Getting Ready for Carnival Fever

There's a Bob the builder marathon going on in the living room on the account that my boy has been feverish on and off for the last few days which gives me some time to talk about another fever of sorts;  the carnival fever.

Carnival is big. BEE-EYE-GEE. In fact, Rio's is the biggest carnival celebration in the world. What comes to mind when most people think of carnival is the bejeweled, feathered samba dancers sporting their 12 inch heels and the monumental floats which slide along the street to the infamous samba beat. This world famous 2 night samba parade competition which takes place at the Sambodromo, the largest stage in the world flanked with permanent concrete grandstands is serious business. Each night, 90,000 people watch 6-7 samba schools made up of 3000-5000 people dancing to the beat of the bateria, a group of 200-300 musicians that lead the pace. Each school has 1 hour to pass in front of the judges.

A "Passista" (samba dancer)- photo taken from carnivalbookers.com

If watching from the grandstands is too laid back for you, you can take part of the parade simply by purchasing a costume from one of the samba school which can cost you between $300-800 US and attending practice sessions before the parade.

Let's say you are one of the 50,000 foreign tourists that floods the city during this week long holiday that didn't get a ticket to the Sambodromo, no worries, you can lose yourself in the crowds at the famous street parades, called Blocos, which take part in various neighbourhoods all over the city for FREE! Each bloco has it's own name and theme, some of which have been taking over the streets for over 100 years. The most famous of the 269 registered Blocos are the Polka Dot Bloco, and the Armpit of Christ Bloco. While The Polka Dot Bloco (Cordao da Bola Preta ) claims to be the largest with over 200,000 partiers, the oldest, Monobloco, hosted 400,000 thousand paraders last year with a street band of 200 performers and they are so popular that they perform all year round.

Bloco street party- photo taken from carnivalbookers.com

Question. Where are the porta-potties?

Today is Friday. It all starts on Sunday. There's is an eerie calmness in the neighborhood, and practically no traffic on the road. Definitely the calm before the storm.....

Mosquitoes, mosquitoes, those darn mosquitoes.

It's early Friday afternoon, and I've been trying to write a post for a few days now and nothing is coming to mind. The kid and I were playing "Rescue in the water and I'm the sea captain" game in the playground when our 4 o'clock D.D.D chased us back upstairs. I nicknamed this daily occurrence, D.D.D. which stands for Daily Dengue Dose and is basically a guy that walks the perimeter of the property with what looks like a leaf blower that spews pesticides in the form of stinky blue smoke that floats off with the wind in swirls of hot air. The rank smoke is supposed to kill the mosquitoes that carry the dengue fever which is a big problem in tropical places.

Last year, I was sitting in the dengue ward at a hospital because I had a weird dizzy spell which turned out to be a condition nicknamed the "foreigner-can't-adapt-to-the-heat-disease" by the local doctors and while I was sitting in a chair being re-hydrated and making a mental list of all the infected places not to touch on my way out, people were being put through at a steady pace to be treated for dengue fever. Dengue apparently feels like a really bad flu, not unlike the flu that was going around like wild fire around my neighborhood over the Christmas holidays; fever, headache, and muscle and joint pain. Just your general pin-you-down-into-bed-moaning kind of flu without a vaccine. This particular female mosquito borne fever is doubly evil because if you get once, you 'll probably just feel crappy for a while and get over it, but it makes you susceptible to a hemorrhagic version of the same fever that basically turns your insides to a bloody mess. Yum.

So if we happen to be in the pool when the D.D.D guy starts up his pesticide blower, we hold our breath or if we can we run upstairs to our apartment and close the windows. What can we do? Ingest chemicals designed to kill bugs or risk turning into a ziplock bag of blood? You tell me. I do have to say that I'm counting the days when the mosquito season dries up and I don't have to put on repellent every day.

This job has to be one of the worse jobs ever.

