City of Gods
23 June 2005 (Thursday) – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
I heard about a square called Largo do Boticario that is just a stone’s throw away from where I was staying. It is a square that apparently had some really old and beautiful houses, restored and preserved. I figured I would take 5 minutes for a look-see before I check out the nearby Museu Internacional de Arte Naif (International Museum of Naive Art).
I ended up chatting with, yes, another artist, who is permanently situated at the square. He is Carlos Solar Barrios, a water-colour painter from Chile. He showed me his newspaper clippings with pride, which indicated that he is somewhat famous. Then, he flipped through his huge photo albums of all the photos he had taken with tourists. He even had a picture of Sarah! To my amazement, he knew where each of them was from. (Of course, I did not remember anything right after.) He comes everyday to the square to paint the square and the houses and to sell his paintings to the tourists who drop by.
Carlos then took out a pencil, an eraser and a piece of paper and handed them to me, suggesting that I draw something there as well. Huh?? I hadn’t planned on doing this. I was a little apprehensive, but he told me not to be shy about it. OK, I would give it a go.
I sketched for, maybe 2 or 2.5 hours and finally, I showed the sketch to him. Hehee… He liked it! He said that he had seen many sketches from other people, INCLUDING artists, and this was one of the best ones he had seen. Wow… this guy has a sugar mouth! But I would take it as a compliment as I was rather proud of it as well. It was not really complete as I had no idea how to handle the trees, but tudo bom.
I finally took my leave because I was starving and terribly thirsty. I returned home to make lunch. Originally, I wanted to relax a little at home, but the sun was out!! So, in haste, I grabbed my beach-stuff and took the bus to town.
I hopped off at Botafogo and walked to the beach Praia Botafogo to admire the Pão de Açúcar (Sugar Loaf Mountain). This beach is purely for playing ball games, not for swimming at all, unless you rather fancy a coat of oil and toxic pollutants on your skin. It was really smelly.
I left to walk to Urca. I thought of lying on Praia Vermelho which is a nice little beach with a good view of Pão de Açucar. I underestimated the time I needed to get there and when I arrived, it was already 4pm.
With the sun setting at 5pm here in Rio, I must look like the complete fool that I am as I prepared to lie down on the beach. In fact, I am the ONLY person on the beach in my beach-wear. I was just there for 20 minutes before I was completely in the shade and freezing from the evening breeze. Better luck next time!
Late that evening, Carol took me to Copacabana to meet her brother and his girlfriend. It is his brother’s birthday today. Well, we rounded the streets of Copacabana looking for parking spaces for a really long time. Population density here is so high, and many of the apartments do not have garages mean that there are many cars parked along every inch of the streets here. And that is also rather risky, considering the high crime rate of car or car stereo thefts.
Even Carol’s brother, Guilherme, a huge stocky guy, was robbed twice last month!! Both times at gun-point! Carol later related how she had undergone a quickie-kidnap-cum-robbery-via-auto-teller-machine-withdrawals incident when she was younger in the town of Campinas. My goodness!!! In my last trip here, I was a lot more spooked as a group of boys attempted to rob me on my very first day in Rio. But this time round, I felt more confident and relaxed. I was smiling and greeting people here and there, if I found that they were looking my way. The people had always smiled or greeted me back. Yes, I had always held on to my bag tightly, BUT I forgot that, hey, if the robber has a gun, it did not matter anymore.
Tags: 02) And God Created Brazilian Women, Rio de Janeiro
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