Jack McDonald dot Org

Seeing as this is my first post and all, I thought I’d take the time to write a letter home to my friends.

So here it is. A fresh start on the other side of the globe. I’m currently resident in Rio De Janeiro. From the 11 days that I’ve been here I can tell this city is different. For instance, their approach to recycling is to let the Favela kids pick up the cans in return for a pittance. This is laudible until it’s 11.30 PM and a barefoot six year old approaches you for the can of beer you’ve been nursing for the last half hour. There’s not much you can really say in such a situation, regardless of the fact that my Portuguese is quite poor.

Getting here took a while, in fact I had to change planes at Sao Paulo. Of course that was on my travel itinerary but I don’t really “do” forward planning when it comes to travel. Hell, it’s all a ride, right? So I’m in Sao Paulo airport, racing through to try and catch my flight. I reckoned without Brazilian time-keeping. You have to give this country a one or two hour curve on any given appointment. I think Revillion (the celebrations for New Years Eve) is such a massive party because it’s the one event a year that happens on time. Back to me racing around trying to catch my flight. I get directed down a flight of stairs for my departure gate (bear in mind my plane leaves in ten minutes) and BLAM, I’m in a mid-west American Greyhound station. If you’ve never been to such a place, think of the most dysfunctional, people-people hating place you’ve ever been in and then combine it with purgatory. My flight is at 8.45 AM, it leaves two hours later. It leapfrogs later and later over flights to Asuncion and some other South American destination. There are three flights worth of bumped passengers all queueing at the same departure gate for three different flights, which every 15 minutes or so change their order of departure. Sound like fun? Yeah. It was. Somewhere along the way, the airline staff just lose control. The crowd asking for information becomes a mob (not helped by the fact that there is an entire football team and it is one of their birthdays. It’s the mob equivalent of a boil in the bag meal). Everyone starts shouting, and most of the airline staff slip off to one desk over, leaving one poor clerk to carry the can. I chat to Joe, my fellow sufferer who is about to embark on the third of six plane flights to get home. Joe is a Brazilian guy who does wood flooring in Boston. So Joe has had to fly Boston to NY, NY to Sao Paulo, and is now flying Sao Paulo to Rio De Janeiro before heading to Brasilia, somewhere North West of Brasilia and somewhere North West of that. I’m sure Al Gore would shit his pants at such an enterprise, but Joe seems happy enough that he gets to see his family again. Somewhere along the line, two hours along to be precise, we get bussed to the plane and we get to fly to Rio De Janeiro. Brazil is positively verdant from the air, literally green and blue. I can’t see the beaches but I’m pretty sure that’s why they put the yellow into the Brazilian flag.

Actually getting out of the airport was dead easy. Border control was literally me handing my passport and a real bored guy who obviously caught the night shift handing it back with a stamp without a word. Thankfully the American system of having someone try and beat you up verbally for wanting to see their country hasn’t caught on down here. I would say the heat hit me at this point but I had endured two hours of it in Sao Paulo, besides, that’s a total cliche and I cannot be arsed. I hopped on the bus to Copacabana. Buses here are a total blast. For starters there are lots and lots of unofficial buses that spring up when and where people need a ride from point to point. They stop wherever you want, and they pick up passengers whenever they can, no matter how much traffic they hold up in the process. Exiting this bus on the Copacabana beachfront was something akin to a parachute jump, as the guy opened the doors while still going at about 10 mph and gestured for me to get off (I’m fully loaded with a backpack and camera bag at this point) He eventually relented and stopped for five seconds while I got off.

If there is a prize for “Highest percentage of scam artists per square metre”, Copacabana beach would surely win it. The beach is packed with people who have every intention of seperating everyone else on the beach from their money by any means necessary. Poverty is indeed an important motivator. If the tories ever suceeded in returning England to their Dickensian dreamland then Copacabana beach would probably serve as a blueprint for how the “riff raff” would have to live. Imagine every method of money-making by “street traders” you have ever encountered, and then times it by ten. For instance, the shoe shiners work in packs, one will drop some oily muck onto your shoe when you’re not looking (this has happened twice in 11 days) and then two seconds later another will appear and offer to clean it off for 2 reais. Because I am a bloody minded bastard I have refused both times despite the fact that you have to say no for the best part of five minutes and then have to endure saying no to two or three other shoe shiners over the course of your stay at the beachfront who all know the tell-tale stain.

