Sol!

One of my body-image idols!

Yes, the sun is out! E eu fico vermelha. That means I'm red. I was doing so well being pasty and healthy...well, I'm happier this way, Vitamin D overdose and wrinkles! I have yet to buy a Brazilian bikini, but I'm definately going to, because I agree with the Cariocas: we should all be showing our butts to the world. What's the big deal, anyway? At first I was startled by the amount skin being displayed, but now I love that everyone is wearing a thong. Not just the gorgeous young people, but everyone. If Brazil has an L.L. Bean kind of brand, it sells thong bathing suits and tiny postage stamp tops.

Chopin at the beach, still a little melancholy

Now that I live "on the beach", life is totally different. People wear bikinis and speedos when they're grocery shopping, when they're sweeping, playing ping-pong (a very serious sport here). The surfers travel via metro. Everyone is tan and some of the grocery stores ONLY sell fruit and vegetables...this grocery store has a cute ad campaign. Billboards of fruits singing songs about themselves: "Cai, cai mamão, cai, cai mamão, cai aqui na minha mão" (Fall, fall papaya, fall fall papaya, fall into my hand). I haven't even written about the juice here. Buenos Aires had cafés on every corner. Rio has juice bars, and they sell the yummiest juice! Limão, laranja, caixu, morango, fruta de conde, millions more and ACAÌ. Oh how I will miss acaí, that purple icey juice slush.

On the beach, like every tourist beach outside of the US I've ever been to, there are people selling things. What I like about here is that 1) they´re selling things that you might actually want, like food and water and sun screen, and 2) they´re not pushy. The vendors sing out the product and walk along, if you want what they´re selling, you whistle at them. And the songs they sing are lovely...just the one or two words of their product, but in a singing way. "Aaaaaguaaaa mineral!" is the one that's stuck in my head today.

Evening walks are nice

The beach is used by everyone. Though I have gotten better at making judgements about people in Rio based on their clothes and looks and accents and attitudes (great, I've developed the ability to prejudice here!), on the beach it's less obvious. Where I live, there is a favela tucked up in the morro behind my apartment, so the people living in this poorest of neighborhoods only have a 10 block walk to the beach. Then there are all of the fancy hotels and apartments that line the beach. But everyone rents the same chairs and guarda sols for 3 reais an hour, and the bathing suits aren't big enough to determine the quality of fabric. I've learned to relax about space. Where in the U.S. I might walk for hours to find a place on the beach where I can have a few meters around me, here I just plop down where ever there's space for my chair. It's very cozey on the beach on a hot day! One mystery I have not yet figured out is this white stuff that some girls paint themselves with. They stand there or sprawl in their chair, slowly and lazily painting themselves white with a tiny paintbrush. Some kind of delapitation? I'll keep you posted.

I've seen two helicopter rescues take place right in front of me! The waves here are big and strong, and they have an irresistable pull (the portugues word for pull is puxar, confusing, huh?). So I guess people get stuck out in the water...a red helicopter swoops in while a black helicopter looks on. A life gaurd jumps out of the red one, and then a big net is thrown out. The lifegaurd and the drowning person get into the net, the helicopter pulls them out of the water and dumps them out onto the beach and zooms away. It's very exciting. So I don't really go into the water at all...too scary!

I don't know what these guys are doing, but it's pretty!