These photos have nothing to do withe the festa de tomato
Swiss Lemonade kills colds. I know this because I've been resorting to it for a few days since I noticed my throat was looking a little white. I'm a week away from bidding my fair love city goodbye, so I cannot get a cold right now. Three days, 8 enormous glasses of lemon juice, and 2 sleepless nights later, and I'm still fending that cold off.
I did loose my voice, but I'll chock that up to screaming for hours.
Why was I screaming for hours? Nothing sinister: I went to a concert. More accurately, I thought I was going to concert, when in fact I was going to the Tomato Fest. The Festa de Tomate happens in Paty de Alferes, two hours out of Rio de Janeiro city. Like all good adventures, I went into this blindly, lured by the name of one of my favorite musical artists, Arlindo Cruz. It was easy: we took a bus and two hours later got dropped off at the misty, light-bulb strewn empty field that was serving as a parking lot. Beyond the strings of yellow halo-ed balls of light, there were bigger, brighter lights: Carnival Rides! This wasn't going to be a hippy tent marajuana music experience, as I had assumed. This was a regular county fair!
We walked by the guys getting drunk next to their cars across a little bridge, and into a neon stick-food paradise. Sausage on a stick; chicken on a stick; candy apples; cotton candy; chocolate fondue shish kabab strawberries... Crepes on a stick? We purchasesd our R$20 tickets from a scalper (my friend Aurora is all about scalpers), and in we went...
9:00 pm is a little early for Brazilians. We had the place to ourselves, and so for an hour we wandered around the fair grounds. A cover band played a good selection of Beatles tunes as we checked out the winning tomatoes, peppers, maracujás and laurel leaves. Aurora sampled the chicken espetadinhas, and I opted for a more suggestive salchicha, and we ate in front of the looming "Ranger", for sure the center-piece of the ride aspect of this fair. "The Ranger" sparkles and glows and whirls people into the air, upside down and backwards in a wind-mill style adrenaline rush. We hadn't seen it in action yet, and I have read enough Brazilian news papers to not feel like breaking the Ranger in, so we veared towards some bleachers where fireworks and barulho were attacting crowds. Through the smoke of a million cheap firecracklers, I could see young men in cowboy hats and jeans with decorated leather chaps. They were praying in front of a Madonna idol framed with raining fire, and a deep godly voice was loudly explaining to us that Deus is in everything, and is the ultimate everything everything everything la la la. When that finished, The Gringo rolled out on his motorcycle, tore up the sand a bit, flew through a hoop of fire, and then fell when a poor girl from the audience joined him on the back of his ride for a romantic spin around the arena. Hahaa! No one was hurt, not to worry.
Next came the cowboys. This was my first rodeo! I was surprised that they really celebrate the bulls. A big white one got to parade in front of us for a while alone before he was hidden away again. The cowboys and the bulls came out together, flaying around for a few seconds in a jerky dance. We could only stand this for a little while...the noise was too much.
We then went on the rides: the Ranger, a pirate ship, and "The American Show". The American Show is hard to explain: from the outside it looks like a two-story house spray painted with naked ladies at a car wash. I thought it was going to be a peep-show, but was thrilled to find out it's in fact a series of gears and mechanical things concealed by plywood that you have to walk over in the dark and pretend you're a car going through a car-wash. It was really scary! A couple of 9 year old boys went ahead of us and even they were scared (but they tried to help us ladies through, being blossoming Brazilian men). We were all pretty sure our legs were going to be ripped off by some malfunction, and I think we were in the dark corridors for a long time, just standing there, trying to detect if we were in any real danger. As we emerged into the Carnival light again, some air sputed up from a hole in the ground and blew my shirt up in front of the crowd waiting for The Ranger. Insult to potential ingury.
Ah, these kinds of surprises are what makes my world go around. At midnight, the concerts began and were wonderful. I got to sing "Meu Lugar" along with Arlindo, one of my ultimate Brazilian dreams, and he wiped the prolific sweat off of his head with t-shirts and threw them to the crowds. Very sensual. Marcelo D2 followed up with another really good show. By 4 o'clock Aurora and I were eating meat again at some stand, surrounded by a drunker group of be-legginged,-be-cowboy hatted, be-booted Brazilians of all ages. We didn't know how we were going to get back to Rio, but that wasn't a concern. Of course we would find a way. And we did: bus-bus-train. We caught an omni-bus to Jacarí through the morning mist. The sun was hidden behind clouds and grassy hills, and everything was damp and rural and clean looking. I slept on the train through Madueira and past Mangueira. In Rio the metrô was excesively airconditioned, and I stopped by the juice stand to buy some more limonada on my way home. 10 o'clock found me snoring in my sleeping bag. So far my cold is only a quarter-cold. I've just got to fend it off for 8 more days and Mom will take care of me!
