Happy first father´s day

So this is a little belated at this point (as are all these posts on Rio by the way), but who cares.

This year was a particularly special father´s day for me, as it was my first as a father.

I woke up and took Annie for a long run up towards the Christ statue, giving Jo a chance to sleep in. That might seem like special Mother´s day treatment, but for me to have a wonderful time with just Annie was really special.

Later in the day, Jo, Annie, and I went to a lovely little bookstore cafe and engaged in another of my favorite fatherly past times: perusing (and procuring!) foreign language children´s books. We came with a few including: I am a Plant; The day you were born; and Spot Goes to Sleep. Sure to be family classics. (my favorite is I am a Plant, although when Annie won´t go to sleep the Spot book has a special place in the rotation).

Aside from the books, there was some lovely afternoon sun, which coupled with a game of peek-a-boo (pictures below) and some excellent espresso and pastries was the proverbial icing on the father´s day cake.

And I think we can all agree that Jo can rock the fedora.

Rodizio

Perhaps one of my favorite things in Brazil is the pizza rodizio. There, I´ve said it. No, it´s not the beautiful beaches, cultural diversity, or ecological riches. It´s the pizza...especially the dessert pizza.

Chocolate and strawberry anyone?

For those who might have missed previous posts in which I mention the rodizio the short and long of it is that it´s all you can eat pizza, but it´s not just that, oh no. Rather, it´s an experience, an environment. A beautiful environment in which waiters circulate endlessly between tables with pizza after pizza.

I actually feel ridiculous devoting a post to the rodizio, but when one has been in rural Amazonia for an extended period of time. There´s no denying it´. One word. Rodizio.

Now, when we were in Rio our friendly hostess E. decided to challenge me to a pizza eating competition.

Being empirically minded, we decided to add a series of handicaps for E. and Jo. Gender counted as a slice as did beer.

                                             Annie was underwhelmed we weren´t sharing.

Unbelievably, in the final tally, E. won. It´s true. To preserve both of our decencies, I won´t give out final numbers here, but let´s just say we both made it well into the double digits. And now, it might just be time to look for another rodizio.

Morning walk

One wonderful thing about Rio is just getting up and taking a walk. Staying in Santa Teresa, this meant that we got to stroll up towards Cristo (the Christ statue).



It's a gorgeous walk through a national forest, which given that it's Brazil is temperate rainforest.






And the views from the lookout over Rio's incredible coastline are...well, just incredible.

Market day meets Rio

Readers of this blog might remember my love of old antique (read: junk) markets. Well, it turns out that there is a great one in Rio.

  

 On bus over with E. Annie is a big fan of mesh it turns out; who isn't really?

Turns out it's right below an overpass (FYI make sure to book it out of there once the market's winding down!)

 It was a place where the most random of most random things can be found


Dolls which have seen better days...

 

Speaking of being a big fan, there's nothing I like more than random motors....

also was glad to see vintage Nat. Geo's are a favorite

And old VHS cameras

 

Annie did get a little nervous though....

 

when she saw the vintage surgery instruments! 

The strangest juxtaposition of all was the vintage porn and machetes. 

Sorry, no picture due to the young readership of this blog. 

In and about Rio

Rio is an amazing city: beaches, mountains, hiking, climbing, national forests--all within the city limits. We were here for two weeks for Dave to conduct research at the People's Summit of the Rio+20 environmental summit.

Dave taking a quick break from research to consult his notes

We stayed with our wonderful friend E in Santa Teresa, an artsy neighborhood up in the hills overlooking much of the city. It's so hilly up there that until very recently, public transport was confined to a system of street cars called the "Bonde" (after James Bond because he rides one in one of his films). The Bonde has become the emblem of the neighborhood, but a few months ago, a car tipped over and killed 14 people. Now hair-raising buses are running up there instead, but there's a large community-based movement to bring back the Bonde. The movement uses a lot of art work involving the iconic street car with a little teardrop on it, like it's crying.

 

Rio+20=Rio+Verde (on poster above)

Below are the Lapa Steps, an installment of ever-changing mosaics on a very long staircase leading down from the hills to central Rio. Rumor has it that the artist lives underneath the staircase.

There's also a lot of street life in Rio. There's the bar scene, which we didn't get much exposure to because we're old oldies, but the food scene was more our speed. In Santa Teresa, a Bahian woman (named Teresa, no less) sets up a decorated tent every Thursday-Sunday where she sits and makes acarajae, a typical Bahian dish consisting of shrimpy-okra-y-lentil-y paste on these deep-fried buns.

A storied fixture in Santa Teresa is the artist Getulio. His art, made out of repurposed trash, wood, and paint. For the last 25 years, he's occupied a workshop he built on a median in the neighborhood that looks just like a Bonde car. His work is currently being shown in an exhibit at a national museum. It's pretty awesome. It depicts Bonzolandia, a fictitious robot-inhabited world that eerily resembles our own.

"The value of the ticket is respect, charisma, and happiness." (Above)

Ilha de Marajo: 2

One of the biggest highlights of our trip to Ilha de Marajo (see our next-to-last post for an overview) was our exploration of the mangrove forests lining small inland channels off the Amazon River.

 

 We took a wooden boat back into the channels twice, first with a guide who helped us figure out where we were going and pointed out some of the local wildlife, and the second time on our own, fortified with a large bag of local mangoes.

Not only was this Annie’s first trip into a mangrove forest, it was her first opportunity to stuff her face with mangoes. She loved it.

 

 we also loved it, as we did the quiet moments gliding through the silent waterways, watching our sleeping baby in the little nest we created.

 

We had to make sure to time our expeditions with the tides. The peak of high tide, in the early morning, can be dangerous because a lot of water is moving into the tangle-y roots and could conceivably take your boat right in with it.

 The low tide, in the early afternoon, is even more problematic, as the water gets so low that the root networks are exposed and it’s too shallow to paddle. Thus, we went out around mid-morning both times. It was cool to watch the tide fluctuate over the course of our few hours in the water. The exposed mangrove roots were covered with little crabs scuttling about. 

The wildlife and flora were fantastic. Jo was especially taken with the birding. We saw two species of macaques, a three-toed sloth, orchids, and all kinds of birds, including several pairs of toucans and one of these odd birds, called a hoatzin, which hops and scrambles around in the roots like a gangly, clumsy turkey. I had been eyeing its illustration in my bird book for weeks and was dying to see it in the flesh.

Hoatzin

 Monkey silhouette

 Acai at every turn

At one point, we found a little spot of dry land, where we stopped in hopes of seeing a capybara. Alas, no capybaras—but we did find an awfully intriguing piece of baby wildlife there instead.

364 days of bliss

Our anniversaries often have a way of, well, sucking. In fact, it’s become kind of a tradition. Here’s a run-down of our anniversaries so far:

First—Spent sleeping on a stone bench in the rain outside of the (closed) airport in Florence, Italy

Second—Spent apart; Dave in Brazil and Jo in India

Third—Air conditioning broke in 90+ degree heat in St. Louis, and half of us got food poisoning from bad chicken nachos in the close quarters of a cross-country RV trip with Dave’s parents

Fourth—locked out of our lovely cabin in an orchid farm in Kalimpong, India, after the key broke in the door; had to climb through the window to get inside with me 6 months pregnant

And finally we come to our fifth, which was just last weekend. It was the day after our return to the settlement from Belem, which was itself a little tough because we had had such a nice trip. As befits our anniversary trend, we awoke the morning to a blanket of ants invading our house. Then the toilet clogged.

As Dave likes to observe, we’ve gotta pay for 364 days of marital bliss with one crappy day every once in a while.