The team at my strange little day job has grown to include several people who live in Brazil, and in the biennial rhythm we've established for gathering all of us remote workers in person, my boss picked out a spot in Rio Grande do Norte for a company trip. But it's a long way to Brazil! So Nina and I decided we'd spend a week in Rio de Janeiro after the week-long working session.
As part of my usual anxiety about visiting a new place, I had to confront my total ignorance about Brazil and Brazilians. What does Portuguese sound like? A little bit like Italian. Can you understand it you speak Spanish? Not really. What do they like to eat there? The Internet thinks they like spaghetti, and they like french fries. They like these little cheese puffs called pao de queixo. And there is a fully trascendent fish stew called moqueca that I'd unwittingly made before from an Internet recipe. We flew in via a physically challenging direct flight to São Paulo and then a quick hop back up to Natal on the coast, where a guy with a van and a horse trailer for everyone's luggage picked us up and drove us down to the resort town. It was a multi-hour drive that took us south through the countryside, with unbroken farmland on either side of us most of the way until we cut east towards the coast and began to pass the occasional small town marked out by produce stands and trash incinerators.
Praia da Pipa, it turns out, is a sort of fishing village that looks like it was invaded by surfers a few decades ago, and maybe subsequently invaded by remote workers arbitraging the exchange rate. We were staying at a little hotel compound called the Pousada dos Ventos (aka the "Nomad Village") a few blocks from the beach. It consisted of a half dozen or so two-story suites arranged around a swimming pool. During the day, iguanas, small lizards, and, incredibly, a few marmosets appeared around the grounds, along with an ugly but equanimious cat that belonged to the owners. One evening, we watched a bat walk on its wings up a short path behind one of the suites towards the compound's kitchen—a friend of the chef? The town itself was nice enough, with terraced levels of shops and houses and restaurants arrayed along cobblestone streets grading directly down into wet sand at the water's edge. Lots of bodega-like kiosks where you could buy a case of bottled water or beer, or a phone card or a packet of vacuum-sealed meat from a cooler. There was a big grocery store where we bought candy for an impromptu screening of The Exorcist in our suite for Halloween—not celebrated in Brazil! Nina and I met the resident cat at a seafood restaurant where the dining room was built on wooden pilings and jutted well out over the water. I tried acai for the first time at one of the numerous places selling it frozen and whipped into a kind of sorbet. It's good! A lot of the other places we ate at were steakhouses of one stripe or another. The more surprising dishes we encountered included escondidinhos, which were these little yucca-based shepherd's pies, and camarão no abacaxi, a frankly insane pile of shrimp inside a cored-out pineapple with melted cheese all over it.
Each morning there was a bit of work to do with the team, and in the afternoon there were planned activities: We went swimming near some dolphins at a beach a few miles up the coast, and Nina and I took a walk through a sort of dessicated cliffside forest preserve, a tangle of unearthly gray branches. There was a group bike ride up towards Tibau do Sul that brought us back to the inn well after sunset. We rode ATVs offroad in a protected area down by Praia das Minas; I struggled with the controls on mine to the extent that one of our guides had to hop onto the dash and ghost-ride it with one hand on the wheel. Then a harrowing ride over the dunes in dune buggies driven by the guides, who were experts in pitching them almost to the flipping point. My dome-protecting baseball cap, hand-embroidered with an image of Boldore by my sister as a gift when we were both catching Pokémon during the pandemic, flew off when I needed an extra hand to grip the seat. My Brazilian co-worker's fiancée, riding along: "Julian, your bonnet!" "Well," I thought, "I guess that's lost to the dunes." But no! A guide in the buggy behind us had witnessed my mishap and snatched my hat out of the air Legolas-style. We took a barge to out to an island in an inlet near Tibau do Sul where there was a colony of friendly but decidedly feral cats. Distracted by trying to break up a fight over a chicken carcass, I reacted too slowly to stop a big horsefly from giving me a painful bite on the shin.