One of my first actions was to step away from the beach and head two streets down to Avenida S. Copacabana. The reason? The Lonely Planet guide to Rio describes it as very dangerous and seedy. Well, it’s not. It’s mucky just like any street in Lewisham could be described as seedy and thankfully it weeds out all the tourists who follow the aformentioned guide book. Having said that, yeah, I can see the backpacker set getting eaten alive here at night, but those people have more money than sense and deserve it. I think alot of Rio (bar the Favelas) is perfectly safe as long as you are not a complete moron. It’s a price differential really. If you walk around here flashing the latest Ipod, people don’t see an Ipod, they see a month or two’s wages. If you walked around Hackney flashing a four grand gizmo at night, the same thing would probably happen.

The next day I headed over to the BTT gym in Lagoa. Lagoa means lagoon in Portuguese. It’s quite apt because it’s a massive lagoon ringed by rainforested mountains in the middle of the city. Rio is a metropolis that’s collided head on with a rainforest and both elements are in a daily turf war. It makes things interesting. You can’t just build a concrete block of flats next to a forest and not expect it to get reclaimed at some point. An hour’s walking later and I found the place, it’s at the back of a sports complex which looks like it had it’s heyday in the late 70s. Though seeing as it’s an outside pool in 35 degree heat, you can’t go far wrong. I eventually found the place and chatted to the instructor, 260 reais a month (for the first three months) for unlimited Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and submission wrestling, it’s about a £15 more than I was paying for two BJJ lessons a week back home. Quite a bargain, when it goes down to 150 reais a month it will be even more so! Out here people train hard and they train all day, six days a week. BTT has lots of people involved in MMA so there are all kinds of incredibly hard people just sitting about or doing random drills while you train. As a rule of thumb the black, brown and purple belts outnumber the lower ranks by approximately a 3:1 ratio. My first day doing submission wrestling I kinda learnt the hard way how different it is from jiu jitsu with a Gi. Instead of everyone being three steps ahead of me, they were three steps ahead of me and everything was happening at three times the speed. Quite the learning curve I assure you. Funnily enough training in 35 degree heat isn’t that bad. You sweat buckets but end up drying off quite quickly. I also got used to the hours pretty quick. I signed up for a Krav Maga class on Monday and Wednesday evenings which is quite good as an evening workout after wrestling.

If that wasn’t enough, the beach is a real good run in the evening. The whole thing is floodlit so that people can play football and volleyball all night. Cariocas (as Rio’s citizens are known) also play beach volleyball just using football skills, headers and volleys only. This might be part of the reason they rule at football. The beach dies down at night as everyone is off nursing sunburn, but it is still quite the hive of activity. Running along it you encounter fishermen casting nets, anglers with rods (quite the hazard as the fear of getting clotheslined in the face by a fishing wire is not too appealing and having to deal with an angry fisherman afterwards even less so), kids on their own at 10pm, all sorts really.

My daily routine is training, eating, walking around town and reading. I had a bit of trouble locating English language books. I realise that half the reason the world thinks America are barbarians is that the sole written output that makes it overseas is Mills & Boon plus some schlock thrillers and the odd detective novel. Realising that the chance of finding a decent read in any of Rio’s bookstores was probably nil I hunted down a second hand shop with a couple of boxes of English books. Funnily enough I had to spend fifteen minutes digging through second hand copies of Mills & Boon novels before I turned up some gems like Steinbeck and so on. Six books for 75p, job’s a good ‘un.

As for nightlife, I haven’t seen much. I went to a place called Casa Rosa last sunday which was probably the best club I’ve been to for a while. Hey, they take clubbing seriously out here, ever heard of an English club with 750 people on a Sunday night plus a queue round the block? No? Thought not! Most nights I go out I just head down to the beach and chill on one of the beachfront hut bars they have, cheap drinks, barmen don’t mind you nursing them, a lot less hustle and bustle than I’m used to and it’s quite nice. Plus if you sit and observe the locals you tend to pick up on details. For example everyone drinks coconut juice straight out of the coconut. The barman picks up a huge cleaver, lops one end off flat and then puts three chops into the other end to make a hole to drink the juice from. But the locals go one step further, ask the guy after you’re done and he’ll take the massive cleaver and make three downwards cuts, plus he slices a bit of the skin off. Coconut skin is almost wooden, so you take the slice, break the coconut into three, and then use the sharp end of the slice to cut out the fresh coconut to eat. It beats just leaving the thing on the table like most of the tourists do.

Anyways, I’m beat, time for bed.