aleatória

santa teresa, rio de janeiro

pequeno mundo
monday, approximately 1900hs: lonely planet lists dozens of hostels, pousadas, and hotels in rio, supplemented by hundreds of other establishments not mentioned. there must be thousands of beds in rio, while rio hostel (our digs) has around twenty. it is up this winding road in santa teresa, far from the more common destinations of copacabana and ipanema, that a young man with a surfboard under one arm and broken portuguese on his tongue entered our place. gringo, for sure. he went to his room, came out, then looked at me and said, 'you look familiar'. that's cause we lifeguarded together at piney creek swimming pool in aurora, colorado eleven years ago. we didn't have much in common then and it took us all of fifteen minutes to catch up. still, i posit that if you're walking around rio de janeiro with a surfboard, you must be doing something right in the crazy game of life.

tuesday, approximately 1415hs: there is a beach not mentioned specifically in our 750-page guide book. you take the s20 bus to its terminus (or, perhaps, to a volkswagen dealership close to its terminus where you can do the awkward i-have-to-pee dance in the lobby while you try to ask permission to use the bathroom from the salesman, in portuguese, a language you don`t speak, of course). you then go under a highway for a kilometer, then turn at the fork in the road into a nature preserve, then another kilometer till you come across the most pristine beach you could imagine. i was walking along that deserted beach, sharing it with scarcely thirty other souls, in that isolated nature reserve twenty-five km from rio, when i heard my name called from the two lane road just behind. my good pal marc mousky, passing through on the scenic route.

barganha
for those of you looking to travel with your young'uns on a budget, rio may be a contender. the public buses have turnstiles that are only activated by a magnetic card that the cashier (yes, the buses have cashiers) holds. just as they are accountable for matching the turns of the turnstile with their register, they are not accountable for when it does not turn. então, in the past few days we have seen kids climb over the turnstile, others slide under, while many more (including a grandmother) held their not-so-little little ones through a waist-high turnstile on swaying buses going over cobblestone streets. or, you could just budget the extra 2,10 reias (us$1.50).

obrigado, george
our guide book, published in january of this year, lists the exchange rate between reias and dollars at just shy of 2:1. it has fallen by close to 25%. this is in large part due to the strength of the brazilian economy, blessed with verdant soils in times of high commodity prices and being by-and-large immune to the worldwide bursting of the mortgage bubble. additionally, they have found large reserves of oil off the coast (coincidentally, the us would like to increase its naval presence in these seas...hmmmm......) which should auger well for at least the next decade.

at the same time, the us economy (has anyone heard this?) is tanking thanks to many factors. então, the value of the host currency is appreciating while mine is six months away from turning into kindling. wonder why i'm hearing a lot more british accents and german in the hostels and restaurants?