At the end of a week we left Pipa. Some of my co-workers went home; Nina and I flew south to Rio. I'd booked a hotel in Rio right off the beach in Ipanema, though I opted for the rear-facing "city view" the rather than springing for the "ocean view." I think this turned out to be the better choice, since this afforded us a real busytown panorama of Rio: Fancy apartment buildings at the fore, some with vacant units under renovation by work crews; blending into housing for normal people further from the beach; and then green hills rising beyond Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon, favelas built into the slopes. We could also see what we later learned was the Mosquito Fofoqueiro, the "gossip mosquito" hovering above the favelas to record violence and petty crimes for Rio TV.
But our hotel was genuinely just across the street from the beach, and in lieu of a wooden boardwalk the sidewalks edging up to the sand featured a distinctive mid-century modern mosaic tile pattern, like the dress on a lady in a French New Wave movie. The very first thing we did after dropping our luggage in the room that evening was stroll up the street to grab dinner at the nearest restaurant that was still open and might have something vegetarian, which turned out to be the excellent Moroccan place Zazá. I should say that La Garota, the bar where those dudes wrote The Girl From Ipanema, was literally around the corner from our hotel, and open seemingly around the clock, playing the song on loop via the PA system.
In the mornings we ate breakfast (pao de quiexo) and looked out across the Atlantic Ocean at the waves crashing on the Ilha das Palmas. We decided to skip Cristo el Redentor (don't want it don't need it) but Nina got us tickets for a two-stop cable car trip up to Sugarloaf Mountain. This proved to be challenging for me, acrophobe that I am; I was (mostly) able to master myself, but even after we reached the summit, I coudn't shake the feeling that we were teetering on the narrow point of a triangle. What if I fell off? Of course it was nothing like that in reality—there is enough physical real estate on the top of Sugarloaf Mountain for several fancy restaurants, a conference center, and stores selling all kinds of dopey stuff like neckties and mahogany eagles that you might reasonably wonder why you couldn't purchase down at sea level. Plus there were a half dozen kiosks selling frozen acai goop, which I treated myself to as Nina leaned out over the railings to snap photos of the city in panorama. The whole place was engineered enough to have multiple clusters of public bathrooms, which raises the question of how they did the plumbing. A small museum relating the history of the development of the mountain as a tourist destination along with its impressive cable system depicted the engineering crew making their daily climb to the top with ropes and pickaxes—we had it easy! But I did ask that we take the winding forest trail back down to the ground instead of the cable car.
We ate at a restaurant up in the hills of Santa Teresa, hiking up an endless series of winding roads from the Escadaria Selarón after greeting the cats as the sun began to set, past ominous wheatpaste portraiture of Marielle Franco. We almost missed the place—Aprazivel—nestled into the hillside. We descended to a sprawling veranda and ate looking out across the Rio cityscape as bats flapped through the tree canopy in the fading light. We visited the botanic garden, which was green and beautiful and was host to colonies of various species of stingless bees. We visited the aquarium—AquaRio!—which featured the largest and most populous shark tunnel I've ever seen, along with a fun little kiosk you could crawl into and stick your head up into a dome-shaped tank full of piranhas. (We had to wait on line for this one behind a gaggle of kids, as you might expect.)
The beaches in Ipanema (fancy) meet up at an angle with the beaches of Copacabana (funky) at Pedra do Arpoador, a small park built up around a kind of rocky jetty that stretches out beyond a cluster of restaurants and snack kiosks. It's a Carioca tradition (I think?) to grab a beer, climb up on the rocks, and watch the sunset. Everyone applauds when the sun dips below the horizon. It was a bit cloudy the evening we were there, but we clapped anyway.
Sunday, November 12, 2023
Sunday, January 01, 2023
Wizard and Dragon
Things I enjoyed:
Frost Is All Over
Whistle and I'll Come to You
Darkest Dungeon
Devil House
Nina and I went to Puerto Rico for about a week in December. Astute readers of the blog will remember our previous trip more than ten years ago. Consider that since our last visit, the island was subject not only to the devastation of Hurricane Maria but also the devastation of PROMESA. Warmly esconced in first Obama term, we did not imagine it, though maybe we should have. Maybe Papo did. But the island is mostly still there. The Gallery Inn is still there, too, and we stayed there again, as a lark.
