Fazer Shopping, Carioca Style

That hot little girl from Ipanema had more going for her than a great bikini with a body to match, and that is a fact. If she was doing any more than beach in this trendy little Zona Sul hood, she was SHOPPING ... for navigation's sake, the first point of departure is the waterfront, and the sections are all marked off the numbers, from 1 - 11, finishing in Leblon. They are called 'Postos', as in 'Posto 9', where our tropical retail therapy experience begins. One absolutely must come off from sunbathing into the cool, airconditioned shops of Ipanema, to spell relief for the body before the deadly credit card threatens the bank account with gorgeous clothing, shoes, accessories and bathing suits of all sizes (from small to extra-extra-small bottoms, beware). There is a street called Rua Vinicius de Moraes, named after the famous Brazilian poet, diplomat and musician who wrote the lyrics for the song Girl from Ipanema. You will pass the bar named after her, and just a block or two after that the boutiques start to pop up in price ranges from high-street, teenagers-could-shop-here to 'uh, you don't look like you belong here' expensive. Do yourself a favor if you want to go into the more expensive places (I know it sounds pedantic but sometimes to a holidaymaker the whole city is their beach) and wash your body so as not to trail sand or, worse still, have a telltale bit of sand on your leg as you waltz into the shop like you could buy the place. They will instinctively think you can't, and hey when in Rome, er, Rio, show a bit of respect for the girls who spend all day smiling, telling you how great you look in those pants two sizes two small, and folding and re-folding the t-shirt they knew you weren't going to buy anyway.

One unforgettable experience that struck me as immediately Japanese was the matching makeup of the shopgirls in a trendy little shoe store on Rua Vinicius de Moraes. It didn't hit me at first, looking from one girl to the next it is obvious they were very made up, more than the girls in other shops, and for a tiny little place there were about five of them swarming around like plaid taffeta bees. After closer inspection, their baby pink blush, orange lipstick and purple eyeshadow matched exactly, down to the way it was applied. Hmmm...either they all get to work early and one girl is assigned to do them up, or they have been given a set up makeup with their uniforms and told to get with the program. Brilliant gimmick! I would highly recommend that chain makeup stores like Sephora follow suit, for obvious reasons. Still, to these girls' credit they may not have been selling more shoes but they made it to this blog for their ingenuity, so here's a high five to free blog press.

Another great shopping street is Rua Visconde de Pirajá, where the fabulous new addition to the young and trendy upper class shopping scene is FARM (www.farmrio.com.br), This brand has been around since 2007 and was first launched in Ipanema with its flagship store on this chic and cheerful street. The entrance is quite dramatic, with a staircase down to the basement floor in front of a huge mirror that makes one feel on a catwalk, a perfect beginning to a unique shopping experience. Every item is displayed on a beautiful boho-hippie hanger with woven raffia and fabric flowers, in just one size, to show the cut. Once you've picked up two or three items, one of the beautiful salesgirls will flutter over, size you up and down and select your size (trust her, she knows best) and put everything in the dressing room. This season (autumn/winter 2009) they are doing the trendy, 20/30-something harem pants, jumpsuits, mexican embriodery and eyelet and great, inexpensive hippie pendant accessories. What will likely remain after we've all changed our looks 180 degrees are the techno-fabulous dressing rooms! They each have a dial with three choices of music, club/house, Brazilian, 'slow music' (a sort of ambient/trance), and pop. Or you can choose to have no sound but the voice in your head saying 'buy it, I know you want to'. To summarize, yes, yes, yes!

Let's face it, shopping is exhausting. That's why the inventive Brazilians would put those little old ladies in tennis whites eating what they think is frozen yogurt to shame. Yogoberry, also on Rua Visconde de Piraja, has a version that actually tastes like yogurt that has been frozen. The consistency and textures are authentic, and it comes in two flavors, vanilla and green tea, with oodles of toppings including of course the ubiquitous tropical fresh fruit that is as my dear reader may remember is literally falling from the trees here in Rio. This ingenius little spot opened at the end of 2007, and is doing a brisk business. 6 Reais will get you a small cup, with 7 Reais for the green tea, and then 2 Reais for toppings. It is well worth the stop, and don't worry that young people haven't discovered the place, you can be a trendsetter with a waisline to match. Those bikinis await, and they're not getting any bigger ...

