As so many good things do, the history of Rio de Janeiro begins with pirates. Apparently the Portuguese had known about the place since 1500, but hadn't bothered to start a colony here because it seemed like a lot of work and there weren't any cute girls on Ipanema beach yet. By 1530, however, the Portuguese were sick and tired of French pirates stealing all of the gold they had worked so hard to steal from the local tribes. (What really bothered them was the way the pirates kept pulling at the end of their mustaches and saying 'Aw-huh-huh!' in the way that French pirates do). So they built a fort, largely to shut them up, and the fort became Rio de Janeiro, a name which means "river of January." The Portuguese may have been the world's greatest navigators, but they couldn't tell a harbor from the mouth of a river.
Every postcard of Rio features a picture of O Cristo Redentor, a 2,000-foot statue of Christ the Redeemer that is located on top of a mountain called Corcovado — "hunchback" — and can be seen everywhere in the city if you are looking, which most people are not. What most people are looking at are the beaches, which are really quite lovely. I made a detailed inspection of the three major beaches — Copacabana, Ipanema and Leblon — this afternoon, and while none of them are original (they're all landfill added to what was mostly swampy jungle) they are really quite nice. This is probably true of a lot of the things one can see in Rio, but we won't get into that right now.
There are lots of ways to see Rio: from the cable cars that travel up the sides of an enormous island called Sugarloaf; from scenic lookouts between the palm trees of the Tijuca (I'm probably spelling that wrong) National Forest; or from a hotel room with Pirates of the Caribbean, subtitled in Portuguese, playing in the background. What comes to mind, especially on the beaches (which are, in my opinion, the best places to do research) is the amazing mix of contrasts here. People from many countries and many races, gay and straight, rich and poor, those with perfect bodies and those of us who are afraid of being mistaken for a stranded pilot whale — all of them mingle, play soccer, sip fresh coconut juice and come together without any problems.
That's not always true, of course. There's a pretty big gap between rich and poor in Rio, as elsewhere in Brazil (and, more and more, in the U.S.) What's different is that Rio's slum neighborhoods — the favelas — aren't somewhere down the road where no one can see them. They're right there, right next to the hotel restaurant or the new string of luxury condos.
Many of the ones near where I'm writing are built into the side of a mountain and look like the homes made by Pueblo Indians, if the Pueblo worked in ramshackle wood and tin rather than adobe. The favelas are full of Brazilians from the country's desperately poor northeast. They gained notoriety in the 1980s and '90s, when gang wars over the drug trade got awfully bloody; they're the reason why it's not such a good idea to go poking around Rio at night. It would be easy to see them as a disaster area, except that you can see them — I can see them, from that very comfortable pirate movie-watching spot I described before — and then you realize that these are the homes of a lot of people who work very hard, and things, as they usually are, are a lot more complicated than they might seem.
Unless, of course, you're watching a soccer match, and then the only important thing is to root for the right team.
Rio has four major teams that play in two different leagues, and the center of everything is Maracanã, an enormous stadium that's a temple to all things soccer. There's no music, no fireworks, not even a playing of the national anthem in Maracanã. The only thing going on besides the game, in face, is the steady beat of a samba drum — several samba drums — that becomes more and more intense as the game goes on. (Brazilian soccer matches are more exciting than American ones, possibly because the players actually score goals from time to time).
No one chats about work while the game is one — everyone in the stadium is completely focused on what the players are doing. Even the vendors sit down and watch when things are getting exciting. It's the thing that seems to stir the passions of Brazilians more than anything else — now that the pirates are gone, of course.
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