I flew out solo, since Nina had arrived several days before for a work thing: a sort of post-Somos Somos. The flight is nothing. You could decide you want to go, in the morning, on a whim, and be there in the afternoon with plenty of time to walk around on the beach. The concierge at the front desk at the hotel asked if I understood what the hotel was all about. Yes, I said, I'd stayed there before. I looked over at the laminated printout taped to one of the plaster busts: "Do not feed Campeche! He is un diablito." Waiting for Nina in our room, my head throbbing from not eating or drinking anything on the plane, I really did feel the vibes coming back. The place is not clean, exactly. The paint on the plaster walls is decades-old and there is snail shit on it. But there is also a fancy antique bookshelf full of cheap old paperback novels in English and Spanish, and if you turn off the dehumidifier, the room doesn't feel like it's indoors at all. It's about as close to camping as I'm willing to get, and ironically it feels a lot more hospitable than an actual hotel. La Perla is still right across the street, but it's gotten a real "glow up" with billboards, neon signs, and fresh paint and sidings on the buildings visible from the road.
Whereas we'd spent our last trip exploring the natural wonders of Puerto Rico, this time we did a lot more "city stuff." An affordance to me, really. I'm a big baby and like to stay where the buildings are and where there's stuff. Nina indulged my desire to visit the Museo de Entomología, and also my desire to not call for a reservation in advance like our old Lonely Planet book recommended. And so we dashed across the highway in Rio Piedras to find that the gatehouse was abandoned, and that the little bathroom inside the gatehouse was all smashed up. And we ventured up the road to where the museum was supposed to be and that building seemed nice and new inside but it was of course closed. So we wandered around the grounds of the University of Puerto Rico's agricultural school (because that is where we were) and waved to a few of the botany students who were tending to their gardens before heading back out to the highway and calling a car. I should have gotten in Trouble for making us do that but I didn't.
We went to La Factoria, which we seemed to remember had at one point been named The Best Bar In The World. It's a good conceit, phenomenal if you can imagine experiencing it in your twenties: A pretty cool bar, with a mysterious door in the back; through the door, another, different bar, with a slightly different vibe. In total I think we "discovered" four bars, but the Internet says there are six. Wowza! Another evening we went to El Batey, which I think might actually be the best bar in the world, and played the most casual round of eight-ball before adding our names to the floor-to-ceiling graffiti with a sharpie.
In the afternoons we dranked iced tea in the front courtyard where a blue macaw (presumably Mikey from our earlier visit; they live forever) had a large cage, a big red and green parrot perched on an artifical tree under a corrugated metal root for shade. There were grackles everywhere, hopping up on the tiled stone table to steal crumbs from our pastries, cocking their heads to look at us with their small golden eyes. Bullying the much larger birds out of their birdseed.
We got paletas from Señor Paleta. I bought us savory mallorcas from a kiosk in Plaza de Armas staffed by a woman who didn't seem to mind the many wasps buzzing around the pastries. I bought us more mallorcas (really the simplest thing to have for breakfast) from an upscale coffee house where I had to listen to some crypto shitheads negotiate a deal while I waited for the pastries. (The island is a paradise but fucked.) We ate mofongo at El Jibarito during a torrential sunshower. I found the location of El Caldero Sabroso, the first place I'd ever had mashed plantains, a decade ago. There was a faded notice that the place was closed, but nothing else had moved into the tiny storefront. Just a padlock on the gate. I made Nina eat yet more vegan tacos at an outdoor food court in Santurce where wild chickens roamed the gravel around the picnic benches and flew up to roost in the trees when it got dark.
A few steps from Señor Paleta is a narrow stone courtyard called Parque de las Palomas, named for the hundred or so pigeons that make their home in nooks carved out of the ancient stone wall of the colonial house next door. (San Juan Viejo is full of these places, an ancient terrace around every corner.) In terms of sheer number of pigeons, the place does not break any records set by New York City. Or even the New Haven Green, where I was once practically mugged by birds after opening a bag of chips. But this is a place you go expressly for the purpose of meeting and interacting with pigeons, and there is even a small kiosk inside that sells birdseed at certain hours. (Though this is in apparent conflict with a sign on the gate outside warning you not to feed the birds.) We found ourselves standing next to a young woman who was absolutely decorated with birds, likely on account of the considerable amount of birdseed she was holding in her cupped hands. A young man was filming her on his phone. Although the birds were polite, she seemed to be a bit unnerved by the sheer number of them on her head, shoulders, and forearms; and she offered to offload some of her birdseed to us. I took some of it, and immediately a pigeon fluttered into my hand to take some. I wasn't prepared for how warm its body was. Like holding a puppy or something. After that we walkd up Calle del Cristo and went into a sock store where they gave us frozen piña coladas in plastic cups and we bought some socks.
