street-art-happy

Rio after Melbourne (Part 2)

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In my last post I showed you some of the culinary highlights of my trip to Australia. Today I wanted to show you some of the other things that caught my eye. I’m aware that this is a blog about Rio, not Melbourne, so I promise that after this we’ll be back in Brazil for the foreseeable future!

 

Beaches and coastline

With the beaches being such a central part of life in Rio, Mrs Eat Rio was very keen to see how the beaches of Melbourne compared. Although St Kilda was nice, it didn’t really come close to the city beaches of Rio. Once we got out of town we saw some much nicer beaches, but I still think Rio wins this contest!

Lorne-beach

Along the Great Ocean Road lies the beach town of Lorne. Pretty quiet this time of year and not an umbrella or beer seller in sight!

 

Lorne-beach

Nice waves for surfing in Lorne.

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Faces of Peru

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For those of you who missed my last post, I have just got back from an amazing weekend in Lima. It was a great weekend in many ways – the food was seriously good, I met some very knowledgeable (and nice) people and I played my small part in representing Rio as one of Latin America’s great cities.

After a weekend so densely packed with goodness, I hope you’ll forgive me if there is a distinctly Peruvian flavour to the next few posts – as someone who has been living in Rio for more than 3 years, I found the contrasts fascinating.

One of the most striking differences I noticed was in the faces of the people I met. The Mistura festival had brought together farmers and producers from all over Peru and I found myself marvelling at their wonderful faces. Here is a selection of my favourites.

 

 

[I’ve put these into a Lightbox series, so just click on the first image to get started]

 

Olive-farmer

This is an olive farmer from Tacna, a region in southern Peru very close to the Chilean border.

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catadores

Rio’s Invisible Army

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There is an army on the streets of Rio right now. They have no formal organisation or structure but they’re doing their best to clean up Rio. No, I’m not referring to the protest groups in the continuing anti-corruption protests in Rio. I’m not even talking about that orange army of waste collectors, the garis. I’m talking about the huge numbers of people who roam the streets of Rio collecting unwanted items that still have some value.

catador

These guys are known as Catadores or Catadores de lixo and more often than not, you see them pulling a hand cart like this.

 

Catador translates to something like ‘collector’ or ‘scavenger’ and that’s a pretty fair description of what they do. Wherever there is something of value that has been discarded, you can expect to find someone busily packing it up and taking it away.

You see catadores in many places across the city. If you spend any time on the beach you will almost certainly have someone come up and ask if they can take your empty beer/soda cans. On the streets you see people pushing trolleys or pulling handcarts, often piled high with cardboard or laden with huge bags full of empty plastic bottles.

catadores

These guys were roaming the streets in Glória, looking for plastic bottles.

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jiewa-at-bandung

Your City, Your Passion!

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A couple of weeks ago I made a rather cryptic comment about a secret mission involving Eat Rio, communication and Indonesia. Well today I can finally reveal all!

Some months back, I was approached by someone from the Skype company who asked if I’d be interested in getting involved in a project they were working on. The title of the project was “Your City, Your Passion” and you might not be surprised to hear that I was a little cynical at first. There is a lot of talk about ‘passion’ nowadays: just skim through Twitter and you will find countless people who are “passionate about getting you the best deal on home insurance” or they’ll shout joyfully that “Shower curtain rings are our passion!”.

However, Skype’s proposal was irresistible: spend a day wandering around Rio, showcasing the best and most interesting food the city has to offer. Hmmm, ‘Rio’ and ‘food’ – I am (reluctantly) forced to admit that I am passionate about both of these subjects.

jiewa-at-bandung

This is Jie! As I showed him Rio, he showed me Surabaya.

 

My partner for the day was Jie, a food blogger from the city of Surabaya on the Indonesian island of East Java. Here’s where Skype came in – they arranged for Jie and me to ‘meet up’ for the day over Skype on our mobile phones. Using the wonders of modern mobile technology we chatted, swapped photos and videos and compared the culinary highlights of our cities.

So, how did it go?

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Jumping-spider

Photo Post: Brazilian Jumping Spider

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Hi everyone – nice weekend? I made a couple of rather delicious discoveries that will need to be written up when I can find a moment. In the meantime, take a look at this cool jumping spider that I spotted hopping about on the roof yesterday.

Jumping-spider

Apologies to the arachnophobes out there. Hopefully it will help you to know that this is an extreme close-up. This little fellow is just 1cm across.

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