Scenes from Copacabana Beach
Finally the Brasilian retrospective begins...better late than never

This was a local futbol (oooh how Brasilian of me!...that's soccer) practicing on the beach. The Mie Mamas unfortunately never had it so good.


This is Luciano contemplating the sweet ass waives and mourning our lack of surfboards. And yes ladies and gentlemen, you may have noticed that the infamous dreadlocks are still there. For those of you who didn't know, about a month before I left Luciano told me that he cut his dreads off! I was ecstatic and spent the next week barely able to stop myself from throwing a "goodbye freaky ass Brasilian hair" party. Upon my arrival at the airport I got a big "Hey looking honey I no cutting my Brasilian fashion hair!" ...yes fashion hair indeed. Oh well, ya win some, ya lose some.




These are the fancy hotels lining the Copacabana boardwalk. They look pretty nice from this angle but I was surprised at how run down a lot of them looked up close. I guess that's just Brasil for ya. There was some pretty expensive looking joints along there though. Costing a pretty penny I'm sure. We stayed about a 2 min walk from here in the luxurious "Hotel Canada." With a name like that how could we stay anywhere else. As I said on Facebook, we asked if the owners were Canadian and they said no but that they wanted a name to attract Western tourist but were afraid to name it Hotel America because they were pretty sure someone would shoot out the windows. Ahhh Canada!

That's right baby...got the photos to prove it...oooh just noticed that it was actually the "Grande Hotel Canada" little Portuguese accent included. Muito bom! Go "Grande" or go home baby!



Nice...and this is the middle of the Brasilian winter!!


Ahhh, beautiful Copacabana beach. We spent only a few days in Rio running about being touristy and soaking in the sun. Spending the day wandering the endless beaches of Rio it became very easy to forget what Rio is really all about. Truthfully I must admit that I was, and still am completely naive and ignorant about the harsh realities of life in Brasil - especially in Rio. I kept finding myself saying to Luciano "Jesus, I don't know what the hell you were so worried about, this place is fine!" He often just shook his head a put up with what must have seemed like the ignorant babblings of a spoiled Westerner. Later that night back at the Hotel he forced to me sit in front of the TV and watch the nightly Rio news... keep in mind that as I was snapping these photos, only a few kilometers away in the Favela Alemao this was hapenning...


Now don't get a freaked out, I did not take these pictures myself. I pilfered them off the internet but these are from the Brasilian newspaper from the exact day that I took the pictures above and this was very likely happening at the exact same time. The Pan American games were set to start in Rio about 3 weeks after we were there (preceded by the Live Earth concert on Copacabana beach) so the Rio government decided it was a good idea to pop into the favelas for an ol' fashioned shootout with the locals in order to clean up Rio's image a bit before the media blitz (or at least try and make the world believe that they were doing something "good" by bashing the bad guys). This had apparently been going on for months on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. Ya the favelas are rough, and rough characters live there but real people live there too and the fact that they have to live amongst this everyday is brutal. All schools in the area of the Alemao favela had been closed for nearly 2 months when I got to Rio, over 5000 children had not been allowed to go to school out of fear that they would get shot in the crossfire between the drug traffickers and the police on their walks to and from the schoolyard...I didn't get from the news that they would be opening up any time soon either. I saw video footage of parents walking down the streets with their small children as police fired indiscriminately into the crowd. I'm not sure if I was more shocked by the fact that the police would shoot with 3 year olds running around or at the complete lack of surprise on the parents faces, they barely missed a beat and just kept on walking.


Thiis is not some special situation, this is life in the "real" Rio. Now I know why when I had first planned to return to Brasil and Luciano was still living in Rio he told me that I wouldn't be allowed to leave his house alone while he was at work. I got so angry at him for wanting to coup me up in his house...this is the kind of neighbourhood where his house was, yet another strike against N.American ignorance. Humble-o-meter is a-rising.


Just another day in "paradise"

This photo is of a mother and her children hiding behind a car while out on their daily errands, caught in the crossfire they had to run behind the car. The girls are wearing their school uniform shirts, this must have been in an area where the schools had not been shut down yet. I guess it's a good illustration of why they did shut so many schools down in the first place. Ducking behind cars to avoid bullets on your way home...kinda makes reading, writing and 'rithmatic seem a little pointless and far from reality.


Now don't get me wrong, Rio was beautiful and I had a great time there, I really had no idea that any of this was going on. The sounds of the guns didn't really carry over the hills of the city and although I saw more machine guns in the small time I was there than I've ever seen in my life, I never saw one fired, just displayed very inconspicuously so that nobody got any silly ideas. Being there for even that short amount of time was extremely humbling. Luciano said that if you live in Rio, you pretty much have to resign yourself to the idea that either you or someone you know is going to get shot. Not on purpose necessarily but from stray bullets.

I think the whole situation was really put into perspective for me this past week. Vancouver had it's first big "gangland" shooting. 2 people were killed and 6 others injured when some gang members stormed an all night restaurant and shot up a table of patrons. It was targeted, no one else in the restaurant was hurt. It was Vancouver's 9th and 10th homicide of the year. ---let me stress that again 9th and 10th Now let's look at Rio. So far since February 1st, 2007 there was been 1536 murders. And those are the ones that are reported. This is in Rio city only. ...once again - Welcome to Paradise.


Ok, so I'm going to leave you all on that happy note. I thought I would get the bad stuff over first. It only gets better from here but it's important to understand what this place is all about. I think it's also important to understand that not all of Brasil is like Rio but that we can't forget the realities that some people deal with on a daily basis. We need to pound it all into our heads how lucky we are.


Right. Next report in a couple of day. It will be much happier.


Cheers

J


I think I'll post a big ol' photorama tomorrow....