Though it felt like July in NYC it was actually almost Christmas, and in the evenings the waterfront and Calle Comercio were dotted with stalls selling gifts and holiday confections, and a skating rink with a synthetic "ice" surface was set up in front of the Puerto Rico Tourism Company's offices on Paseo de la Princesa. The line for skating snaked over itself several times the length of the rink.
We spent a few nights walking around in Santurce, the cool neighborhood in San Juan. We dropped in on an outdoor film screening at La Goyco, a community center repurposed from an old elementary school. We were too late to catch the movies but in time to listen to a panel, mostly in Spanish, from the filmmakers. It was a warm night and I sat in pleasant bafflement understanding about 50% of what was said. We'd walked deep down Calle Loíza looking for "limbers" which are a kind of frozen fruit juice served in plastic cups. That part of San Juan seems caught in a tussle between the cool jovenes living their lives and the rich colonial scum who want a pied-à-terre on the beach. There was a scruffy but impressive community library ("Libros Libres") on the corner of Calle del Parque; a block away, million dollar condos at Gallery Plaza. I know, that's always how it is! We hung out and watched people dance outside the market stalls at La Placita while we ate alcapurrias. (I don't know if I like 'em.) Another night we cut through the concrete courtyard of an apartment building in Parque down to the beach and walked along the water's edge in the dark towards Condado til we reached what looked like a pier half buried in the sand. A huge shape, some kind of industrial hulk, protruded from one end. What was it? We walked closer to see. Oh, a big sewage outflow: "NO SWIMMING." We walked back up to the road.
We went to the Art Museum, and the Contemporary Art Museum (with its Big Ass Fans) and the tiny Museo de San Juan, mere feet from the Inn.
On our last day we visited Save-A-Gato, the cat sanctuary in Old San Juan, a short walk down Calle Norzagaray from the hotel. The sanctuary itself is a small, unassuming building between some basketball courts and one of the buildings of a nearby design school. Didn't seem big enough to accommodate visitors, and it didn't look open anyway. But the surrounding "Parque de los Gatos," a scrubby lawn with a large banyan tree presiding over it, is where all the cats were. Dozens of them, scruffy, skinny, limping; alternately missing ears, eyes, tail tips. But they all seemed pretty satisifed with their lot. Some were friendly and affectionate, most of them indifferent to the handful of people who were carefully stepping around the turds to get a look at them. From there we walked down to Paseo del Morro and traced the ancient sea wall around the Fort until we got too hot. In the evening, we went down to the Cementerio Santa María Magdalena de Pazzi, the necropolis at the end of a short road from El Morro where you can see the waves crashing out beyond the array of white headstones. Time stops for a moment.
Back up on the broad green lawn of the park, dozens of people were walking, sitting, and flying kites. As it happened Nina had never flown a kite before, and there was a woman selling kites and other picnic tack from the back of a van near the entrance to the Fort. We bought the cheapest kite, printed with a picture of a wizard astride a great golden dragon; unspooled the line, and ran it up into the sky. The sea wind by the Fort carried it up rapidly, and it we took turns tugging the bridle back and forth to keep it aloft. There's a real pleasant disorientation that comes with flying a kite out where the sky is really huge and the sun has just set and you're in a huge field that's full of people but it feels like it's only you and the sky wheeling above.
Once it got truly dark we placed the kite on a low stone wall near the rotary on Calle del Morro where people were leaving behind things that could be reused. We'll come back for it in ten years.
Frost Is All Over
Whistle and I'll Come to You
Darkest Dungeon
Devil House
Nina and I went to Puerto Rico for about a week in December. Astute readers of the blog will remember our previous trip more than ten years ago. Consider that since our last visit, the island was subject not only to the devastation of Hurricane Maria but also the devastation of PROMESA. Warmly esconced in first Obama term, we did not imagine it, though maybe we should have. Maybe Papo did. But the island is mostly still there. The Gallery Inn is still there, too, and we stayed there again, as a lark.