Battling Customer Dis-service

Am I crazy? I asked myself on my way home from the supermarket yesterday. Checking with my Brazilian husband, he assured me that I'm not insane and that I've been experiencing a heavy dose of Brazilian-style customer service or should I say "dis-service". I'm not used to having to throw tantrums to get my way, signing heavily and rolling my eyes. I don't like to look like the crazy "foreign" lady who's lost her cool, but at the same time, I can't sit in line behind 15 people when one cashier is slowly passing the items over the scanner as if she had no feeling in her arms and a huge hangover, while the next cashier is chatting up her fellow co-worker and refusing to allow customers to pass through her.

"Are you a preferred customer?" The cashier asks as if I had woken her up in the middle the night.
"I don't know am I?" I wish I could say sarcastically in Portuguese.

I try to stay calm and gently suggest that perhaps she could mention to her manager that it would be helpful to us "preferred customers" if they would open a few more cash registers when the line-up is long. She smiles and chuckles. It's funny that this wacked foreign lady is trying to complain in her broken Portuguese. She brushes me off and slowly scans my things. I focus  on counting my breaths, counting my breaths, counting my breaths.

So you might think it's a one time thing, a bad day, you know, but it's not, it has happened frequently enough that I've been questioning my ability to communicate in Portuguese, and my "people skills". My husband assures me that unfortunately to get what you need, even the most basic service you always have to assume that they didn't hear you the first time, that the information that gave you is wrong, or that they've forgotten you. As a Brazilian, he reminds me that there is much more of a "fend for yourself" attitude that permeates daily life, even on the road, he points out. And he's right, you have to push your way into traffic, otherwise you will sit waiting and waiting to merge whereas in Vancouver, you are much more likely to have someone let you in with a smile. So it's okay, he assures me to be more forceful and make myself heard.

The thing is while I don't prefer to act like a smelly toddler who refuses to take a bath to get things done in my life, counting my breaths can only take me so far.  I should really brush up on simple, polite, but stern Portuguese phrases that I could use to gently coddle the service workers I encounter into actually doing what they are paid to do.

Rant is over.

(Here's a photo of the beautiful view behind our tower to make up for my rant.)

Summer in Brazil

Every summer in Vancouver, I wait for it. And it never comes, summer. Ah sure, some years after an interminable rainy June, we get lucky, the sun comes out for a few days in a row, we scrape layers of rust from our bbqs and we dare to go out with bare shoulders past sundown, but that's not summer. Not to me. Summer is the seemingly endless string of sunny days sucking on Popsicles and sweaty nights with the fan on. My memories of the summers of my youth are filled with the scent of dry grass that cut my feet as I run to plunge off the end of the dock into the refreshing, dark waters of the lake. I hoist myself back up out of the water, giving a kick to untie myself from the tickling algae wrapped around my toes and lay my cool body on the hot wood, tracing the carvings, JT loves MK forever with my finger. I daydream that I could have a summer romance like in the musty second hand Sweet Valley High novels I bought at the Thrift store, but I know I won't, mostly because the only boys I've seen around have more of the slight mullet/Guns and Roses tank top look to them than the dreamy, sun-kissed, clean cut sailors from Sweet Valley. Summers are countless bike rides to the ice cream shop because dad will always side with you if you ask him before mom. Days filled with canoeing, picnics, wet bathing suits, and visits with the cousins and nights buzzing first with mosquitos, then cicadas, crackling campfires, and kids laughing in smelly sleeping bags.

Most of all, summer is waking up every morning, day after day and knowing it's sunny and it's hot, and the best place to be is near water. Being here in Rio, with the temperature in the high 30's and not a day of rain in sight, brings back all these wonderful memories of what summer really is, and sorry folks in Vancouver, but even when one or even two weeks goes by without rain, there's always that feeling that today might be the last sunny day.....and just that inkling....makes it feel like a prolonged warm Spring that slides into a cool crispy Fall.