… I never did finish talking about my trip to Brazil. Life intervened — it happens from time to time!

Let’s see.  When last I checked in, I had mentioned going to Afro-Reggae, a social and musical movement situated in the favela of Vigário Geral, in the northern sector of Rio de Janeiro.  They just opened a new community center, open 24 hours a day, in what used to be one of the more crime- and violence-ridden favelas.  Afro-Reggae, and its charismatic co-founder Anderson Sá, were portrayed in the documentary Favela Rising, which I saw a couple of months ago (did it give me a moment of, “You want to take us where??”  Yes, it did).

One of the things the group does is basically take kids off the street and teach them music and arts.  We were welcomed with a full blown performance by the junior class.

Then the group I was with got drum lessons, which was quite fun … to photograph.

In the above video, you can see me sitting on the sidelines for a split second.

Let’s see, what else.  There was a trip up Pão de Açúcar (Sugar Loaf) on one of those damned cable car things that I hate with a passion.

It rained most of the week, but the rain cut out just a bit while we went up the mountain … and then resumed again when we went down to Ipanema to drive back along the beach.  Blech.

The group departed on Sunday for São Paulo, while I stayed in Rio an extra day because it cost $600 less to fly home on Monday.  Sunday night was the fun night that I decided to stay in and cook dinner for myself in the apartment I rented.  I’m not a big fan of dining in restaurants all alone, although I can do it when needed — the issue is that when I was hungry on Sunday night, there was some soccer game on TV and most of the restaurants around my building were packed (and, frankly, I was a little terrified of the restaurants that weren’t).  It’s one thing to eat alone, it’s another to wait an hour for a table and arm wrestle others for a seat in order to do so, so I hit the grocery store for some pre-made stuff and went back to the apartment where the usual Sunday night lineup was playing on satellite television.

This is where I learned a critical fact about rental apartments: always check the oven before deciding that you plan to use it for something.  I discovered two things: first, the oven (which was, roughly, the size of an EZ Bake oven that uses a lightbulb to cook things) had no temperature on the knobs.  There were various levels, 1-5, but nothing that actually explained what these were supposed to correlate to.  (I mused over the possibility that these were abbreviations for hundreds of degrees, but in a country operating on the metric system, I couldn’t fathom why one would need an oven capable of reaching 500 degrees celsius, nor could I imagine that this particular oven was capable of doing so).

And then there was the pilot light.

Confession: I haven’t lived in a place with gas cooking since I lived in DC, which was 12 years ago.  While I recognize that gas is easier to control, there are certain things that I just don’t entirely know how to do — one of which is how to light a stove that doesn’t have a pilot light underneath.  I remember having to re-light ours a couple of times, but it was pretty easy. In this case, I opened the stove, turned on the gas, lit the last match left in the box, and hoped I wasn’t about to blow us all to kingdom come.

The thing lit.  Yay!

On went the heating element, and in went the food.  And 25 minutes later, it was still frozen.

At some point in the next 15 minutes, without my doing anything, the heating element lit up the way it was supposed to and the oven actually warmed up quite quickly, meaning we went from frozen to almost burned, but whatevs.  I got my food, blew out the pilot light, and sat down to watch A Familia Da Pessado (or, Family Guy, which was, thankfully, subtitled).

The next morning I woke up to discover that the rain had broken and that it was sunny.  When I’d had dinner with Natalie two nights earlier, she told me that the trip up to Christ the Redeemer–the massive statue of Jesus with his arms outstretched that overlooks Rio from the top of Corcovado that’s on every postcard of the city–was entirely worth it.  It was sunny, so I decided to plug about on the InterWebz to see if I could figure out how to get there without bankrupting myself. Turns out that you can take the metro to the Lago do Machado station and then change to a special bus that runs up to the neighborhood where the cog train up the mountain is.  Pretty easy, thinks I, and I set off.

Two small issues: apparently it’s not as easy to change from the Metro to the Integraçao bus as I thought, because I didn’t manage to do it correctly in either direction.  I wound up just taking a cab up from the metro station (which was still way cheaper than it would have been from Copa), and on the way back I wound up paying the fare twice (once to get on the bus, again when I got to the metro — the fare is supposed to cover both), but whatever.

And so I arrived at the cog station to discover that every other tourist in Rio de Janeiro had had the exact same thought.  I waited in line for an hour to buy my ticket up to the top of the mountain, which, when I got it, I discovered was for the train leaving an hour later than that.  Finally, after waiting in line and fighting off annoying tourists, I got on the cog train and up the mountain we went.

Jesus is here!  Look busy!!!!!

I ask you: is it a sin to snark at people within site of a 60 foot tall granite Jesus?  Because I kind of did.  People had no problem stopping in the middle of traffic flow to take a photos completely oblivious (or possibly actively ignoring) to the people trying to get around them.  At one point, after waiting for a group of three to rotate through all three of their cameras, at which point they then started to exchange their cell phones to take photos on those, I believe I did actually snark, “REALLY?” before plowing through and ruining the photo for them.  They kind of deserved it.  (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)

And so, after enjoying the view from the top, I climbed back aboard the cog train and headed down the mountain and went back to Copa in time for lunch, a quick round of the shops for a second bottle of cachaça and some guava paste, and then went back to finish packing and head to the airport.

I’m still kind of processing Brazil — I enjoyed it, and I’d go back.  It’s a huge country, and I think my next trip would prioritize exploring a different part.  I don’t know that I’d head back to Rio just to hang out–it’s actually pretty expensive–but I’d definitely go with some particular goal in mind.