June 3-4: A Visit to Iguaçu Falls
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For my second week here in South America, I was doing a Structured Analysis Class at a hotel in downtown Rio, and in the afternoons and evenings (and a couple of times during lunch) I tried to get out and see a few things.

With the class underway, the days now had a routine to them. The class was being held in a Hotel along the Ipanema Beach, which is that curved beach that you can see in the center of the picture at left, taken from my room at the Sheraton. I could have moved to the hotel where the class was, but I was settled in here and knew the bus schedule downtown.

Since few of the class attendees speak much English, my lectures are being translated into Portuguese by translators in the back of the room. They can hear me, and they translate and speak into microphones. The entire class is wearing headphones so that they can hear the translation. When one of the class wants to ask a question, he or she speaks into a roving microphone that is brought to them, the translators hear it, and translate for me. I have a small set of headphones for the purpose.

At first, it was very disconcerting (as many of my standard humorous lines don't translate well). It's something like a time lag on radio transmission. When I used to call my family over ham radio from Korea, we were always talking over one another, as the time delay meant you weren't sure if the other person heard you, or if they were going to respond. Sometimes, we would end up talking at the same time. Well, I simply had to develop the habit of waiting whenever I heard one of the class members begin to speak, even if my back was turned, because that meant that a question was coming. Because of this time spent in translation, it had been decided that the class would run a week and a half to allow for that, and that is one reason why I spent a little over two weeks in Rio and Brazil.

As I mentioned earlier, in the center of the city there is a steep, high mountain with the iconic statue of the "Christ the Redeemer" on the top; it is a very popular tourist attraction, and a great place to take pictures. One evening, one of the class members asked me if he would like to take me up there to get a night view of the city, and I accepted.

We just took a taxi ride to the top, since it was too dark to walk, and spent a half hour at the summit. Even at night there were quite a few people there, but you really couldn't see much except the lights of the city below. I didn't think that I could hold the camera steady enough to get some good night shots of the city lights, but I did try this shot by resting the camera on a metal railing. The picture turned out rather well. I made a resolution to come back to the summit in the daytime.

To do my jogging, each day I would run down the road from my hotel to the city, and then along the walkway at Ipanema beach. You have undoubtedly seen pictures of the undulating, black and white tiled walkway before (which is why, I guess, I didn't take my own picture of it). The walkway was broad enough that I could avoid any people walking along. When the weather was warm, the beaches were packed with people, but not so much during the week. It made for an enjoyable, five-mile roundtrip, and I did it almost every day.

The seminar was being sponsored by a Brazilian consulting firm, who had actually sold the seats in it and hired Chris to have the class taught. Since part of the class involves workshops, and since we need to make copies of student solutions to review, I spent some afternoons at the office of the consulting firm.

This picture was taken on the way to their offices one afternoon, and shows the cleanliness and park-like layout of at least part of Rio.

This is more of the city scenery on the way back from the offices one afternoon. Again, I am impressed by how clean and neat at least this part of the city seems to be.

I kept looking for an opportunity to go to the top of Corcovado Mountain to see the huge statue of Christ the Redeemer. You have seen it before; it is the Art Deco statue of Jesus Christ created by the French sculptor Paul Landowski and Romanian sculptor Gheorghe Leonida. The 100-foot statue (with outstretched arms that are themselves 90 feet wide) is situated at the top of the 2300-foot mountain in the Tijuca Forest National Park overlooking the city. A symbol of Christianity across the world, the statue, built between 1922 and 1931, has also become a cultural icon of both Rio de Janeiro and Brazil.

At right is part of the park in which Corcovado Mountain is situated. I took this particular picture one day when I was returning from the consulting firm's offices. While I was in those offices, a young man named Marcos, who was the class coordinator, and I got to talking about going up Corcovado, and he offered to go with me one afternoon after class.

I should have written down Marcos' last name, but I did not. I can recall that he was very friendly (as seemed to be just about everyone I met or interacted with in Brazil), and I relied on him for all the clerical support (copies, overhead transparencies, etc.) that the class required. The day after we met, he happened to come over to the hotel to bring some supplies to the class and that's when we made plans to do this sightseeing.

Since the weather was pretty nice that day, we thought we'd head off right after class. I dismissed it a bit early, and Marcos and I took a taxi back to the firm's offices where we collected one of Marcos' co-workers for the trip up to the top of Corcovado. Marco knew just what to tell the taxi driver, and soon we were going through the park and up the hillside. This view looks out over the city from a point part way up the mountainside.

I wish that the generally good weather had held into the evening, but just as we were ascending Corcovado, clouds started to roll in (not an uncommon occurrence, Marcos pointed out) and so when we got to the top, the opportunities for picture-taking were less than ideal. I did not get a good view of the statue itself at all (I took two pictures of it, but neither turned out for some reason.) I did take some other pictures, though:

This is a view of the same marina area that you saw from the top of Sugarloaf.

Here is another view through the thickening clouds from from the top of Corcovado.

You would have been able to see Sugarloaf at the left if the clouds hadn't been so thick.

This city picture didn't turn out so well.

Even though the weather wasn't good for our trip up the mountain, we enjoyed it nevertheless. On our way down the mountain, Marcos asked me if I would like to come to his house for dinner the next night, and I accepted, looking forward to seeing something of typical Brazilian life in Rio.

The next afternoon, we took a bus from the hotel and then a short walk to his neighborhood, which is hard to describe. It was right in the city, and appeared to be similar to the area where I live in Chicago, except where I have lots of low brownstone buildings near my high-rise, Marcos' neighborhood is full of these high-rises- more like New York. Some of the buildings were shorter, only five stories or so, but Marcos and his parents lived in an apartment some twenty floors up. His parents were very, very nice people, and all three spoke a good deal of English. I tried to describe to them the apartment I had in Chicago. Their apartment was a bit smaller, and there were three of them. They were very nice people, and I wished I had brought my camera along, because the neighborhood was very busy, with lots of stores and restaurants and such, and there were good views from their apartment window.

Marcos and Friends at the Airport

Marcos spent some time showing me the computer work he was doing, and had me listen to some authentic Brazilian music. His parents served a nice dinner, very much like our own food, and we were joined by one of Marcos' friends who lived nearby. Afterwards, we went out and walked around the neighborhood until it got late and I took a taxi back downtown.

I left Rio at the end of the class, on July 13th. Marcos and two of his friends rode with me to the airport to see me off; I left directly from the hotel and he had been there to see to the wind-up of the class. That is Marcos in the foreground, and his two friends behind him. Perhaps Marcos wanted to make a friend in the US should he ever want to come here, but I don't think that was really his motive, since he lived pretty well in Rio. I was a bit puzzled still, but it was nice to get shown around the city by someone who knew it well.

This is the third or fourth time that someone my age or a bit younger has latched onto me in the travels I have made. It has happened in Korea, in Japan and in Bangkok. I don't consider myself overly friendly or even tremendously interesting, and so it is somewhat mystifying why this continues to happen. It is probably just because I am the visitor from a long way off and someone like Marcos is just proud of his city and wants to show it off. And I have to admit that it is good for me, because in every case I have had someone to show me around wherever I was.

The nighttime flight back to the United States was pretty uneventful. We returned through Miami, this time, and I got back to Chicago before lunch the next day.

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	June 3-4: A Visit to Iguaçu Falls
	Return to the Brazil Trip Index