Brazil - Random Thoughts and Photos

It was a great trip and well worth all of the effort and preparation.  I do recommend visiting Brazil for many reasons…

 

Rio de Janeiro is one of the most photogenic cities in the world – spectacular vistas and unique, vantage points.  I love this photo that Tracy took of the sunrise over Copacabana beach.

The people are warm, friendly and will bend over backwards to demonstrate hospitality.  They laugh easily and love much.

The climate through the middle of Brazil is temperate year round.  Winters are very mild.

Over the next four years they will host three of the world’s biggest events

·         2013 World Youth Day with Pope Benedict

·         2014 World Cup

·         2016 Summer Olympics

Now the flip side…..

I would not classify Brazil as a poor country, but it is still developing and has many poor families living in hillside “favelas”.   Brazil is by far the most economically advanced and politically stable country in Latin America.  There is a wide gap between rich and poor with the inevitable crime.  You must be careful when traveling in Latin America.

As a developing country their infrastructure is also developing.  Sao Paulo state accounts for a large portion of Latin America’s industrial output and as such have the best infrastructure.  When you go a level deeper (even in Sao Paulo) you’ll roads, bridges, power grid and airports in need of investment and repair. 

Rio’s infrastructure is not only behind Sao Paulo but poses unique challenges to city planners and engineers; namely, an ocean coast and mountains in very close proximity.  These changes in elevation provide unique challenges for highways, mass transportation and for distribution of water/sewer utilities.  Imagine New Orleans with a couple of mountains placed within the city limits.

Rio has much work to do to be ready for the big events mentioned above.

You will need to slow down and adjust your expectations – everything just takes longer.  It’s not that people are slow or are not hardworking, quite the contrary.  It’s just when you have 20 million plus people living in close proximity, you are generally going to wait in line for most everything.  Gear it back a notch or two and you’ll be fine.

In North America we tend to be obsessed with efficiency – speed and quantity tend to trump quality; multi-tasking rules.  You will rarely see a Brasileiro multi-task anything.  It is one task at a time with their full attention devoted to that task.  It doesn’t matter if it’s eating dinner, having coffee, talking with a loved one or attending church.  To those in Brazil, if it’s worth doing; then it’s worth doing it well with their full attention.  I think that I will work at this a bit more on my return.

The best example I can provide to illustrate is the small retail shop where we purchased a Brasil futbol shirt.  This store was no larger than 200 square feet and had three sales clerks on hand.  One of the clerks very nicely gift-wrapped our present and placed in nicely in the shopping bag while another clerk politely operated the credit card terminal and handed us our sales receipt – very different.

This is one of the best articles that I’ve come across that details the geo-politics of Latin America.  Explains why many of the countries are mired in the last century.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/299154/what-s-wrong-argentina-matthew-shaffer#

These little suckers were hot – stickers in my tongue for ~15 minutes after tasting a drop of the oil.