A great sleep was had by all but Chris. He thinks someone switched the fan to the wrong setting which didn’t bring the cool air down, so he decided to stay home for the day. Vero and I headed for Santa Teresa to see some ruins.
We arrived at a market and bought an amazing egg-burger for $1.30R! THIS was authentic working-man hot dog stand food from Brazil! Two buns are inserted in a bag, the patty and egg added, some crunchy things and some rose sauce are the final ingredients. A free cup of juice as well! Score!
We stumbled in three separate instrument stores. Unfortunately my quest for the Brazilian version of the ukelele (the cavanquinho) was thwarted by the price of $200R minimum! A little too much than I was willing to pay considering I can probably pick up a uke in Canada for $50. Dang…now I realize with the exchange rate that it was closer to $100CDN which WAS what I willing to pay! Argh. Maybe I’ll get Philipp to ship me up one.
I did find a Spider-Man (the French pronounce it Speeder-Man!) digest which reprinted Issues 99-101. An interesting format that I have never seen (or only have seen with Archie comics). The newsstand that I picked it up from had comics that were sun bleached and not taken care of. I wonder if they have some proper comic stores in Rio somewhere? They must.
After some navigational woes, we finally found Le Bonde – the streetcar station to go to Santa Teresa. There was a lot of shade and benches so the 1.5 hour wait didn’t feel long at all. We chatted with a few girls from Chicago who were on a winter break. There was also a guy with them with a shirt that said SOU and then had a guitar and I couldn’t figure out what it said. I finally realized that the guitar formed the letter ‘L’ and the word was SOUL. I gotta get me one of those t-shirts!
We boarded a rickety old street car, the only one still in service and what a ride it was. It lurched forward and felt like it would break anytime. One time I swear it went off the rails and I could feel the heat from the engine beneath my feet as it tried to get back on track. Locals jumped aboard and hung on for dear life. We weren’t going fast so cars were passing us on tight corners. We kept climbing on past the sign for the ruins and I got concerned because I really had no ideas where we would end up. Perhaps even in the favela (slums)! We finally got off when it was turning around to go back down because Vero realized I was a baby. We then realized all we boarded onto was a streetcar ride up the hill to a neighbourhood in Santa Teresa! We were thinking there was something to do at the top of the hill, but there was only the choice of riding back down, or walking. Or getting a ride to Corcovado, home of the Cristo Redentor statue. I wondered if this was secretly a faster way to get up to the statue instead of the two hour line-up!
Vero and I hoofed back down the barren street and snapped photos. We found a little bit of civilization when we bought some excellent grapes and found a souvenir shop. Vero bought a notebook which I am quite jealous of.
We made it to the cutoff to the ruins and finally got to the gate of the ruins to find it locked! This was not the biggest surprised in the world considering we had read in her tour book that it was closed on Mondays! Nevertheless, we enjoyed the trip.
We then went searching for an old artistic community where they had spruced up the area years ago. After some help from some dude in his windows, we found the stairs we were looking for. The Escadaria Selaron. An artist (Selaron) had laid ceramic tile along the vertical edge of each of the hundreds of steps. Looking down, nothing. But looking up, what a sight! I was quite impressed. They even had ceramic tiles on the walls of the neighbourhood. It was quite colourful.
There were many tiles depicting a caricature of a pregnant person. I believe this may be a caricature of the artists himself.
A local invited us into a gallery of artwork and showed us (along with two girls from Munich) some celebrities on this famous stairway. U2 in the Walk On video, Ed Norton in the Incredible Hulk. Very interesting.
At the end of the stairway, we found ourselves quite close to where we started off. Got a Metro back to find Chris still in rough shape. Philipp and Erica had returned from Philipp’s first day of work which was decent. We ate a nice meal of pasta/rice, went to the beach for a swim which was horrible due to the eaves being quite lame.