I flew out solo, since Nina had arrived several days before for a work thing: a sort of post-Somos Somos. The flight is nothing. You could decide you want to go, in the morning, on a whim, and be there in the afternoon with plenty of time to walk around on the beach. The concierge at the front desk at the hotel asked if I understood what the hotel was all about. Yes, I said, I'd stayed there before. I looked over at the laminated printout taped to one of the plaster busts: "Do not feed Campeche! He is un diablito." Waiting for Nina in our room, my head throbbing from not eating or drinking anything on the plane, I really did feel the vibes coming back. The place is not clean, exactly. The paint on the plaster walls is decades-old and there is snail shit on it. But there is also a fancy antique bookshelf full of cheap old paperback novels in English and Spanish, and if you turn off the dehumidifier, the room doesn't feel like it's indoors at all. It's about as close to camping as I'm willing to get, and ironically it feels a lot more hospitable than an actual hotel. La Perla is still right across the street, but it's gotten a real "glow up" with billboards, neon signs, and fresh paint and sidings on the buildings visible from the road.
Whereas we'd spent our last trip exploring the natural wonders of Puerto Rico, this time we did a lot more "city stuff." An affordance to me, really. I'm a big baby and like to stay where the buildings are and where there's stuff. Nina indulged my desire to visit the Museo de Entomología, and also my desire to not call for a reservation in advance like our old Lonely Planet book recommended. And so we dashed across the highway in Rio Piedras to find that the gatehouse was abandoned, and that the little bathroom inside the gatehouse was all smashed up. And we ventured up the road to where the museum was supposed to be and that building seemed nice and new inside but it was of course closed. So we wandered around the grounds of the University of Puerto Rico's agricultural school (because that is where we were) and waved to a few of the botany students who were tending to their gardens before heading back out to the highway and calling a car. I should have gotten in Trouble for making us do that but I didn't.
We went to La Factoria, which we seemed to remember had at one point been named The Best Bar In The World. It's a good conceit, phenomenal if you can imagine experiencing it in your twenties: A pretty cool bar, with a mysterious door in the back; through the door, another, different bar, with a slightly different vibe. In total I think we "discovered" four bars, but the Internet says there are six. Wowza! Another evening we went to El Batey, which I think might actually be the best bar in the world, and played the most casual round of eight-ball before adding our names to the floor-to-ceiling graffiti with a sharpie.
In the afternoons we dranked iced tea in the front courtyard where a blue macaw (presumably Mikey from our earlier visit; they live forever) had a large cage, a big red and green parrot perched on an artifical tree under a corrugated metal root for shade. There were grackles everywhere, hopping up on the tiled stone table to steal crumbs from our pastries, cocking their heads to look at us with their small golden eyes. Bullying the much larger birds out of their birdseed.
We got paletas from Señor Paleta. I bought us savory mallorcas from a kiosk in Plaza de Armas staffed by a woman who didn't seem to mind the many wasps buzzing around the pastries. I bought us more mallorcas (really the simplest thing to have for breakfast) from an upscale coffee house where I had to listen to some crypto shitheads negotiate a deal while I waited for the pastries. (The island is a paradise but fucked.) We ate mofongo at El Jibarito during a torrential sunshower. I found the location of El Caldero Sabroso, the first place I'd ever had mashed plantains, a decade ago. There was a faded notice that the place was closed, but nothing else had moved into the tiny storefront. Just a padlock on the gate. I made Nina eat yet more vegan tacos at an outdoor food court in Santurce where wild chickens roamed the gravel around the picnic benches and flew up to roost in the trees when it got dark.