Favela Chic

There is a pair of uber-trendy bar-restaurants in Paris and London called Favela Chic. Do not go to either of these spots thinking there is anything favela-like about them. Do you see open water running across the floor, do you see pre-adolescent boys with guns under their shorts ... do you see people cutting up cocaine on the sidewalk ... okay, then, you should probably just buck up and order the ten euro caipirinha and enjoy the music, because a favela is a totally different thing. Jonas and I rocked up one night after a Marcelo D2 concert on the top of Sugarloaf Mountain. Appropriately, the rapper-cum-singer is from the baile funk school, the name of which is shared with one of Rios most famous favelas. This supposedly ghetto sound screams with all the aggravation and agitation that coming from a place where many children do not reach adulthood incites. There are three ways to get up to the hotel where we were staying, by a motorcycle, which means separating and sticking my then-mini-skirted-self onto some teenage boys bike ... um, no thank you ... or taking a taxi to a certain point and then walking, let the buyer seriously beware ... or walking, in which case, do not say you werent warned.

Not because this is a dangerous favela, in fact Tavarez is the only in Rio with its own police station. And it houses perhaps the only B&B where Snoop Dogg chose to shoot a favela video, further romanticizing the hip hop, violence and poverty connection. It is just that two seriously white kids on Saturday past midnight do not really have a place wandering around a hood uninvited. Thank God for Bob and The Maze. This hotel is an incredible example of someone who thought what every favela tour participant has thought, these are the poorest people in Rio and they have the best views. He has created a space with rooms, a small bar, breakfast room with breathtaking ocean vistas and every other week live jazz performances on Friday nights.

Bob is the owner, a salt of the earth British hippie-intellectual-activist who surely abhors any sort of labeling, but hey reader, until you go there, I can give you my supremely biased view ... He worked for the BBC World Service for years, and told us stories about saving the venerable John Simpson, or something to that effect (do not quote me on any of this as the morning coffee had not been fully integrated ...), the war in Lebanon, and training a Brazilian footballer from a favela who is now on a major European club team. To find an eclectic, boheme spot with personal-expressionist paintings on the walls and a concrete sculpture of a face in profile looking down over an empty, mosaic-tiled pool, leading up to a small cabin of a bedroom that views a fat chunk of Rios best beaches is just unreal, for lack of a better expression! Do not believe me, go there and see for yourself. If Bob does not charm you, his beautiful wife and children certainly will, and lets face it, not many people come back from Brazil with a story of sleeping in a favela.

Modernism in the Tropics

I have never been one for the uber-contemporary. Even the famous Disney (or is it Sony) centre in Berlin did not awe me for more than a five-second WOW. There is something about Brazilian modernism that just works, and part of it has to do with the weather, I am convinced. Great, arching concrete works do not fit in a gray and dreary landscape. It also helps that the greatest period of architecture, for myself, a layman and enthusiast with no formal training on the subject, was this midcentury period of form, form, form. Which necessarily must complement its environment, lest it digress into suicidal minimalism ...

Here, in the sun-drenched tropics, buildings such as the capolavoro of Niemeyer, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC), just a boatride from Rio in Nieteroi, a mid-century spaceship if I ever saw one, to the Museum of Modern Art (MAM), the work of landscape architect genius Burle Marx, claim their austerity in form, structure and material, leaving the interaction between visitor and building at once intact and paramount. The geometric quality of each structure balances gracefully the necesity for light and space with ample windows and relatively thin panes and no superfluous decoration. In an environment such as Brazil, with mountains, water, an animated, azure sky and greenery, there is already a built-in dialogue between man and nature. The dominant discourse of concrete and glass has now in architecture schools from here to Timbuktu become a proper and accepted aesthetic. Such as many movements viewed in retrospect this is rather ironic, as its original purpose was the breaking away from old, European, and specifically in the case of Brazil Francophone and post-Colonial emphasis on aesthetics and decoration.

