Rio de Janeiro

So Rio is the location of the next Olympics. Normally I wouldn't give a flying foo-foo valve, but Rio has always fascinated me. There's something about seaside cities and towns in an east coast climate in these latitudes (23 degrees). It makes for easy open living, a warm climate leading (maybe) to a warm people.


It's the same latitude (almost) as Maputo in Mozambique, another former Portuguese colony, which used in its time also to be a city of pleasure, and a bit closer to the equator than Durban or Brisbane.


Another reason for my interest is their music, not just the obvious 'Latin' styles of bossa-nova and cha-cha but also their more 'classical' composers--Louis Moreau Gottschalk (A Night in The Tropics) and Heitor Villa-Lobos, just for starters.



They speak an odd sort of Portuguese in Brazil. Though I can understand written Portuguese and written and spoken Spanish (including the odd dialect of Buenos Aires, where 'y' is pronounced 'zh'), I struggled with Brazilian. They pronounce 'r' even more gutturally than the French, almost like a Dutch/Afrikaans 'g', and swallow all their 'l's.


I did a quick random search of images of men on beaches in Rio. I note that they wear squarecut swim briefs rather than the smaller racing briefs or the bigger shorts. But the women still wear less than the men!


American visitors will have to get used to seeing more male flesh than they do at home. It is good, though, to be exposed to other cultural moeurs; to see the world differently. Broadens your mind.


Here's the Wikipedia article about Rio.


One of the places I plan to visit when I've sold a best seller.