Eat Rio Blog - Page 50 of 106

Framing Rio

08/03/2013/2 Comments/in Musings

A few days ago I was about to lay the table for breakfast (it was a weekend – I’m never that organised on a weekday). I gazed past the table and out of the window and was struck by how beautiful the view was. As Mrs Eat Rio can testify, at times like this I forget about whatever it is that I’m supposed to be doing and go grab my camera (very annoying if you’re waiting hungrily for breakfast!).

Although the end result was that we had to wait a couple of extra minutes before eating our fried eggs on toast, I think it was worth it.

Enough to make you forget about breakfast (temporarily at least…).

At the time I took the photo I wasn’t trying to be clever – I just wanted to get a shot that would show what it was like to look out of the window from inside. Afterwards I looked at the shot again and thought it looked rather nice, framed by the open windows on either side (please feel free to notice and admire the roses that are growing in the window box too!).

Last night I was looking through the photos I’d taken recently and realised there was another one that I had taken that was inadvertently framed.

Copacabana, street kids and popcorn in the rain

07/03/2013/9 Comments/in Musings

We had a massive storm in Rio on Tuesday night. I was leaving work in Barra and had just got on my bus when the first fat drops of rain started to fall. Within minutes the rain was coming down in torrents and the thunder and lightning started soon after.

The windows on the bus steamed up and the rain was so strong that it was like someone was spraying the outside of the bus with a hose. As the bus hurtled along the precipitous Avenida Niemeyer I thought that perhaps it was a good thing that I couldn’t see out of the windows.

When hurtling along Avenida Niemeyer at breakneck speed in the dark in the middle of a thunder storm, looking out of the window is not recommended.

The bus came down the hill into Leblon and then followed the beach into Ipanema. Every time the bus doors opened to let passengers off, I saw some new scene of watery mayhem – people cowering on the beach under a buckling gazebo or wading through flood-water and sheltering under wind-smashed umbrellas.

Then I made my fatal error.

Rio’s Lost Paradise

05/03/2013/26 Comments/in Art and culture

The caretaker, sometimes armed, is on the lookout for intruders. Twice a day he climbs the 37 stories of the residential building he guards. He doesn’t greet anyone as he makes his rounds and no one greets him because despite the fact that it is over 40 years old, the building is empty and no one has ever officially lived there.

The building that I’m talking about is in Barra da Tijuca and was once called Torre Abraham Lincoln – today it is usually referred to simply as Torre H (‘Torre’ means tower). Alongside this abandoned building sits its inhabited and fully functional identical twin, Torre Charles de Gaulle. They make a strange looking pair and immediately caught my eye when I started working nearby.

What’s wrong with this picture? Torre Charles de Gaulle on the left is a fully functioning building complete with satellite dishes and a/c units. Torre H, on the right, is a windowless abandoned shell.

When I first saw Torre H I had no idea how old it was – I thought maybe there was just a short delay in the construction work. As time passed I noticed that there were no windows being put in, no builders, in fact no activity whatsoever.

Coming back on a birthday

02/03/2013/7 Comments/in Musings

Well, what an eventful couple of weeks it has been! My 13 days in London were many things – fun, exhausting, chilly but above all else a great chance to catch up with friends and family (though I did miss a few friends which was sad).

I feel rather bad that my post comparing London with Rio seemed to show London in rather a bad light. I guess going straight from Rio carnival at 38°C to a Monday morning London commute at -2°C made me feel a little negative. London is undoubtedly an amazing city and the hard winter months make the brief summer all the more magical (I must plan my work trips more carefully in future!).

On my way to the airport. Heathrow is in a rather miserable part of outer London, but I was pretty pleased with the send off.

Moving between my two favourite cities always makes me reflect. I think about my past life in London and my new life in Rio, the pros and cons of both cities and the things I miss out on by being in one place and not the other (that is a rather ‘glass half empty’ view isn’t it?). But looking at things in a more positive light, I can never feel too sad as I leave either place because there is so much to look forward to in the other.

Street Art Adding Colour to Rio

28/02/2013/11 Comments/in Art and culture

Regular readers will know that I have a soft-spot for street art. I know it’s not to everyone’s liking and some people even have quite strong objections to what they see as ugly vandalism, but I like it. Having said that, I definitely have more trouble with the pixação so common in São Paulo – while street art (in my eyes at least) makes places less ugly and more interesting, pixação seems to do the opposite.

Today I wanted to illustrate the positive effects of street art in Rio. Praça Quinze de Novembro is a large open square in Rio’s Centro (downtown) neighbourhood. Running straight through the middle of Praça Quinze is the Elevado da Perimetral, an overpass or flyover. Take a look at the scene back in February 2012, taken from Google Maps Street View:

Dark and imposing – the Elevado Perimetral running through the middle of Praça Quinze. Photo from Google Maps Street View