow on March 16 for my flight to Rio de Janeiro two hours before take off and got told my American agent had only booked me as far as Sao Paulo, despite the fact my e-ticket said otherwise.
Clearly didn’t plant enough trees with Moor Trees (www.moortrees.org) to off-set the carbon emissions on that final leg of the journey…
Picture the scene: blonde reporter just the wrong side of 25, jet-lagged, rinsed out from goodbye parties, lugging a backpack bigger than her, finds herself in the world’s third-largest metropolis at 6am with Portuguese skills that stretch as far as ‘my hotel room has cockroaches’ and ‘the octopus is tired’.
Cue: stress, sweat, the shakes.
But, a few phone calls to the states and a very apologetic agent later and my housemate, who before I left was practically cuffing me to my headboard (not like that…), was pushing me through the departure gates with tears of relief.
And suddenly it was just me and an open road; well, you know what I mean.
Twelve hours 35 minutes later and I’m on the other side of the world being picked up by my new flatmate Ana-Lúcia, a 40-year-old freelance television producer and lifetime Carioca (Rio-dweller).
I now live three hours behind Plymouth time, in a modest two-bed apartment in beach-side Flamengo; you might’ve heard of the football team?
You’ve definitely all seen the pictures of Rio so I shan’t venture into the lurid details of how much more beautiful it is with the sun on your back or how the towering Cristo Redentor lends it a supernatural hue; suffice to say, they don’t call it Cidade Maravilhosa for nothing.
Your picture of life in Rio will grow with my own as I file these blogs weekly over the next six months. Pre-1904, when Copacabana became a hit, Flamengo was Rio’s finest residential district. It’s now characterised by young, single Cariocas, juice stalls, restaurants and friendly bars good for a cold chopp (draft beer).
No matter where you live in this city there’s a favela (slum) nearby. They are clustered on the hilltops so you only have to look up a street to see them. In Rio, the saying goes: “Nowhere is safe, except the metro because it isn’t run by the Government.” I picked up O Globo – the leading Rio newspaper – on Monday and on page eight found two pictures of dead bodies lying on the sides of roads, in different parts of the city. On page eight, not page one. Clearly, they are a daily occurrence.
As you know, the Herald wouldn’t freely picture bloody corpses in its pages and anything like that would be front page news. In this context, it’s easy to feel fearful. Not helped by the fact my Monday morning ‘orientation talk’ at the language school, where I’m studying Portuguese everyday as part of my Rotary International scholarship, tells me as a gringo I’m a target, not to go on a bus lest it gets hijacked or blown up and to resist that journalistic urge to go near a favela in case I get hit by a bala perdida (stray bullet). I’d be packing an AK-47 by now (I can practically pick one up at the local market) if everyone I’d met so far hadn’t embraced me and made me feel safer than I would in London.
Of course, I have taken all the warnings on board but I think: what good is a cynic with no better plan? I’ve got a few plans; they may or may not be best laid but you’ll be sure to hear about them.