This is the blog for the Elmira College travel class to Brazil in May 2010.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

The City

We spent a large portion of our day in the old part of the city. We had studied Brazil´s history before we left Elmira, and today we had the chance to see some of the most important buildings and sites in the nation´s history. We visited the oldest Catholic church, as well as a church with massive amounts of gold all up and down the walls and ceilings (built by the gold traders in the 1800s). We visited the Congress building and the first bank; we saw the earliest tax and toll building as well. The oldest streets are all cobblestone and very narrow, and it was quite charming, albeit crowded, to walk through the area. At one point, we stopped to see the house were Carmen Miranda grew up, although most of the students hadn´t heard of her before. It was a really old and charming house at least!

We stopped to eat at an incredibly fancy old art nouveau cafe, the Columbia, which used to entertain the Portuguese upper classes. Brazilians are so casual, though, that inside this gorgeous building, with the huge mirrors and the gold gilding and the intricate carved decorations, everyone was sitting around in shorts and flip-flops. The menu was quite extensive, and many of the students tried lots of small empanadas and fancy little tarts. It was delicious!

We also had the chance today to go to the top of the mountain (Corcovado) with the Christ Redeemer statue. This famous statue stands with his hands outstretched beside him, and the people of Rio seem to think of him as a kind of protector. Unfortunately, we just happened to be here while he was getting his 10-year cleaning. Such bad luck on our part! But we still got to experience seeing him up close, and seeing his view down over the city and the ocean. This view was even better than the view from Sugar Loaf. It was gorgeous in any direction you might care to look and SO many photos were taken today. (And we did see some more wild monkeys today, too, in the trees in the park around the statue)

The ride up to the top of the mountain was pretty intense. We were in jeeps today, with open tops, and the road up to the top is incredibly steep, with sudden switch-backs and steep drop-offs. And it was paved with cobblestones most of the way up. It was quite a bumpy and breathtaking ride! (I´ll just point out that I may perhaps have been the only slightly scared person, as the students laughed and sang and talked pretty much the whole way).

We also got to see up-close some of the damage of the recent mud slides. Last month, Rio got a record amount of rain, and there were some severe landslides. More than 200 people were killed, mostly in the poor favela neighborhoods (where the houses are built illegally). We passed a favela on the way up the mountain today, and some of the houses were built on impossibly steep slopes. We could see whole areas of the mountain that had given way, with trees crashed down and gashes of mud and rock freshly exposed. Apparently, much of the road to the top of the mountain had been blocked, and we could see 4 or 5 places where the mountain-side had washed down onto the road. One larger landslide had taken out the mountain above the road and below it, wiping out quite a few houses along the way. We could only see the ruins, some with just the roofs crushed, but some where you couldn´t even tell how many houses had originally stood there. It was quite intense, and a good reminder about the power of nature.

Tonight for dinner, we went to the original cafe where the ´Girl from Ipanema´song was written. It was optional for students, but everyone came, including two young British gentlement who had already made fast friends with some of the ladies after meeting at the hotel pool late this afternoon. The cafe is famous not only for the song, but also for the Brazilian barbeque, which is basically a grill brought to the table while still sizzling. People just pull a piece of meat off the grill when they are ready to eat it. It was both fun and delicious, although it ended up being a lot of meat even though were were sharing. The cafe itself was on a corner, with an old-fashioned wall of open windows all along the outside. It looked like a cafe from Paris, very charming, and it really was lovely to sit by the windows and watch people go by.

We had a couple of hours of free time today, and some of the students hung out at the hotel pool, while others went swimming in the ocean at Copacabana Beach. Some students also watched some of the local people playing a very intense game of soccer volleyball (which I had never heard of let alone ever seen). We also had students go to one of the local craft markets, and I can say that there are some real treasures coming back home with students...

All in all, it has been a very good day.

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