BLOCO!!!

I went to my first Bloco last weekend!  Yay!

Actually, I'm going to backtrack to a day before the Bloco, which was Saturday.  I came home from doing something boring... I think it was looking for a multifunction copy/scanning/faxing/printing/does-the-washing-up machine with my mum.  It had been pissing with rain all day.  I was in a bad mood, possibly because I was starting to suffer from cabin fever as a result of spending more time with my mother than is healthy at my age.

I got a text as I walked in the door from my new friend Kelly (Brazilian: friend-of-another-Brazilian-friend from London).  She had already mentioned the Bloco thing on facebook for Sunday, but as far as I was aware, I was having another 'cozy' night in with my mother in front of the television on Saturday night.
"Hi!!!!" the text said "There's a party at a friends house today. do you want to go?"
"Hmmm, do I want to go?" I said to my mother, "I'm tired."
"Go! Go, go, GO!" she replied.

I know when to take a hint.

I ate some dinner, spiked my squash with a small teaspoon of guarana powder (I still can't believe that stuff is legal) and zipped over to the other side of Bela Vista.  Kelly welcome me with a glass of wine (or two), we then walked to the nearest 24 hour store to pick up a LOT of beer and got on the metro to Belem.  At Belem we hung around in the spitting rain for a delightfully ditzy Luiz (Kelly's best friend) to work out exactly which metro station in Sao Paulo we were waiting for him, despite the fact that he grew up in Sao Paulo and he had been to Marco's (the guy who's birthday it was) house about 10 times before.  Gay men are the same everywhere, bless their little cotton socks.

When I got to the house, I was very pleased to discover it was my kind of house party: a pair of decks and loudspeakers blasting out good quality house music, a refrigerator (and freezer) full of alcohol, and gay men majorly outnumbering women in the room.

N.B. Despite being a lesbian, I don't actually enjoy hanging out with lesbians.  Not all of them (obviously, or I'd be terminally single), but a lot of them.  The following are lesbian traits I strongly dislike: veganism/vegetarianism (combined with a 'holier than thou' attitude), militant feminism (being a lesbian doesn't mean you have to hate men), lesbian drama (don't ask), drinking too much and getting into fights in the street/club/bar, and taking oneself too seriously.  I don't take myself seriously and I like to hang out with people of the same mindset.  I like going out, having fun, partying hard and generally just enjoying myself.  This is why I tend to get on very well with gay men, they tend to be rather light-hearted too.  Again, not all gay men are like that but there is a significant majority who are.  I am in my element when surrounded by gay men.  I love them, and (as far as I'm aware) they love me.

Long story short, I didn't get to sleep until 6.30am Sunday morning.  I woke up at 2pm to another text from Kelly:
"Are you alive?? I have a terrible hangover!!! Let's go to the bloco?  It's at 4."
I managed to get myself over to Kelly's flat around 4.30pm, just as it started to bucket down (yet again).  We hung around the apartment for another half an hour waiting for the rain to disperse, then made our way to Bloco.  After inexplicably getting lost despite being only 3 blocks away and hiding from the rain twice, we got to the Bloco.

It. Was.  AWESOME.  This particular Bloco was an 'alternative' one (it was called 'Bloco Academicos do Baixo Augusta').  The Porta Bandeira (usually a woman, carries the flag of the samba school at the front of the procession at Carnaval) was male and in a wheelchair.  It was held in what was probably a car park during the week.  They didn't have a license from the city to parade through the streets, so the party was literally held within the car park block.  The car park enclosure had completely filled out with people and there were people watching from outside the square on the streets, pissing off all passing cars I'll bet.  The music was played by a brass band.  They played everything: Brazilian contemporary/pop music - new and old, samba tunes, Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder....they even played "Age of Aquarius".

It was raining cats and dogs; we got absolutely soaked.  Everyone was dancing & singing - the atmosphere wasn't dampened in the slightest.  There were people splashing about in puddles wearing canvas plimsoles, spraying foam from cans into the crowd, throwing confetti on each other.  And lots and lots of beer.  Brilliant.

Downside: everything I was wearing got soaked, I stubbornly refused to have a shower at Kelly's, preferring to wait till I got home, and ended up with an annoying cold on Monday & Tuesday.

Totally worth it.

I *LOVE* RIO

OK, so I’ve changed my mind about this city.  I’m sure everyone who’s been here knew that would happen.

We spent the first couple of weeks in a tiny studio in a sleazy part of Copacabana with an asshole host.  The refrigerator wasn’t working (he tried to make it out it was, it just “wasn’t very cold”), the toaster oven wasn’t working (he tried to make out that, despite the fact there were clearly two heating elements in the toaster oven, only one of them was supposed to work: “that’s how they work in Brazil”), the apartment building backed onto a favela, the entrance hall stank of sewers, there were cockroaches in the hallways that weren’t cleared away for days, the apartment was humid and dark… I could go on. 

Anyway, when we did complain about the refrigerator (quite reasonably, given we were staying for a month and a refrigerator is ESSENTIAL in 30C-35C heat) he firstly tried to make out it had been working until we got there, we then reminded him he’d said himself it wasn’t working very well when we arrived, he then backtracked and said it was a new refrigerator under guarantee he just hadn’t gotten around to calling the repair service because he would have to wait around for them to come and he’d need our permission, we gave it to him, he then backtracked again and said we’d have to wait, we said “fine, because we need it working”.   Long story short, it took 3 days out of OUR holiday that WE had PAID FOR waiting around for a repair man to service HIS refrigerator, he got very unpleasant when we started getting annoyed, we ended up complaining to the booking website and they rebooked us into a much nicer apartment.

We are now 10 seconds from Copacabana beach in a much nicer part of Copacabana near the Copacabana Palace Hotel, the apartment is still a studio but has at least another 10m2 to it, it’s brighter, it’s not humid, there aren’t cockroaches, the amenities in the flat are old but they work, and our new landlord couldn’t be more helpful and welcoming.

Apart from that, Rio has really grown on me.  Most of the favelas have been pacified – especially near the tourist areas – so all those warnings about safety in Rio are mostly redundant.  I wouldn’t walk around with a massive SLR camera strung around my neck and R$500 in my wallet, but then I wouldn’t do that in London either.  Copacabana beach is a very interesting place to take a stroll of an evening: lots of people out, live music on the beach, restaurants and bars along the front, art and tourist fairs.

I’ve been to the Botanical Gardens, several museums in Centro (especially the National Historical Museum – finally some Brazilian history has been filled in for me), Sao Bento Monastery to hear Gregorian chants at Sunday morning mass, Flamengo Park, Lage Park (it’s like Neverneverland), Petropolis to see the Imperial City, walked all the way around the Lagoon, and had a night out in Lapa.

We’ve got plenty of stuff left like Pao de Acucar (Sugarloaf mountain), the Christ, jeep tour around Tijuca forest, the zoo & winter palace, Fiscal island….

Basically, Rio is about more than just sitting on the beach, getting a suntan and sipping a caipirinha.  It’s stuffed full of culture, art and history – and finally I am really beginning to enjoy it.

P.S. I don’t have a reliable internet connection here, which is why I’m not posting so much.

P.P.S. I have taken shitloads of pictures.  Due to aforementioned unreliable internet connection, I am not posting any pictures to my blog until I get back to SP.  I’ll do a blog with a few selected highlight photos later.