A few steps from Señor Paleta is a narrow stone courtyard called Parque de las Palomas, named for the hundred or so pigeons that make their home in nooks carved out of the ancient stone wall of the colonial house next door. (San Juan Viejo is full of these places, an ancient terrace around every corner.) In terms of sheer number of pigeons, the place does not break any records set by New York City. Or even the New Haven Green, where I was once practically mugged by birds after opening a bag of chips. But this is a place you go expressly for the purpose of meeting and interacting with pigeons, and there is even a small kiosk inside that sells birdseed at certain hours. (Though this is in apparent conflict with a sign on the gate outside warning you not to feed the birds.) We found ourselves standing next to a young woman who was absolutely decorated with birds, likely on account of the considerable amount of birdseed she was holding in her cupped hands. A young man was filming her on his phone. Although the birds were polite, she seemed to be a bit unnerved by the sheer number of them on her head, shoulders, and forearms; and she offered to offload some of her birdseed to us. I took some of it, and immediately a pigeon fluttered into my hand to take some. I wasn't prepared for how warm its body was. Like holding a puppy or something. After that we walkd up Calle del Cristo and went into a sock store where they gave us frozen piña coladas in plastic cups and we bought some socks.
Though it felt like July in NYC it was actually almost Christmas, and in the evenings the waterfront and Calle Comercio were dotted with stalls selling gifts and holiday confections, and a skating rink with a synthetic "ice" surface was set up in front of the Puerto Rico Tourism Company's offices on Paseo de la Princesa. The line for skating snaked over itself several times the length of the rink.
We spent a few nights walking around in Santurce, the cool neighborhood in San Juan. We dropped in on an outdoor film screening at La Goyco, a community center repurposed from an old elementary school. We were too late to catch the movies but in time to listen to a panel, mostly in Spanish, from the filmmakers. It was a warm night and I sat in pleasant bafflement understanding about 50% of what was said. We'd walked deep down Calle Loíza looking for "limbers" which are a kind of frozen fruit juice served in plastic cups. That part of San Juan seems caught in a tussle between the cool jovenes living their lives and the rich colonial scum who want a pied-à-terre on the beach. There was a scruffy but impressive community library ("Libros Libres") on the corner of Calle del Parque; a block away, million dollar condos at Gallery Plaza. I know, that's always how it is! We hung out and watched people dance outside the market stalls at La Placita while we ate alcapurrias. (I don't know if I like 'em.) Another night we cut through the concrete courtyard of an apartment building in Parque down to the beach and walked along the water's edge in the dark towards Condado til we reached what looked like a pier half buried in the sand. A huge shape, some kind of industrial hulk, protruded from one end. What was it? We walked closer to see. Oh, a big sewage outflow: "NO SWIMMING." We walked back up to the road.
We went to the Art Museum, and the Contemporary Art Museum (with its Big Ass Fans) and the tiny Museo de San Juan, mere feet from the Inn.
On our last day we visited Save-A-Gato, the cat sanctuary in Old San Juan, a short walk down Calle Norzagaray from the hotel. The sanctuary itself is a small, unassuming building between some basketball courts and one of the buildings of a nearby design school. Didn't seem big enough to accommodate visitors, and it didn't look open anyway. But the surrounding "Parque de los Gatos," a scrubby lawn with a large banyan tree presiding over it, is where all the cats were. Dozens of them, scruffy, skinny, limping; alternately missing ears, eyes, tail tips. But they all seemed pretty satisifed with their lot. Some were friendly and affectionate, most of them indifferent to the handful of people who were carefully stepping around the turds to get a look at them. From there we walked down to Paseo del Morro and traced the ancient sea wall around the Fort until we got too hot. In the evening, we went down to the Cementerio Santa María Magdalena de Pazzi, the necropolis at the end of a short road from El Morro where you can see the waves crashing out beyond the array of white headstones. Time stops for a moment.
Back up on the broad green lawn of the park, dozens of people were walking, sitting, and flying kites. As it happened Nina had never flown a kite before, and there was a woman selling kites and other picnic tack from the back of a van near the entrance to the Fort. We bought the cheapest kite, printed with a picture of a wizard astride a great golden dragon; unspooled the line, and ran it up into the sky. The sea wind by the Fort carried it up rapidly, and it we took turns tugging the bridle back and forth to keep it aloft. There's a real pleasant disorientation that comes with flying a kite out where the sky is really huge and the sun has just set and you're in a huge field that's full of people but it feels like it's only you and the sky wheeling above.
Once it got truly dark we placed the kite on a low stone wall near the rotary on Calle del Morro where people were leaving behind things that could be reused. We'll come back for it in ten years.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)