Let us begin with the MAC. Intuitive to its surroundings, where the mountains in the distance, just across the water in Rio, come to majestic, frothy green peaks, the Museum complements in floor to ceiling windows around a partially flattened, UFO circle. Think of a cup with no handle and the saucer on top. Oh, and the tea underneath the cup, just for good measure. No space is broken on the interior save a staircase that goes from the ground to the second level. It is the first musuem for this blogger where one is asked to please take ones shoes off if one wishes to take a photo from the carpeted bench that wraps around the interior, flanking the windows for the best possible view of sea, land and sky. In addition, one can feel free to take flash photography of the artworks and sit, on the ground, whilst contemplating a painting or sculpture from a more relaxed point of view. Lastly, a loud splash of color in bright red lines the top of an s-curved walkway, contrasting the otherwise neutral tones of glass and concrete, beckoning one to put down the rules-book on modernist color palates and just enjoy the experience. The MAC truly is like landing on the moon, if the moon were tropical, lush and sunny...

MAM is another story, one of a landscape architect named Burle Marx, best known for marrying modernist buildings with flora and stonework. The structure is raised on concrete stilts, and underneath one has the feeling of being an airy hangar. Its location in the waterfront Flamengo area offers up the blue that complements the greenery, and Marx has placed a sort of oversized rock garden to smooth the edge between structure and landscaping. Palm trees are planted in even rows, whilst a fountain of small, turqoise mosaic tiles allows for a more playful nature and ties in with a chic cafe and gift shop. The exhibit at the moment of Vik Muniz, a contemporary Brazilian artist who lives between New York and Rio, utilized the wide, rectangular space and for those weary of stairs it is housed on one convenient level, with places to sit and explanations in both English and Portuguese.

Enjoy Modernism! Just do not be too brash about it, eh.

The Blonde in Leblon

That would be me. I am a white girl. With blonde hair. And I stand out. More for my skin color than anything. The hood where I've landed is called Leblon, and is just next to Ipanema and Copacabana. Unlike its more famous beachy cousins, Leblon is a residential area where tourists woudn't necessarily stay. Sure, there are hotels, but this is an area where wealthy Cariocas (the Brazilian name for Rio's citizens) raise their children and tend to their dogs and houses and hairstyles. Leblon was named after a nineteenth century fishing magnate, whose name was Charles Le Blond. Le blondes are few and far between (that's where I come in), but the francophone influence is felt in the typical answer to the question of Europe comes up and residents will tell you they looooove France! Funny that, a continent with 50-something countries and people here just want to talk to you about Paris & Provence! Something to notice here is that instead of squirrels, they have monkeys. They are very small and you wouldn't necessarily notice them as they hang out high up in the banana trees. That's right, banana trees. And noone seems to be picking the bananas. It's just excess fruit. From Leblon and beyond, the bits of Rio I have seen in these past five days at least, fruit seems to be poring out of every orifice of the city. The Tesco here is called Hortifrutti, and they will even deliver the mangoes to your door! Not to mention the sucos (fruit juices), there are about a zillion combinations to choose from. With or without sugar and granola and protein powder. I've tried watermelon, orange and acerola, peach and my personal favorite - acai. That powder mix and tea that everyone has been raving about in England as a superfood, I can report that it's purple and delicious and gives you such a caloric kick that it serves as a liquid lunch or dinner, depending on how hungry you are. My charming host Jonas has an account at the juice bar round the corner so that when he comes back from surfing he doesn't need to have money on him. Genius! Newsflash - he is not only my host ... I knew it was official when he told the guy at the juice bar that I could get juices on his account. Ah, the fringe benefits ... healthy and delicious just like I like it ;-)

Wow, Ta Quente!

That means it's hot. Cuz it's hot. There are digital clocks all over Leblon, Rio; spouting out the hour and temperature. The hour changes, errr, every hour or so, but the 27 or 28 degree heat is a constant. Gone are the grey skies of London, gone is the rain, the uncertainty of the BBC weather site to plan or not plan one's weekend, and I am left with a bit of sunblock next to my ear and a constant desire to take a shower. Or not. I mean, what do people do that go to an office every day and leave at lunchtime to grab a bite? My wager is that the sale of 100% cotton clothes is extremely high in this city. Enough about the weather .... it is all terribly British, but alas, as a seriously chameleon Yank, I can proudly say that 4 years in Blighty have made their mark. Some of the opinions expressed in this blog will be influenced by this my most recent sojourn, and for the collective European jaunts of 7.5 years in total, 4 of them were in Blighty, so take it all with a grain of salt and some malt vinegar. Chances are that after a month here I'll be samba-ing my way down the street and forgetting to not look people in the eye. Such is life, and such is this journey, so Open Up, Brazil, here I come! Tell me everything. I promise to kiss and tell. I hope you enjoy the read.