Day 70 – Banish the modern world!

“Banish the modern world!” is the slogan that we lived up to the whole day that we spent in the center of Rio, the only place that still has the old-looking buildings. The rest of the city was rebuilt in the 1960’s, and in my opinion, is quite nothing to write home about. But the center is beautifully quaint. Apparently, the old facades reveal ultra-modern offices behind them, and it is a construction law here to preserve the exterior while rebuilding the interior. I wish they came up with this brilliant idea in the 1960’s, but I guess the main problem back then was that they needed to go up, since they couldn’t really expand the town otherwise due to the water surrounding it almost from all sides.

APPLE PIE FOR TOM
Tom’s ultimate test for any foreign country is a McDonald’s apple pie. I don’t know where this tradition came from, but I witnessed it observed in every place I’ve been to together with him. Tom is in NYC now, but since there was no McDonald’s in Ilha Grande for him to make his tasting at, we decide to do it in his honor and on his behalf. At McDonald’s we try to communicate with some guy who works there in a mixture of English and Spanish, and his face actually lights up with excited understanding. He tells something in Portuguese to the girl at the counter, she gets our 1.50 Reals, and proudly hands us a paper bag, the shape of which doesn’t suggest any presence of an apple pie inside. Sure enough, it’s an apple! Well, at least we got half-understood.

ART SHOW
In NYC, Dima has this unique ability to find the weirdest and funnest places and activities. We have always cherished this talent of his. And who wouldn’t? If you are with Dima, you will never get bored. Ever. Even in Rio, even when everybody around speaks Portuguese, he managed to literally bump into some experimental art show and dragged us in. Completely against our will, but since we were told that the show would last only 15 minutes, we gave in.

For the next half an hour we witnessed audio art in the making. The only thing present in the small gallery hosting this even were speakers hidden in the most unlikely places: in the cracks of the floor, on the ceiling, under some watches, etc. Some people (not sure if they were part of the art-making crew or innocent by-standers) read something in Portuguese (one liners, long poems, nonsensical and pretty annoying sounds, etc.) into the microphone and then it was played back from one of the speakers. Both the original reading and the playback were recorded, and it was clear that all of it will be somehow amalgamated at the end of the performance. Unfortunately, something went wrong, and they had to repeat the whole wonderful experience another time, making the show last half an hour instead of the promised 15 minutes…

The hall was packed with people, standing, sitting on the floor, leaning against the walls, and it was absolutely impossible to leave, because at the very beginning of the show Dima insisted that we sit at the very heart of it. He, of course, strategically located himself next to the open doors, so in the middle of this nonsense he just walked away to the nearest bar. At least, he had the decency to greet us with beer at the end of this audio torture. Actually, the end result of the recording experiment was pretty cool. The super-imposed voices were transmitted from every speaker in the gallery and onto the street, and it created a really interesting effect. So in the end, it turned out to be a somewhat successful time-spending.

NO SANTA TERESA FOR US TODAY...

After our excursion in the Centro, we made an attempt to ascend to Santa Teresa, allegedly the most picturesque and bohemian neighborhood in Rio. However, the tram was closed due to the mud-slides, so we decided to go some other time.

Note: Carioca is a person who was born and lives in Rio de Janeiro.