.......
I don't think I can do it justice.
The inadequacy of language becomes very evident now, trying to describe how things actually were. How they felt. Abstraction seems like the only solution; to boil down a narrative to it's emotional truths through images. To paint an impressionist picture—a Monet, a Pissarro—with flowery language, elegant words.
Ugh. So unappealing.
I have pictures. They're supposedly worth a thousand words, but a thousand words isn't that much, really. A thousand words tells what the weather was like when i got off the plane. A thousand words describes one beautiful girl, shuffling a samba. I need a million words—a hundred thousand pictures—to really make you understand what Carnival was like.
I guess the best thing to do would be to give up. Really guys, you just had to be there.
Still, a couple things:
The weather in Rio was overcast most of the trip, but that didn't slow anything down. I still went to the beach everyday; the water in the ocean was bathtub warm. At night, I would slip off to Ipanema by myself (or sometimes with others) and imagine the ghost of Jobim sitting on the white sand, strumming a guitar, constructing my favorite song in his head, inspired by the same scene I was looking at then. I splashed in the waves with the favella children, I sat with thousands of other tourists (mostly people from Sao Paulo), baking in the sun, sucking on straws thrust into coconuts, each one of us thinking we were having a unique experience.
At the Bloquinos, the little carnival parades that happen all day all over the city, I danced, drunkenly and exuberantly. A smile permanently plastered on my face, I laughed, posed for pictures, joked with strangers, let the catchy rhythms of the Carnival songs overtake me: always a single song, repeated over and over again, until even the most inept gringo could sing along with the words. I became a part of the huge mass of people, a festive monster, spewing balloons and ribbons, ravenously eating up the street in front of it, swaggering along to the blaring music, it's breath the melodies of bossa-nova.
In Sao Paulo, where even the flowers are made of concrete, it is only the city's churning energy that sustains itself; a perpetual beast, an ouroboros, feeding its expansion from it's own tail. In Rio, the natural world plays much more of a role; slums built into rock faces, every horizon weighted with trees, the smell and taste of ocean salt present in every breath. A constant perfume of the most human stenches, prime-evil earth, lingering nimbus' of sweat and piss and mud and beer and sex and shit. When we were stumbling around one day, the word that kept popping into my head was 'electricity'. There was something electric about that place, a current that jumped from person to person. You could feel it in the street; sparks flew from peoples feet as they danced. There was lightning in every pretty girl's eyes. An ecstatic voltage, the kind you feel when you first kiss someone you're starting to fall in love with...that's what it's like in Rio.
The people I stayed with in our apartment with were amazing. I made new friends, brothers and sisters, people I will always have that experience in common with. Carolina, Gabriella, Caio, Allen, Adriana, Maria, Carla, Joao...all names etched into my head besides specific moments. All the people I've encountered here are so warm and friendly. Even the little kid who stole my mask during a parade was nice about it. The sound of portuguese, a lilting and beautiful language, was always in my ears. The food was heavenly...I won't say more than that, because I intend to devote an entire entry to it.
Oh, look at this. I said no shitty, over-saturated writing and what did I do? Exactly fucking that.
I'm sorry guys. Once I can get people to give me their photos, I'll do a much simpler run-through of some of my favorite things from there. It'll be quick and breezy, and illustrated too: exactly what the internet wants.
Until then,
tchau companieros!
-JD
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