Hi all,
Well, I finally made it to one of those churrascaria restaurants, where they bring the meats around to your table on skewers. It was great!
I’d gone to Copacabana to change my plane ticket and see the Copacabana Palace Hotel, built in 1932 and featured in that 1935 movie, Flying Down to Rio. It’s big and white, has a large pool and a lovely restaurant facing the famous beaches, but the lobby is about half the size of the lobby at the Royal Anne Inn, or whatever they call the motel that used to be the Wandlyn. The Copa does have more marble, but the lobby is tiny for a fancy hotel with its reputation.
Walking down the street afterwards, I saw a sign for a churra restaurant, with a notice that always catches my eye: “Special sale”. For $15 Cdn I could have the experience I’d been wanting since I first arrived in Rio.
So, of course, I went in.
I ordered my ‘aqua com ges’, the host pointed me towards the salad bar, and put a drink coaster on my table, one side reading “yes” and the other reading “no”. This was to tell the “meat boys” whether or not to stop at my table. I decided to wait on the salad bar, and turned up the “yes” side.
Instantly, a young man with two two-and-a-half-foot long skewers of meat approached me. I nodded in the affirmative, at which point he sliced off some sausage meat, and some kind of beef. The variety of meats was astounding, and servers just kept offering more and more and more!
Filet mignon, roast beef, barbecued pork (served with lime slices), chicken breasts, hearts and livers, two kinds of sausages, beef of all sorts, salmon, plain and wrapped with bacon. The servers brought around platters of fish, an entire frying plan full of melted cheese (it tasted like salty mozzarella) and some shrimp-like things that were sliced the long way and had a lot of legs, the texture more like fish than shellfish, but great tasting and drenched in lime juice. (For some reason, there are no lemons in Brazil.)
In addition to the variety of meats, I was also served small platters of French fries, French fried onion rings, and a rice pilau and cheese biscuits. At one point, someone at another table was served with a pitcher of orange juice, so I asked for one of those, too, although it proved to be kind of watery (I don’t think the oranges here are as good as the ones we take for granted on the North America continent). Anyway, given the cold that has me in its grip, the fresh-squeezed orange juice proved therapeutic, indeed, and the hit of vitamins just what the doctor ordered.
All and all, the churrascaria proved to be a great experience, easily the equal of what I’d imagined, and perhaps even more splendid. After I’d eaten my fill, I turned my coaster over to “no” and set about to consume the food remaining on my plate, although it proved to be a quite impossible task. Still, I did my best. I’m so glad I finally managed the churrascaria experience, even if I was dining alone on this occasion.
After dinner, I returned to downtown Rio to catch the bonde home to Santa Teresa. There were about 100 people waiting to get on a tram that might hold 35 people. So, I went over to get the bus instead. Surprise! All those maps I’d been seeing in the newspaper finally made sense. Most of centro was closed to traffic as they were having parades every day. So the roads were full of street vendors, mostly selling beer and cachaca, although there was some food on offer. I also noticed something that looked like canisters of whipped cream, but that couldn’t have been the case, as I spied several young boys happily spraying one another with this white foamy substance. The bus I was riding was absolutely covered in the stuff, despite the onslaught of rain.
When I decided it was time to return home, I set about to find the correct bus to transport me back to Don’s neighbourhood. Of course, as usual when I found myself in Rio de Janeiro’s bustling downtown area, I immediately proceeded to get lost. Not to worry, though.
While attempting to figure out which bus to take, I heard a great band, and saw lots of authentic Carnaval costumes. These costumes I saw up close looked much better than the ones I’d seen on TV — perhaps the quality of escola increases as Carnaval goes on. The costumes I saw on this particular evening were great, made of wonderful fabrics woven through with bright colours. The tights and the gloves and the shoes, as well as the flowing coats, decorated umbrellas, and even masks were eye-catching and amazing. Everyone I saw was in a festive mood. I stumbled over some floats, though they at the time I was near them, they were unoccupied. This was about 4pm, and the official parades don’t start until 9 or 10 p.m.
I even managed to catch a parade, and as it happens, it was just the right kind of parade for me. It was a Christian sponsored youth group, and facets of the group each depicted an aspect of Carnaval that might be ‘overdone’ participants, like: drink, drugs, violence, sex. It was great fun.
Also interesting to note was this: there was a line of adults holding hands along both sides of the parade, situated between the kids and the crowds watching. I was told later that this was to ensure no one grabbed a child and then disappeared into the crowd. Remember I mentioned the US$80,000 for a kidney?
The band nearby was nearly all percussion, as I’ve reported previously, and the drummers either wore bicycle gloves or had their hands wrapped with adhesive tape. No wonder! They bang those drums with abandon and great force, pounding and pounding at least an hour, often two. The leader raises his hands; when he lowers one hand, one group bangs, when he lowers the other, another group booms away. Simple but very effective.
After asking several policemen, transit officers, and people on the street (employing my increasingly efficient fractured Portuguese), I finally saw a Paulo Matos bus, which was the transportation I required to return home. By now, it was 6 p.m., about two hours after I had first begun looking for the bus. But what a lot of excitement and a great deal of entertainment I’d been party to during that two-hour period.
(It’s a sign of how helpful Brasilians are, that when you stutter out that you don’t speak Portuguese, but you’d like to know…whatever it is this time, that they look at you intensely and then speak out very rapidly something for nearly three minutes solid. I just smile gently and point in various directions, asking ‘here?’ each time. If you do that often enough, you usually can get wherever you want to go. As I did this time.)
The ride home through Santa Teresa was just as mobbed as downtown. The sidewalk was full of vendors with styrofoam coolers, selling beer, with people in various stages of costume and drunkenness. All the restaurants and shops were mobbed — Shrove Tuesday is a national holiday here, and everyone was out celebrating. Thank goodness that I didn’t need to eat in a restaurant again. I could just relax on the bus, and watch the scenery.
Eventually I made it home safe and sound and in one piece. Along the way, I managed to more fully experience some of the flavours of Carnaval, without much concern at all about crime or for my personal safety. How fortuitous and delightful.
As I set fingers to keys today, I am in the last stages of preparation to return to return to snowy Nova Scotia, where I was reading the temperature might hit an astounding plus 2 tomorrow. How different the Annapolis Valley will be from Rio de Janeiro.
Perhaps if it proves too chilly in Nova Scotia, I’ll travel out to the west coast and revel in Vancouver’s early spring weather, and gaze upon the cherry trees in blossom, and the boulevards full of daffodils in bloom.
Much love to all of you.
Corinne
