View out my office window

NOTE: This post was written days ago, and never published. It is currently sunny, humid, and hot in Rio.***************


It is currently raining. Spring brought a cycle of sunny days, increasing clouds and humidity, rainy day, sunny day, increasing clouds and humidity, rainy day, and so on.

However, the above shots were taken out my living room/office window on a sunny day. This view makes being back home in Rio a little more special, and makes me feel a little emotional over my impending move to Salvador. The views from Salvador are fantastic, too, but they're not iconic. (The two potentially iconic views of Salvador that come to mind are of the Elevador Lacerda and the Farol (Lighthouse) da Barra. Many Brazilians might recognize these - the Farol is often in Petrobras's overly-patriotic ads - but foreigners would have difficulty.)

The spring of road trips that began September 20th in Porto Alegre has come to an end. I'll be here in Rio de Janeiro (or at least in the state) through New Year's, continuing to set up interviews and trying to put everything I've collected and considered in order.

Some loose thoughts from the travels:

1. Curitiba did turn out to be a very enjoyable city, for two main reasons: the buses do go everywhere, and the food is cheap. The bus operates as a metro would: you enter a tube and wait for your bus to arrive. At other tubes, you can connect to other lines (which are announced while the bus is en route) and eventually reach your destination. One can get all the way across Curitiba on a single fare of R$2.20, much as one can go anywhere in New York City for whatever the subway toll now is. They call it "metro on the surface," and had once proposed it for Rio de Janeiro. (Rio has a long, long list of transportation problems, all of which will be magically solved by the Transit Fairy before the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. It's mentioned in the bids.) In addition, I found a buffet for R$5.40 that included a drink (Tang) and dessert (pudding) for lunch. If I stuffed myself at lunch (and I did), I could buy dinner at the grocery store for R$5.00. Success! I ate like this multiple days in a row.

2. The governor of the Federal District (read: Brasilia) has been caught in a scheme to pay off legislators, and the opposition is demanding his ouster. Multiple people were shot or killed in celebrations of Flamengo's win here in Rio, and a college student shot in a robbery remains in intensive care. Two police assigned to guard the president of the state water company, who I'm interviewing next week, were shot and killed a few weeks ago. A study today found that only 40% of anti-corruption lawsuits against public officials go unresolved, and others are resolved with "laughable fines" (from Globo).

I can't figure out whether the Brazilian media wants us to be genuinely shocked and appalled at every scandal and crime, or whether I'm allowed to take in this string of crimes as a low background buzz. I don't know how most Brazilians consume the news; it would be an interesting psychology question. There are certainly protests against individual outrages, but these individual acts are not often sustained and used to enact change. (One might say the same thing of the contemporary United States, with exceptions such as Sarbanes-Oxley, campaign finance reform, three-strikes, etc.) For example, José Sarney and Renan Calheiros are still in the Senate, still living it up. The war in Rio continues, and homicide is still the leading cause of death for males aged fifteen to twenty-four. The term "scandal fatigue," invented by silly pundits in silly Washington, D.C., comes to mind - it's difficult to become outraged every night while watching Jornal Nacional. It would be exhausting.

Sometime soon, I'll lay out my pop-sociology metaphor of how Brazil is like Disneyland. I've now been to four of the five regions, with just the North (read: the Amazon) remaining.

3. I can now go back to an accent that's turning more carioca with each day. On the phone, when giving out my phone number, I had to monitor and cautiously treat the way I said "83." It gave away my time in Rio.

Chris and I watched the new Almodóvar film last night at the nearby Odeon, and we both had to rely on the Portuguese subtitles. That Madrileño accent is a bit difficult, and whatever Spanish I once knew lies very dormant in another part of my brain. Spanish words only emerge at inappropriate times when I'm searching for or trying out a word in Portuguese.

4. Bethany comes back in fewer than three weeks, and she'll be here for New Year's Eve. Hooray! I hope she brings peanut butter. I think of Jeffery Tambor when I eat the Trader Joe's crunchy peanut butter she brought me: "I am having a love affair with this ice cream sandwich."