In honor of my cousin in the Australian Army who's on a mission peacekeeping in an Islamic country for the first time, I present the minarets of Cuiabá. This town has a lot of radio towers, cell phone towers, electricity towers, and towers. I attribute these numbers to the remoteness of the city and the size of the state. There are 141 municipalities in the state, spread from Amazonian jungle to Pantanal swamp to dry sandy cerrado. The capital lies roughly in the middle of it all. I guess that cell phone towers are there to relay calls from pretty remote locations. (The latest Brazilian air accident was an Air Force plane that went down northwest of here. The survivors were rescued after a native tribe alerted officials in their bi-monthly meeting with government officials. That's pretty remote.)
The last photo contains a view of the Verdão (the Big Green), the stadium that will host matches in the 2014 World Cup. There are stickers plastered all over town celebrating the arrival of the tournament to Cuiabá; there are also graffiti saying things such as "Cup = trash" or "Cup out" or "A Cup for whom?"
I can summarize my thoughts about Cuiabá in with a contrast. It is not a lovely town. It has alternated between extreme heat and uncomfortable humidity. However, the people have been wonderful, warm, open, and friendly. Despite their kindness, I'm glad to be going home to Rio de Janeiro soon.
Aesthetics don't seem to be a high matogrossense priority. Below are photos of City Hall and the Municipal Cathedral. Judge for yourself.
I don't mean to suggest that there aren't flourishes of beauty to be found. In front of City Hall is the ambition of numerous Americans: a Ten Commandments plaque! Long ago, I was shocked to notice graffiti on public monuments, specifically on the statue in front of the Congress in Buenos Aires. This phenomenon is not limited to Argentina. (The oddest graffiti below reads "Thou Shalt Not Burn Alligators.")
There's also a bust of Marechal Rondon, an intrepid explorer who was the first to string telegraph lines across the cerrado (predecessors to the radio towers) and discover the sources of numerous rivers. His life is pretty amazing, and it's justified that the nearby (even more remote) state of Rondônia is named for him.
The town is walkable, but is hillier and more hot and humid than was Campo Grande. I took two weekend walks in search of food and happened upon two of the three main shopping malls in town. This was very fortunate, because malls have three key items: food courts, air conditioning, and drinking fountains. (New lesson: when out walking, always carry an empty water bottle. It saves money and is refreshing. Also, note that airports also have those amenities.) I could sit in a food court and read without being bothered. On Sunday, I went to the mall, armed with a camera – because I was eventually going to a museum, but it was going to be closed for lunch hours – found a bookstore, found the politics section, located some books I wanted to read, found some pieces of paper in the form of deposit envelopes at a nearby Banco do Brasil ATM, and sat down to read, take notes, and photograph relevant pages for entry later. Isn’t that how everyone spends their weekend?
I later visited the third shopping mall, Shopping Pantanal, because it's right across the street from the state government/administration complex. It's the best of the three; it even has an H. Stern outlet. I spent yesterday there, after my morning interview, reading a book written by the former state Secretary of Finance and preparing for my afternoon interview. The afternoon interview was a fiasco; no one at the Secretary of Infrastructure’s office knew anyone who would be prepared to talk with me. I left empty-handed.
It was not all work and no play. I did eventually reach the zoo on Sunday afternoon. The museum was closed. The zoo’s located at the federal university in town and admission is free. (The ice cream vendors out front, however, had many, many sales.) Brazilian families and I walked freely around the complex, and the animals behaved exactly according to expectations: in the hot Mato Grosso sun, they lounged in the shade and tried to sleep.
I’ll just dump a bunch of animal photos on here. There’s no order to them. One is of a capybara up close. There are some birds. There was a concrete dinosaur, and a monkey banging a nut against concrete to break it open. Oh, and the colorful parrots are native. Always remember that Brazil has an incomprehensible amount of biodiversity.
The last picture was taken especially for Bethany.
In all, an okay town. I certainly wouldn't vacation here. I think Campo Grande is a better entry point to the Pantanal than is Cuiabá. Cuiabá is closer to the national park in Chapada. The zoo and the malls are better here; the food and weather in Campo Grande were more to my taste.
A final note: both towns have the same taste for ice cream. There seem to be ice cream shops (sorveterias) on every corner, and with good reason. As the following billboard illustrates, intense heat is best addressed via soft serve:
"Thirty years refreshing the Mato Grosso heat."
I'll be back in Rio de Janeiro in 48 hours. Thank goodness.
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