The Pool on the Roof

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.