Well ok, so here we are on April 9th, which is Palm Sunday, and also my grandfather’s 90th birthday! This is quite a year for birthdays, in fact. My granfather, Percival Bugbee Woods, turns 90, my grandmother on my other side, Dorothy Epstein, turns 95, my father, Alan, turns 60, and I myself will turn 30 this year (though after all of them are done).
Anyways, so her we are in Brazil and it’s been a week since my last update, and I must apologize for being remiss. It does seem like very little happened this week, although there have been some meaningful occurrences.
Early in the week, Marcy was a bit under the weather with a cold, and I stayed home to work on some data stuff (using a sum-of-squares formula to calculate party system volatility across Brazil’s states with some new data I’d found) and help take care of her. I, then, got a bit down in the mouth later in the week. Just a little touch of cold–nothing to worry about. Probably and effect of the changing climate &c.
Anyways, so we didn’t get out a huge amount this week, although on Wednesday we had our major coup. After Marcy’s ‘rents got their tickets to come visit us (yay!), we sallied forth to nail down travel plans of our own. After a circuitous route to the bus station that took us through and under a couple of favelas, we hunted up the counter to buy tickets to Paraty, where we’re headed with our soon-to-be guests Aisha & Rebecca next weekend. Then we came back to Leblon and descended upon the American Airlines office in Ipanema in an attempt to translate AAdvantage Frequent Flyer Miles into tickets on AA’s Brazilian partner, TAM, to take us around Brazil on three separate trips. After a long time standing at the counter talking on the phone with some ticketing agent who was probably behand a screen in the same office, and then even longer waiting for the tickets to be authorized in a queue apparently backed up in Lima for all of South America, for 120,000 miles and $196 in fees, Marcy & I got tickets for the following trips:
Rio to São Luis Apr 26 - May 6
Rio to Salvador June 16 - June 21 (Marcy’s return)/ June 29 (my return)
Rio to Manaus July 7 - July 15
So people wishing to come visit should be apprised that we will be gone on these dates (as well as sometime in the latter half of May, but on a bus-intensive trip to the south). Getting these tickets was a huge relief, because of the fact that we were able to use miles for them. Had we had to purchase them all outright, they would have run us well over $2,000 (air travel in Brazil is not cheap). We had heard that indeed, such tickets could be got with AA frequent flyer miles, although some AA agent we called on the phone a week ago told us that we could only get such tickets if we were Brazilian citizens. We thought & hoped that that guy was full of misinformation (as so many bureaucrats tend to be), but we were a little nervous that we’d have to combine/curtail/insert-more-bus-legs into our planned travel, so not having to do those things is a huge boon to us, and makes our budget breathe easier as to our rather luxurious apartment.
Little else very exciting happened this week as far as our own activities in Brazil are concerned. We went to a movie last night (Inside Man–which we missed seeing at a special screening in LA, unfortunately, but were quite excited to see in any case–and we thank Linda for her attempt to get us to the screening and her generosity in making up for the fact that we’d missed it! Perhaps it might redound to her benefit somehow if readers of this blog all go see the movie–it’s quite good) at Rio’s giant mall, Shopping Rio Sul. It’s a 6-story mall where each level, instead of being one long avenue with a long airshaft in the middle, is a serpentine labyrinth curving in corner after corner with intersections and escalators placed so that you can’t find your way back to where you came from and often can’t find your way down a level after you come up on the escalator–unless you’re paying very close attenion.
We did find the theater, and find our way out. We also experienced a "bib’sfiha" from an odd sort of chain restaurant Habib’s that does to Middle Eastern Food as much or more of a disservice as Taco Bell does to Mexican food. I’ll say this much: it’s not quite so bad if you get the queijo bib’sfiha–the carne resembles upchuck. Far better to get a bolinho on the street, if you can.
After the mall, we went out do dinner at a comida por kilo churrascaria nearby (as opposed to an all-you-can eat) and had some quite succulent bife and a chopp (draft beer), which was quite heartily satisfying. The different modes of purchasing cooked meat for consumption here are interesting: you can get an order churrasco at a low/medium class outdoor plastic-table restaurant and get basically two steaks (per person!) of medium quality (some of the meat is quite good, but there will be sections of fat and gristle) accompanied by huge portions of fries, beans, rice, and this vinegary mixture of cubed tomatoes, peppers, and onions. This will cost you about $7-9 a person,unless you get it at beachfront plastic-table place, in which case it will cost more like $14-15 a person. It’s not a bad way to eat a lot of food. You can also go to an all-you-can-eat churrascaria (Porcão is a quite nice one), and eat a ton of wonderful meat, along with other delights (much like the Midwest Grille in East Cambridge) for about $25 or so. Or you can go to a place like Kilogramma that we went, and pay only for what you eat (by the kg), and get a fair share of succulent meat for abot $10. Kilogramma, the way we went last night, was pretty good!
Anyways, so that’s the news from Leblon today. Here are a couple of pictures of Marcy and me, respectively, by the ocean at the end of Leblon.
I’ll put some others up on the photo blog.
Hope you’re all well and to hear from you soon!
- Dan
